In the grand narrative of post-millenial British pop, Katy B is a crucial plot point. London’s culture of pirate radio stations has produced some of the world’s most vital music over this period, but those scenes—be it garage, grime, dubstep, or funky house—inevitably faced the glass ceiling that is the country’s pop charts. To be sure, tracks from the underground did eventually hit big: garage architect Artful Dodger scored massive pop hits with Craig David, while Dizzee Rascal and Wiley did the same for grime. But none of those breakthroughs were as smooth or as sudden as that of the singer Kathleen Brien, whose debut single, “Katy on a Mission”, shot straight out of the funky scene into the top five.
In doing so, she set the precedent for the rapid rise of artists like Jessie Ware, Disclosure, and Rudimental, the latter two of which defined British pop music in 2013 while also making quicker and more legitimate inroads in America than any of their peers before them. Katy certainly benefited from the groundwork laid by others over the years, but she proved that full-on pop stardom could be immediate. But now she is trying to write a new chapter: the artist who exploded out of the London underground and then crafted a sustainable career on her own terms, without relying on newer trends or reliable pop heavyweights.
Well, that second part is more like 98% true. Two songs on her sophomore album, Little Red, find Katy B collaborating with Guy Chambers, the co-architect of obscenely massive singles and albums by Robbie Williams. But you wouldn’t know that without looking closely at the credits; Little Red is purely the work of a singer redefining her voice. Though it can initially feel understated and even closed off, with repeated listens it detaches Katy B from a specific sound and establishes her as a pop star with a coherent point of view.
The most visible example of this, if not quite the best, is the current single “Crying For No Reason”, one of the cuts co-written with Chambers. A ballad that threatens to blossom into a disco song but never does, it'd be hailed as perfectly left-field if it was Adele’s comeback single (and it could be). But in the context of Katy’s career, it strips away the thump of house that has been her essence. She chooses to let the single live or die on her ability to sell the song vocally, and the soft grace with which she hits the slowly escalating notes is something like watching a gymnast: Katy steps carefully but with strength, never launching herself into the chorus but instead opting for a churning build. Her stunning performance of the track on Graham Norton’s late night show is a study in confidence and the power of tension.
Like “Crying For No Reason”, Little Red hangs on moments that reveal themselves over time. “All My Lovin’” sounds at first like one of her most generic songs, a ballad that flirts with American dubstep’s crushing drops. But the way Katy’s vocals rise out of the chorus is sublime, and by the time the synths start to slyly sound like a vocoder, it's one of the album's standouts. “Tumbling Down” is another mid-tempo song, but Katy sings the chorus melody like a feather slowly fluttering to the ground.
There are bangers, too. “Aaliyah”, the Ware duet carried over from Katy’s late-2012 Danger EP, is her most smartly-written song but also works as pure dancefloor euphoria. On “Everything”, Katy dons the crown of the diva over a tech house beat, and there she finds the sweet spot where yearning and control meet. Then there's “Emotions”, the album’s showstopper. It is yet another ballad, but this one turns up the drama almost immediately, with big synth stabs and tightly coiled strings. The climax is the one point where Little Red suddenly seems to become fully aware of the broader musical context: the drum'n'bass beat nods toward Rudimental smashes like “Waiting All Night”, but “Emotions” is constructed as a slow burn and thus has much more emotional resonance.
All that said, Little Red may be seen as a slight step down by many, and that’s not without reason. The album kicks off with the perfectly adequate but hardly spectacular duo of “Next Thing” and “5 AM”; “Sapphire Blue” and “Still” are two more ballads that sandwich “Emotions” and neither quite reveal their charms, with “Still” being particularly gloopy in a Celine Dion way. And though Katy has potentially charted the course for the rest of her career with Little Red, it lacks the inherent thrill of its predecessor On a Mission, an album of UK dance sounds aimed squarely at the top of the charts.
Still, this is a deft step for Katy B. She sheds the schoolgirl innocence that accented her debut and dives deeper into herself, probing love, lust, sorrow, glee, and power dynamics from all angles. Little Red is not the best album it could have been—a few of the bonus tracks should have made the album proper—but Katy displays a vision for her career that suggests an exciting future.
