In 2020, Naomi Namasenda became the first Black artist signed to PC Music. A.G. Cook’s British Isle of misfit toys had, over the better part of a decade, curated a distinctive visual sensibility that was neon, plastic, and predominantly white. Namasenda appeared on the cover of 2021’s Unlimited Ammo as a femme fatale straight out of The Matrix, a leather catsuit clinging to her body. But the mixtape never fully unloaded its clip—or made a strong case for who this enigmatic, Sweden-born electropop artist was meant to be beyond the latest vehicle for new Cook productions. The bubblegum bass just wasn’t banging.
Not so on Limbo, Namasenda’s proper debut, which is coming out on YEAR0001 after she parted ways with PC Music in 2023. (Shortly thereafter, the label announced it would stop putting out new music altogether, a promise that held until the release of GRRL’s Beetle earlier this year.) Limbo also marks a decisive break from the arch stylings of Cook and his cronies in favor of sounds that feel really good in your chest. Submerged in a molten crucible of trance, Eurodance, and laser-lit rave, Limbo writhes against hyperpop’s cellophane coating while plumbing the beating heart inside the Barbie doll.
The disembodied pirate radio emcee of “Madonna” attests to an early love affair with dance music born in Namasenda’s hometown of Veberöd. (When she was born, its population would’ve been around 3,600.) Limbo’s production, handled by Medium—the duo of fellow Swedes Isac Hördegård and Hannes Roovers—is an unspoiled fantasy of the club. The sound is blissed-out and still rips: check the oceanic splash of a beat drop on “Love Island”; when the speaker stacks seems to double in size midway through “Coquette”; the frenetic acid bassline of “Claremont Twins,” as irresistibly chewy as Polly Pocket clothes. “Miami Crest” is Nick Léon and Erika de Casier’s “Bikini” if it traded its mermaid tail for legs and then rented a Bugatti. Hördegård and Roovers have daydreamed up a warehouse party the way a kid might imagine it, with trampoline walls and a floor made of Floam.
Let’s call peak PC Music a Baudrillard stage three: a bizarro mirror image of the Billboard Top 40 that exposed the real thing to be just as synthetic. Limbo crosses over from fish-shaped fish sticks into Swedish Fish-flavored Oreos as the English language breaks down into a primordial soup of yummy phonemes. “Hot wax, Brazilian” rhymes with “bikinis in martini land” rhymes with “I got to/Multimillion.” “Love me like I’m your Madonna” fuses into “Lovemelikeimyourmadonna.” Limbo’s most asinine hooks—“Sticky like a cola/My favorite soda,” ”This is love/What it feels like, love/This is bad/This is bad love”—also happen to be its, well, stickiest. Namasenda’s writing often reminds me of the way professional hitmakers record demos—like this one of Rihanna’s “Diamonds” by Sia—ad-libbing every third word as they rush to commit an especially earwormy melody to tape. Venture far enough into the post-pop event horizon, and you loop back around to proto-pop.
If there is sense to be made of all this deliberate missense, it’s a story about contorting oneself into the desired shape of a lover or, perhaps, a label. “[When] I wrote it, I didn’t feel beautiful at all,” Namasenda said of the “looksmaxxing anthem” “Heaven” in a recent Paste profile. “I was just trying to manifest this other person that I was gonna be when the album came out.” On the hiccuping “Cola,” she vows to become “less like me, more what you want.” As cultural signposts, Namasenda chooses women—Marilyn Monroe; Aaliyah in Romeo Must Die; reality stars Shannon and Shannade Clermont and their “iconic tits”—who both weaponized their beauty and frequently had it weaponized against them. “Virgin but I never fake it,” she declares on “Madonna,” recalling in one breath Mary, mother of Jesus, and Sophie Rain, who has become the highest-earning creator on OnlyFans without ever having sex on camera.
Squint at Limbo’s cover art, shot by Hannah Diamond, and you can make out the album title carved into the plexiglass fourth wall, as if by frantic fingernails. Namasenda’s PC programming remains intact in her processed vocals, but she’s starting to go rogue. Consider 2017’s “Donuts,” her first track to get traction online, next to album closer “Alright”: One’s a car circling the parking lot and the other is a satellite orbiting the planet. Namasenda’s whole sound is bigger than ever. She’s out of the box and into the real world.
