At 20, Roy Wood$ is the youngest artist signed to Drake’s OVO Sound label. Like the rest of the mostly Toronto-based roster, the singer born Denzel Spencer has the skills of a malleable R&B crossover: a capable and identifiable voice, practiced comfort riding a beat, a knack for moody melody. But these same talents are frequently squandered on his debut album Waking at Dawn, which offers a polished dose of brooding unoriginality.
Up to this point, OVO Sound has been a cautiously experimental vehicle for new musicians, many of whom churned out hits for Drake before struggling to do the same for themselves. Spencer, on the other hand, hasn’t provided a creative burst for his boss yet, and Waking at Dawn finds the artist more interested in conforming to the house style than pushing it forward. Nonetheless, he has enjoyed the benefits of OVO’s infrastructure over the last year: a Drake feature, song premieres on Drake’s Apple Music radio show, Drake retweets, an opening slot on Drake’s upcoming summer tour. Correspondingly, his aesthetic is perilously Drake-adjacent.
Spencer sings confidently in a smooth, thin tenor that he commands with a pattering agility. He also frequently puts on a strained Michael Jackson impression. You can hear the imitation on songs like “How I Feel,” where he hiccups, gasps, and adds breathy grit into an otherwise pure tone. It’s a technically accomplished trick that does nothing in the way of character development; because he slips in and out of these vocal tics, they sound like shticky put-on instead of resourceful identity-building. Elsewhere, on a track called “Why,” he channels the Weeknd in both vocal tone and emotional despondency. He nails the mood via dark and legato synth work, but the upshot is severe: Spencer isn’t doing anything new.
The most troubling shortfall of Waking at Dawn is the songwriter’s lyricism. Instead of coming off as mysterious or suffered, the Ontario native spins drama that is too often dull and vague. On “Why,” a song that tiptoes around the singer’s emotional crimes to a lover, he almost never anchors the romantic separation in specifics, so when he moans a repetitive apology during the outro—“I’m sorry for so much”—it doesn’t mean much. (To his credit, he at least mentions that time he showed up late for prom.) The more gut-wrenching missteps manifest as corniness. “Can I speak some Spanish? Te amo my darling, babe,” he croons for no reason to a distant love interest on “Menace.” There are tedious reference-points of a night out. “I could pop another pill tonight/Even though I don’t really want one,” he sings, sounding both bored and boring.
The ambient production on Waking at Dawn is consistent to a fault, and the best songs switch gears and pace. Spencer slips comfortably into patois for the album’s softly bouncing lead single “Gwan Big Up Urself” (which was premiered alongside a radio respin of Drake’s own dancehall-infused “Controlla”). The isolated lean into the Caribbean sound isn’t forced— the track’s Jamaican producer Krs. expertly colors many of his R&B tracks with dancehall and soca rhythms and textures—but given the style’s singularity in Spencer’s catalog and its current rise in the mainstream, the single seems like a calculated quota-filler. Still, the song is a rare and gratifyingly airy moment on this oppressively swampy album; even when tracks like “Got Me” and “She Knows About Me” threaten to break open into dance numbers, they instead loop back into plodding gloom. Besides his raw talent, Spencer’s greatest asset might be his consistent mood-building, but there’s an obvious peril in his manufactured sameness: Waking at Dawn just sounds sleepy.
