Samba Jean-Baptiste’s music dwells in the semi-sublime state of being bored and stoned. On his second album, +3, he floats across faint guitars, zonked reverb, and avant-rap and R&B production spiced with capricious experimental interjections. Even the signs of urgency, like barking dogs and sirens, sound glazed over; everything comes shrouded in an indica plume.
Beneath the album’s apparent drift lies Jean-Baptiste’s almost classical concern for proportion and structure. Jean-Baptiste, who trained as a cellist, arranges his songs—some of which are barely over a minute long—like a chamber cycle punctuated with interludes. Despite the fog, +3 represents a clear tightening of Jean-Baptiste’s practice. His previous album, Cardinal, was guided by charmingly disorganized instinct. Here, his stabs at form feel more purposeful. The album’s most substantial song, “Object 9,” is built around a simple guitar figure and an Auto-Tuned monologue that circles self-doubt and breaks through into accidental revelation: “Please help me reshape connections with my friends.” It’s a potent example of how much force his writing can carry when he sees a song through to its conclusion.
Jean-Baptiste’s voice is alluringly pitchy and thin, and gives needed perspective to the almost overfamiliar tropes on the album. Much of it, like the simple, sunlit guitar line on “Peppermint,” sounds a bit like BROCKHAMPTON if they were raised on the Dean Blunt Discord rather than Kanye forums. It’s difficult to listen to +3 without hearing the enormous influence of Blunt and the broader post-Blunt ecosystem across the London underground and in New York, where Baptiste is based. The album’s sketch-like, psychedelic format is also reminiscent of Frank Ocean’s Blond; its most experimental moments—like the warped tempo and tonality of “Peripheral Pulse”—could have come out of LA timpa’s playbook.
The music on +3 feels like Baptiste is listening back to what he was raised on, holding it at a blurred yet sentimental remove. He breaks those influences down and patches them back together into a kind of bricolage, as if he were using the album to interrogate his own tastes—the trip-hop of “Pressure & Light,” the diaristic strain of early internet rap channeled on “Nothing 2 Tell,” the Blood Orange-like etudes of “Swan Song” and “Marseille Miserere.” That sense of musical memory hardens into its own kind of stylistic language, one full of degraded textures and an opacity that he treats as depth.
Depending on the moment, the album can feel either profoundly affecting or frustratingly indistinct. The plainspoken lyrics align with a broader embrace of sincerity, privileging emotional directness over irony. There’s a stylized vulnerability to that shift, a willingness to say things plainly, even awkwardly. But here, that openness can also collapse inward; the writing occasionally bogs down in its own interiority, as on “Fatale,” where the lyrics can scan as first-semester creative-writing coursework: “Precious jewels of blemished glow take my wind out.”
But in its best moments, like the post-classical adagio “By the Wind,” which sounds a bit like looking out the window of a train and not knowing whether it’s yours moving or the one beside it, +3 finds Baptiste arriving at a clearer articulation of his own sensibility. The song opens with a blurry swirl of strings, breaking glass, and the sounds of crashing cars; plucking an acoustic guitar, he repeats a few simple patterns and mutters, “Not everything has a meaning.” Gradually, new elements join in—a crisp drumbeat, an assured guest vocal—and the song blossoms into a surprisingly sturdy shape as Jean-Baptiste finally allows himself a little tasteful mischief.
