Fousheé’s voice sounds like the sentient form of nails scratching against a chalkboard, but it’s so sharp, so memorable, that you absolutely want to hear it again. That coveted commodity has made her a go-to featured guest; on a 2021 collab with Lil Wayne, she makes sorrow sound enticing. On Ravyn Lenae’s vibrant HYPNOS, she makes a rough breakup feel celestial. And on Steve Lacy’s “Sunshine,” she encapsulates the bliss of love’s unexpected turns. But the textures that make the singer’s vivid songwriting and piercing falsetto so commanding are difficult to decipher on softCORE, her official debut album. Instead, the record lands as a faulty attempt at meshing punk grit with her folk-tinged R&B.
On the New Jersey native’s 2021 project time machine, a record anchored by stunning vocal delivery and guitar-laced soul, the singer embraced her relationship insecurities. This time around, she relies on punk and R&B to sift through her fears. But the album oscillates too frantically between the two genres, making softCORE feel like an ill-conceived experiment.
Across 12 tracks, Fousheé confronts a catharsis filled with unyielding rage, sass, lust, and anguish. softCORE’s punk tracks are bold and mesmerizing, almost imposing, and it often makes the album’s R&B songs feel obsolete. “simmer down,” the behemoth opener, is an angsty track backed by thrashing basslines and lush guitar chords. Fousheé reveals just how searing she can be when someone dares to threaten her: “And you haven’t seen crazy till you pissed off a Jamaican,” she warns in the first verse. On “bored” and “die,” Fousheé proves that she can transform her soft wails into the kind of caustic dexterity needed to carry a punk song. And when the soft guitar-picking on “i’m fine” mutates into flashes of screamo, Fousheé shows she can masterfully camouflage her inner turmoil with a false sense of tranquility.
softCORE’s pure R&B tracks pale in comparison to its grand punk displays. “unexplainable” is a dull track about a toxic romance that lacks the intensity that permeates the first part of the album. Similarly, on the blissful “smile,” Fousheé treads into familiar territory with airy vocal patterns that don’t sufficiently fortify the singer’s adventure into new styles. The breadth of softCORE’s punk tracks could have positioned the singer-songwriter as a luminous addition to the current pop-punk revival, joining peers like WILLOW and Machine Gun Kelly. But infusing anticlimactic R&B songs that dilute the album’s punk-inspired momentum makes Fousheé’s arrival into that arena seem less convincing.
Still, the raw, descriptive storytelling across softCORE invigorates the album in its placid moments. Take the Lil Uzi Vert-assisted track “spend the money,” in which Fousheé drops cutting barbs about how she’s with a partner only for what they can financially provide. And on “supernova,” she makes the euphoria of lust sound like a top tourist destination: “Supernova high like glitter in the sky/I’m faded out my mind/Let’s make a memory.”
Fousheé’s voice is liberating and her songwriting bleeds with emotion. Her pursuits on softCORE prove that it’s possible for pop-punk and R&B to exist in the same space, which adds a fresh take on the nostalgia train steering the former’s resurgence. While the endeavor is admirable and audacious, its execution isn’t as seamless as the fluidity of Fousheé’s own voice.
