Erika de Casier, Still

Even if you’re unfamiliar with cult R&B artist Erika de Casier, you’d be familiar with her work.

The 33-year-old’s profile has grown since her playful 2019 debut Essentials, an album that even pricked the ears of Dua Lipa who picked the Danish artist to remix her hit Physical. Last year, de Casier co-wrote most of Get Up, the acclaimed EP from K-pop girl group NewJeans, including the effervescent smash Super Shy, surely the best song of 2023.

The introspective tone, inventive energy and sticky hook that made Super Shy such a success is typical of de Casier’s sound, albeit amped for chart play. Her last album, 2021’s Essentials – her first for UK indie label 4AD – found her playing at the nexus of Y2K-era R&B and UK garage and Sade-inspired sophistipop, uniquely textured songs that asked questions like, “What if Aaliyah, but with a harpsichord?”

All grey-skied atmospherics, hushed vocals and muted drums, Essentials was filled with gorgeous slow-burners just begging for the club remix treatment. If the hooks were deceptively subtle, the songs were packed with enough Euro sincerity, off-kilter lyrics and odd details to hold your attention (In Polite, for example, she harbours doubts over a lover who’s rude to wait staff). Her new album with 4AD, Still, offers another hit of the same seductive energy.

The album cover, with its slick plastics evoking a Hype Williams music video, hints at de Casier’s musical preoccupations. Born in Portugal to a Belgian mother and a Cape Verdean father, she grew up in Denmark, enamoured with the US hiphop and R&B that flooded MTV during her childhood at the turn of the millennium. Unsurprisingly, there’s a cosmopolitan bent to de Casier’s R&B, perfectly showcased on the bubbly opener Home Alone, in which her feathery vocals float over a sonic landscape that draws in Afrobeats, Middle Eastern guitars, classical strings and what sounds like a slinky bandoneon.

A concept album of sorts, charting the trajectory of a relationship from giddy love to post-breakup unease, Still is a cohesive thing, sonically and tonally, all too rare in the streaming era. Lucky continues the early yearning vibes, jumping off a nostalgic piano loop that sounds like an echo of that JoJo song but paired with a skittering trip-hop beat that brings the track firmly into today’s trends.

Like the wonderfully sullen My Day Off (from the album’s breakup half), these could be big singles if de Casier wasn’t so interested in restraint, the through-a-rain-streaked-window mood more important than any cheap payoff. But it’s all part of the allure, from a pop master with one foot firmly in the machine and one still in the shadows.