It would be easy to paint an unflattering portrait of Onra. Over the course of seven records the Parisian producer has doggedly followed the throwback trends of the moment. Early records contributed to a global surplus of California-by-way-of-Detroit hip-hop; a few years later, he and a lot of other people started rooting around in big, breezy synthesizer lines, one nation under a Sonics snapback. Onra never released a bad album in this decade-long span, but he also never exactly released a good one, all defined by an ineluctable acceptableness.
But there were a handful of easy-listening bangers spread throughout those records, the sort of amber-hued boom-bap that transcends trend and reference point ("Sitting Back", "Hold Tight"), and on Fundamentals he finally locks into that easy groove front to back. The result feels immediately like his best album, or at least his most fun one. The title implies a return to basics, but in practice it’s the opposite: the productions, which look heavily to late-'80s and early-'90s R&B and pop-rap, are dizzyingly diffuse in places. Many, such as "Like You Miss Me" and "Over & Over", traffic in the same gauzy washes of sound as 2012’s Deep in the Night, but less as a matter of course and more as a purposeful counterpoint to the other, crisper tracks here. It’s Onra’s most writerly album: even if it’s all verse-chorus-verse stuff, it’s a delight to hear the hi-hats on "Every Second" rush headlong into the hook, breathless as the beat itself.
Don’t let the romantic notes fool you, though: this is low-bitrate barbecue-rap, good on nice speakers but fine coming off a laptop because you’re day-drunk and the playlist was too short. I don’t mean this as faint praise: Fundamentals is purposefully feather-light stuff, and its bounty of guest vocalists seem to intuit this and accordingly not give a shit. Chuck Inglish and the Doppelgangaz drop the sort of placeholder raps that normally only fans of J-pop get to hear (sample lyric: "I might buy you a scone, or get you a streusel/ This ain’t no Kool-Aid drink mix, it’s Metamucil"), and a parade of professional crooners find their voices phasing in and out of the mix. Do or Die and Daz Dillinger stop by to lend credibility to Onra’s Kangol-era fetishism, his transcontinental, trend-agnostic vision of '90s hip-hop approximating the way it might be experienced in the post-streaming era.
Still, these vocal performances, so consistently characterless that it seems to be an artistic intention, point to the very thing the album lacks: a soul. At this point Onra is a portal to his own influences rather than a synthesis or evolution of them; Fundamentals is essentially an album-length recommendation to dig into Mary J. Blige’s early works. This is fine advice, but damning for Onra. His dream of the '90s is frequently beautiful and wholly sincere, but increasingly creepy, full of uncanny-valley hooks and rappers whose facial features seem to blur and morph. Why these people are together is unexplained; the reference points all point to other reference points, an endless loop of hyperlinks atop a glitchy .gif of someone popping champagne. Fundamentals, like every other Onra album, is a well-timed evocation of the past, slotting neatly alongside recent work by Devonté Hynes, Kindness, How to Dress Well, and many others, but there is a difference Onra still doesn’t grasp between being of the moment and being a part of it.
