Isolation

Kali Uchis opens Isolation with a breezy Brazilian-jazz intro, psychedelic and motoring, as she coos birdlike about physical intimacy. Rio singer/goddess Flora Purim immediately springs to mind, and its ambitious vocal runs invoke cocktails and caftan weather, like Uchis recorded it by the beach. It’s an empathetic way to welcome a listener into an album, but more than that, it’s a statement piece: pointed evidence of the way she’s deepened her range en route to her debut album. “Just come closer, closer, closer,” she intones. Kali Uchis did not come to play.

The 23-year-old Colombian-American singer has spent the last six years in the flourishing landscape of West Coast soul. She was often compared to Billie Holiday for her resonant alto and ability to imbue a dreamy love track with a wistful melancholy without giving up any of her power. That quality naturally invited comparisons to Amy Winehouse, too, but Uchis is slightly more plain-sad than self-destructive. Her ability to shimmy between genres has been exemplified by her omnivorous taste in collaborators—Snoop Dogg, who helped put her on in 2014, Colombian superstar Juanes, and Miguel, with whom she sang one of the best tracks on his 2017 album, War & Leisure. She has a baseline in R&B and often veers into the territory we used to call neo-soul. But Isolation projects how far out there she’s willing to go, exploring doo-wop, funk, bedroom pop, and reggaetón with equal enthusiasm and reverence while painting a fuller picture of herself as a dreamer, the femme fatale with around-the-way swagger who takes no shorts.

The track most congruous with her past work—most specifically, her 2015 EP Por Vida—is the lo-fi surprise “In My Dreams,” which finds the Gorillaz calling upon the ghost of 2003 for its Casiotone-adjacent, ice-cream-twee production. She makes her voice uncharacteristically chirpy on the sardonically escapist lyrics: “Everything is just wonderful here in my dreams,” the subtext being that life is not so rosy. To emphasize that, Damon Albarn pops in to inject the affair with a slightly more pointed missive that “The moments we are happiest/Are the moments that we don’t exist.” It makes for a solid mission statement on an album where good news always comes with caveats. That notion is underlined in “Your Teeth on My Neck,” a deceptively perky indictment of industry vampires, labor exploitation, and general inequity, with a live-jazz backing by Los Angeles’ Wldrness. “What do you do it for, rich man keeps getting richer taking from the poor,” she sings, her voice a soaring scold. “You gotta get right.”

Uchis has always been interested in speaking truth to power, and she mines her personal narrative—binational upbringing, immigrant parents, living out of her car—for a slyly political backdrop that feels neither too obvious nor preachy. That wisdom and storytelling acumen in her music feels strongest here on “Miami,” in which she and boricua rapper BIA narrate an immigrant perspective against a gossamer backdrop of the city that basically invented bisexual lighting. With languorous swing, Uchis parallels immigrant hustle with the rudely empty promise of the American dream, as in the line, “Why would I be Kim, I could be Kanye/In the land of opportunity and palm trees.” It’s a type of cinematic storytelling that feels almost vintage in this era of diaristic confessionals. Plus, it’s always nice to hear this kind of devotion to the concept of making a song about Miami that would sound great driving around Miami.

“Miami” features production from TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, Frank Ocean collaborator Om’Mas Keith, Drake hitmaker DJ Dahi, and it’s a gleaming example of the veritable brain trust of musical talent assembled here, all serving the same purpose of showcasing Uchis’ fascinating confidence as a singer. Even as the album traverses genres, it’s united by a slinky desert vibe, a document of the way young Angelenos have opened up the way for sounds and genre to gloop in on each other like a lava lamp. In the early 2000s, this often manifested in navel-gazing and weeded beat experiments whose prime objective was headiness. But this generation—here, including Isolation guests like Tyler, the Creator, the Internet’s Steve Lacy, and BROCKHAMPTON’s Romil Hemnani—has found a way to make that style of experimentation inviting and friendly through an openness that is intellectual, but doesn’t depend on intellectualism as its prime objective. As a uniting force, Kali Uchis could not be stronger, nor as nimble with her ability to match lush beats with an even lusher voice. Isolation is a star turn from an artist who has proven she’s ready for it.

Kali Uchis: Isolation

$33 at Rough Trade

$28 at Amazon

$30 at Target