Samantha Urbani has been exploring the boundaries of pop music since her days as a founder and frontwoman of the Bushwick group Friends. The collective—who channeled ESG and Stacey Q.—was a Brooklyn DIY staple and one among a coterie of producers and performers finding blog acclaim for pushing pop outside of its overly-manufactured confines (see: Charli XCX’s “Nuclear Seasons,” MNDR’s “Fade to Black”). Like other subcultures before it, alt-pop was a direct response to 2010s Top 40 despondency. The artists creating some of the hookiest songs of the year weren’t necessarily trying to navigate the indie world, but rather trying to make glossy, catchy music whose substance and heart were in plain view.
“The current, tragic state of pop music doesn’t mean that people should forget about great pop artists of the past or write off the genre’s future,” Urbani said in 2012. “Look at somebody like Prince, for example; he was such a genius who was in control of all aspects of his music, and he still made complex yet commercially palatable music with a statement behind it.” Five years later, Urbani has readied her debut, a five-track collection called Policies of Power. If her goal is simply to have control over music and create sonic and lyrical depth while still being primed for radio, then she ticked all of those boxes easily with her EP.
Featuring two songs released in 2015 (“1 2 3 4” and “U Know I Know”), Power is a product of patience. In 2016, she launched her own record label URU (as in “you are you”) where she first reissued overlooked British synth-pop duo Rexy’s 1981 album Running Out of Time. The reissue was released in tandem with a covers series for which she enlisted people like Ariel Pink and Zoë Kravitz, among others, to perform alongside her. Her own music stayed on the back-burner.
Even though one of her oldies, “1 2 3 4,” is the most euphoric point on the album, the new songs are deft and nuanced—synths make way for sax on “Time Time Time” (supplied by Sade’s co-writer and “Smooth Operator” saxophonist Stuart Matthewman) and ’80s hair metal shredding goes bubblegum on “Hints & Implications.” The vibe can feel more suited to a decades-old, forgotten teen comedy, but because Urbani’s lyrics avoid platitudes, it scans as something more grounded and mature. “No more invitations/I got the hint that you don’t want them,” she sings on the hook. “Without the same information/We’re living in two separate dimension/So break it to me.” It isn’t as detailed as the failed romance narratives some like Kelela displays so baldly, but it is far more personal than the vague missives pop so often provides.
“Go Deeper” pulls out the same shattered poetry: “I had an attitude/And you can't, can't, can't stand that/I hear you, respect your solitude/But was it poetry when you told me you would be right back?” Some listeners will suspect that lines like these are about her former paramour Dev Hynes, but those coming to the EP for indie gossip are here for the wrong reason. Urbani’s big draw is her contrast, the elation that glows behind the sadness revealing more and more layers of her sound and personality.
Policies of Power may only suffer because it does have so much style. Urbani is often compared to Madonna because of her ’80s throwbacks caked in contemporary gloss. But unlike some mainstream pop music that is incubated in songwriting camps with each piece fabricated until it is blemish-free, Urbani’s music comes almost entirely from herself. Considering the time it took for her to reveal who she is and the art she wants to make, it was worth the wait.
