“I love the silliness and the joy that comes with the P-Funk universe,” multi-instrumentalist Emma-Jean Thackray recently told The Guardian. “It’s not like free jazz; it’s Black liberation music for the masses.” On her second full-length, Weirdo, Thackray’s music—bouncy jazz-funk dusted with spiritual overtones and rubbed down by velveteen ’70s soul—does for grief and loneliness what the Mothership did for Black identity. It uses humor and a shuffling beat to get at something deeply serious, to shape it, to say the unsayable. Its 20 tracks wiggle by in a constantly evolving groove that dares you to stay reverent; you might laugh out loud a few times. Though you will have ample opportunities to try, you will not have more fun empathizing with someone’s suffering this year than you will listening to Weirdo.
Thackray initially intended for the follow-up to 2021’s acclaimed Yellow to be a musical exploration of her neurodivergence—a risky proposition for even the most self-aware musician, although for Thackray, a record about her ADHD and autism could well play to her considerable strengths: She writes rhythms that ripple and eddy, and melodies that ping like super balls in a small room. Shortly after she began work, however, her longtime partner unexpectedly passed away, throwing her deep into grief. Weirdo became her way of pulling herself back out. She recorded the album alone in her South London flat, and, save for cameos from Reggie Watts and rapper Kassa Overall, she’s responsible for every sound on the record: vocal harmonies that spread like a fan unfolding, exhaling Rhodes piano, programmed and live drums, flugelhorns, enough synthesizers to make 1974 Herbie Hancock jealous. Her name is listed 123 times in the album’s credits.
Printing that surplus of Emma-Jean Thackrays in Weirdo’s liner notes is meant to be a bit, as is the toaster perched on the edge of the tub on the album’s cover. Both are funny, kind of—but, like the dark comedy of the album’s lyrics, the cheekiness is a mask Thackray wants you to notice. “I don’t wanna go on,” she sings in the opening moments of “What is the Point,” a brutal line whose brutality you nearly forget when the squishy synths and curving groove kick in; her vamp on the phrase “what is the point,” later in the song, is clever, but also tragic, but also vocally impressive, but also inspirational: Her runs are so remarkable, you can hear the music bringing her to a place her words can’t.
Weirdo is full of moments like this, where thin layers of emotion stack into mille-feuilles Thackray invites you to pick through while you’re dancing. Over the heavy funk of “Tofu,”, she sings for her supper through a bright melody, and when the bean curd fails to heal her wounds, she swerves that melody into a wordless la da da da da da da. Did you know dissociation can be funky? Lest you think she’s ready to move on and return to the noble work of performing grief, she follows “Tofu” with “Fried Rice,” hoping maybe this time it’ll work (it doesn’t).
Thackray’s talents as a singer and arranger are key to the album’s success. Her voice is airy like crepe-paper streamers, with a bit of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s pinch and some of Erykah Badu’s snap. Like Badu, she lets her melodies take on the tone of conversation, setting “Stay” down in a moment of resignation; later in the same song, she flicks a Prince guitar solo across the beat. After starting with an Afrobeat stutter, “Save Me” melts into rich vintage soul, its bobbing hotel-lounge groove finally ending in a gospel rave-up. In “Let Me Sleep,” she pads McCoy Tyner chords with the kind of gently rattling beat that would ordinarily take a song over; here, she slips it behind the keys, making both instruments sound plaintive and exhausted. A little scrap of guitar wanders around the margins of the title track until it gains a bit of power and will from its solitude.
If you’ve never lost anyone, this arch approach might feel a little gross. In fact, Weirdo’s artistic success depends on that; you’re supposed to wonder why someone in so much pain is intent on throwing an incredible house-quaking party. Take a step back, though, and Weirdo becomes a very serious and genuinely moving portrayal of what mourning can do to you. After a while, the feeling is still there, and the expression of it is still legit, but you get tired of seeing it around; you have to start doing other things with it. As you go deeper into Weirdo, the album’s opening track—a kooky vocal reading of its title, “There’s Something Wrong With Your Mind,” that sounds a bit like Sun Ra Arkestra—feels less like a possible remnant of the neurodivergent album and more like the sound of Thackray’s own exhaustion.
