No one could have sung “Ooooh/Now I’ll never get over you” with quite the same starry-eyed naiveté that Ella Mai does on her unapologetically sprung summer smash “Boo’d Up.” It was a song that both Stevie Wonder and toddlers found easy to love, a four-minute reverie during which everything slips out of focus apart from you and your boo.
Mai has been signed to hip-pop hypeman DJ Mustard’s 10 Summers imprint since 2016, putting a decisive point of view on likeable, if not particularly individual, trap-leaning pop beats, with songs centering on agency, desire, and her early-morning appetite to receive a, kind of, breakfast in bed. Mai’s finger-snapping, perfectly fine debut is billed as a “throwback R&B album,” with dutiful Easter eggs for the genre’s aficionados: a “no no no” reference here, a “little secret” wink there, and a “writing’s on the wall” hat-tip elsewhere. Despite a few obvious reference points, Mai avoids pastiche, although a tightened tracklist would have provided focus to this over-long collection of 16 songs.
Executive produced by DJ Mustard, Ella Mai pays homage to ’90s commercial R&B and Mustard’s own hip-pop signatures while bringing in new sounds, from aerated beats punctuated with the sound of teeth-kissing (the Nana Rogues-produced “Good Bad”) and Majestic Casual-ready synth swashes (“Cheap Shot”). The throbbing “Dangerous” transposes the conceit of the Shangri-Las’ ode to bad boy allure, “Out in the Streets,” into squelchy G-funk with double-time harmonies which cascade like heart flutters.
Ella Mai never quite scales the heights reached by her skippy single “Trip,” or the pristine “Boo’d Up.” Yet Mai’s songwriting can be deft and unexpected, refining the attitude that once led her to declare, on an early EP, “I hope the next girl you love ends up fucking you over” into more nuanced examinations of knotty relationships. Her words are scathing over a partner who’s “chewing with [their] mouth wide open,” but she lays her own flaws bare, too. The acoustic bonus closer, “Naked,” is a challenge for a lover to accept her, “resting bitch face” and all. “Can you love me naked?” she asks, in a song that distances nudity from the context of R&B seduction and reframes it to vibe more with body positivity and mental health.
Not all Mai’s efforts to open up are as successful. The album is threaded, like Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope or TLC’s FanMail, with earnest interludes that riff on her full name (“E” is for emotion, “L” for lust, etc...) which can tend towards vague Hallmark-isms. One of the album’s strongest tracks, the simmering relationship ultimatum “Shot Clock,” ends with a whimper, as Mai intones “Love...full of chuckles and cuddles and sometimes eye puddles,” a saccharine sentiment that should have remained stitched on the gas-station teddy bear it was lifted from.
Perversely, the most immediate song on Mai’s album is “Whatchamacallit,” a peppy two-hander with Chris Brown which essentially copied the Nic Nac-produced beat of Brown’s own “Loyal” to create a carefree-feeling bop. With a different collaborator, “Whatchamacallit” may have brought a welcome, blithe sense of fun to Ella Mai. But, as pop artists are rightfully being held accountable for being complicit with abusers, Mai’s inclusion of Brown raises questions about her own artistic values. It’s tough to swallow Mai’s pro-women message, given her association with an artist who has repeatedly treated them with violence.
R&B is crowded with young artists who use nostalgic soulful sounds as a baseline for their individualistic music, whether H.E.R.’s velveteen soul, Daniel Caesar’s fraught blend of gospel and R&B, or the stately self-interrogations of Jorja Smith. Ella Mai’s raw talent and likeability, and showcased in her spontaneous-feeling Instagram cover versions, got her noticed by DJ Mustard in the first place. But on Ella Mai, her abilities don’t always find an assured direction, and it calls into question just how quickly this record was put together in the wake of “Boo’d Up”’s summer dominance. Mai’s album will likely bring her a couple of radio hits—“Sauce” is an undeniable heater. But a lack of focus means that, on her debut, the instant, infectious rush of Mai’s warm personality proves a little more elusive to find.
