Little Dragon singer Yukimi Nagano must have a separate phone line just for fielding feature requests. Since their breakout appearances on Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach and Big Boi’s Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, Nagano and her electronic-pop band have become the go-to collaborators for any artist looking to make a statement about how eclectic their tastes are. Over the last two years, the Swedish group has popped up on albums by De La Soul, Flume, Mac Miller, and Kaytranada, lending each an air of sophistication and modernity.
It’s a wonder they haven’t called on more of those artists to return the favor. For a band best known for their work on genre-blurring albums with huge casts, Little Dragon’s own albums have become surprisingly hermetic and narrow in scope. Like its predecessors, their fifth full-length Season High purposefully avoids marquee guests and wild stylistic leaps in favor of cautiously controlled, luxury mood music. It commits even further to the ’80s slow jam vibe of 2014’s Nabuma Rubberband—a look that didn’t completely flatter them the first time around, and feels even more restrictive here.
While Little Dragon pull off the record’s throwback sounds with their usual technical precision, that’s less of a selling point than it might have been five years ago. There was a time when artists scored points for the mere novelty of recreating that decade’s soft aesthetic. But in a post-“Hold on, We’re Going Home,” post-Rhye, post-Blood Orange, post-that one Justin Vernon side project with all the saxophones world, where every third song on the radio channels the ghost of a Reagan-era homecoming dance, those production tropes have become familiar to the point of exhaustion. The sounds of the ’80s are so thick in the air right now that even when the Weeknd and Daft Punk are put in the same room it’s what they come up with.
It doesn’t help that Little Dragon’s take on sensual R&B is strangely dispassionate. Though Season High references touchstones like Prince, Janet Jackson, and Sade, icons that musicians tend to develop intensely personal relationships with, those influences do little to fire up Nagano. In the past, she’s carried entire albums largely on the strength of her winning presence, but here her performances feel less like loving homages than like genre exercises. She’s also been tasked with breathing life into the group’s flattest, most literal songs yet. It’s too great a challenge even for her.
Songwriting is such an afterthought that many song titles simply telegraph the mood the track is meant to evoke: “Sweet” is the record’s sugar rush, “Butterflies” is a nervous slow burn, “Strobe Light” is a dance track, and so forth. Every convention is presented at face value. “Push” sounds like it was commissioned for a salon commercial or fashion shoot, so of course its lyrics touch on the nature of fame. “Angling for the big win, you want the world to know,” Nagano sings over a RuPaul runway beat, “Magazine star/Your name lit up in gold/All eyes on you.” That song wears its emptiness on its sleeve, but Season High’s attempts at profundity don’t land any more gracefully. “Butterflies” wallows in moodiness for six minutes with no end game, and the even grimmer “Gravity” similarly writes itself into a corner. These aren’t songs in search of a payoff; they’re songs that forget to look altogether.
In interviews this album cycle, the band has tried to walk back its reputation as ringers for hire. “Working with other people is fun, but it always makes us more focused on our work because otherwise, we’ll always be ‘that band that always does collaborations,’” Nagano told Dazed magazine. And as frustrating as it must be for the group that their own records are eclipsed by their outside work, Season High won’t do anything to reverse the narrative. It's so clinical that it works better as an audition reel for their next round of features than it does its own statement. Looking to capture that smooth, ’80s feel that’s all the rage right now? Yeah, Little Dragon can do that for you.
