The best moment from Kanye West’s ye, his much-maligned album from 2018, was crafted by 070 Shake. The 22-year-old singer’s chest-thumping appearance on “Ghost Town” was a glimmer of promise amid a heap of sloppy, single-take recordings, one of the few times on the album actually seemed transcendent. Her debut, Modus Vivendi, proves our ears weren’t deceiving us. The album is intensely sincere, with the New Jersey native proudly serving her soul raw atop bullish, beautiful production. It is the most compelling and complete release under G.O.O.D. Music since Pusha T’s Daytona.
The heavy-hearted vibes begin immediately on the opener, “Don’t Break The Silence.” Shake’s ambered voice rises over a floating synth and describes a lover who isn’t quite ready to break things off. “If you were liquid, you’d be bitter like wine/Till then I’ma drink, stay here for the ride,” she hums out. The feelings of desire, being desired, and all the messiness in between are at the center of Modus Vivendi, a Latin term used to describe an arrangement between two conflicting parties in the hopes of coexisting peacefully. For Shake, that harmony is elusive, not only in her relationships with women but also in her own heart. On “Terminal B,” she grapples with whether the warm feelings of a relationship can be trusted, poking at it like it’s too good to be true. “Yeah baby, she’s on lockdown love,” she murmurs before immediately second-guessing herself: “Maybe she is not down.”
All this heaviness is packaged neatly within bright melodies built for lovesick kids to belt out at Coachella and Rolling Loud. This gives her songs a tone of triumph and catharsis rather than total defeat, like on the hook for “Morrow,” where she dejectedly lets a partner know, “I don’t know if I’ll be here tomorrow,” but stretches out the last word in snappy fragments, similar to Rihanna’s ad-libs on “Umbrella.” She goes for a higher register on “Come Around,” where she cries out for someone to join her in her loneliness, like she’s trapped at the bottom of a well, yelling at a sliver of sky.
The elasticity of her voice isn’t always utilized properly here, perhaps the result of too much experimentation in the studio. On a few tracks, she ventures too far into trap-rap territory, dumbing her voice down to a mumbled delivery, like on “Rocketship,” which could serve as a Travis Scott reference track in how similar it is to his auto-tuned sound. She dips heavily into voice modulation on the album as a whole, recently telling Pitchfork that this was done to make her sound “more real.” In actuality, it achieves the opposite effect, creating a degree of separation between her in and the listener by placing a governor on the amount of emotion she conveys. At times, you find yourself yearning for her voice to be left more naked and vulnerable.
These are largely the only missteps on an otherwise richly produced album. Modus is essentially the antithesis of the half-baked works that arose from Kanye’s Wyoming sessions in 2018. It is the result of a handful of talented collaborators who provide enough eclecticism to balance out the bombastic sound of G.O.O.D. in-house producer Mike Dean. For every “Come Around” built on the same roaring synths Dean supplied for Yeezus, there’s an infectious ’80s-inspired jam like “Guilty Conscience.” “The Pines,” meanwhile, is constructed on a distorted chant similar to the one played out on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy switch-up “Hell Of A Life,” but finishes with a thunderous string arrangement, giving Dean’s sound some refreshing variance.
The most inspired works, though, come from former Stills member Dave Hamelin, who gives Shake ethereal, dreamy soundscapes to navigate through, none more pretty than the closer “Flight319.” Over astral chords that conjure images of misty daybreak, Shake encapsulates her internal tug of war by alternating between lines of confidence and shame, optimism and fear. Eventually, the drums cut out and she hits a point of reflection: “Oh, I’ll never know, how long I’ll stay, how far I’ll go.” Everything is in agreement, even if it’s just for a moment.
