Album Review: Solange - When I Get Home

The Knowles sisters have cornered the market in surprise album “drops”. Last year, Beyonce released, without warning, her Carter Family hook-up with Jay Z (takeaway: Beyonce’s a better rapper than her rap superstar husband).

Now her younger sister has put out the follow-up to her fantastic 2016 odyssey A Seat at the Table. That record was an unflinching chronicling of life as an African-American woman in a United States on the cusp of saying farewell to Barack Obama and welcoming Donald Trump. It was bittersweet and bruising – a r’n b fugue state that casts its spell slowly yet inexorably .

She plunges even deeper here. Inspired in part by her upbringing in suburban Houston, When I Get Home is both a love letter to her childhood and also reflection on how far she has come and the challenges that remain.

Along with all that it is brimming with cameos. Gucci Mane turns up on the bifurcated ‘My Skin My Logo’ – it starts slo-mo then turns stormily hectic – while Pharrell contributes production touches and Devonte Hynes and Tyler, the Creator and Panda Bear are part of a backing choir that swoops in at the end of ‘Time (Is)’.

Jazz, at its most dislocated and free-wheeling, is an influence, too, as proclaimed on lulling bangers ‘Way to the Show’ and ‘Stay Flow’ . What the record lacks are break-out songs with the same impact as ‘Cranes In The Sky’ and ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’, the big “hits” off Seat at the Table. But none of that matters. ‘When I Get Home’ isn’t a pop record. It’s a dream, a spell, an incantation that wins you over by increments but wins you over all the same.

8/10