Many women started playing music because of history’s first all-girl punk band, the Slits. But the British singer Hollie Cook launched her career as a reggae singer after being in the Slits. She was, in some sense, destined. Cook was born in 1987 to Jeni Cook, a backing singer for Culture Club, and Paul Cook, the drummer of the Sex Pistols who infamously helped steal all the gear that history-splitting band used to get started. Boy George is Cook’s godfather, and it is unlikely that Johnny Rotten has been in a photo more adorable than one, shared recently by Cook, of the pair backstage at a 1996 Sex Pistols reunion show. At 19, Cook was tapped by a family friend to sing at a recording session. It was Ari Up: the status-quo-annihilating, dreadlock-donning, firebrand Slits singer—a woman who, in her freedom of mind, was so controversial in punk’s early days that she was knifed on the streets of London; who not only fused punk with reggae, but subsequently moved to Jamaica and made a life there.
Cook eventually joined Ari in the reunited Slits lineup, touring the world with one of the most influential (if rarely recognized) groups in music history. And for the Slits’ 2009 album Trapped Animal, Cook wrote and sang her first song, “Cry Baby,” which also appeared on her self-titled 2011 debut, as “Cry.” Cook credits her Slits experience with turning her on to reggae and emboldening her to make music. In 2014, four years after Ari’s unexpected death from cancer, Cook opened her sophomore album with a heartfelt ode called “Ari Up.”
On her pristine third album, Vessel of Love, Cook sings her desire and pain into an exalted, beaming sway. Cook is influenced by singers like Janet Kay and Carroll Thompson, who helped define lover’s rock in the mid-1970s—the moment when rocksteady grew less political (and male) and more romantic. The producer Dennis Bovell has said “the theme of lover’s rock was to get young girls up front, singing,” and Cook’s work bears out that legacy. Lover’s rock subsisted on just as much yearning as 1960s girl groups, of which Cook is also a fan; she has herself covered the Shangri-Las. Vessel of Love, a collaboration with the producer Youth (of Killing Joke), adds more electronic flourishes to Cook’s mix of horns, strings, off-beats, and space. It incorporates drums from her former collaborator, Prince Fatty, inspired by the soundsystems of the early 1980s, and a few Vessel of Love songs are what Cook calls “Jah Wobble cast-offs that he didn’t end up using so I stole them and wrote music over them instead.”
For Cook, love and resilience are complementary forces. She fights for love and uses it as oxygen, rendering it a sustaining force. On “Together,” she practically turns it into a rallying cry: “Together we are one/Together we are powerful.” There is a thrill to the immediacy of Cook’s music—how the repetition becomes hypnotic, how the slow rhythms move your heart and bones. Cook’s voice is variously anchoring and featherlight, and she is equally compelling when singing of the complexities of heartache or offering a pure outpouring of adoration: “Your beautiful eyes have fallen from the sky,” Cook sings on “Survive.” She always sounds strong and self-possessed, and that is what most makes Vessel of Love sound like pure joy. She calls the highlight “Freefalling,” for example, a song about “being too free to love one person individually,” as she sings of “too much thunder in my heart/To hear you calling.” The title track is so squarely fit for a beach party—“I’m feeling low today/So I get myself high”—that it incorporates samples of crashing waves and squawking seagulls.
At the center of Vessel of Love is an enveloping daydream called “Lunar Addiction.” Its echoing, dubbed-out beats sparkle with a dizzied sensibility; it feels the way infatuation does, floating and unmoored. Cook sings of the moon and the ocean, “lucid and free,” losing her grip of reality: “I’m in a sphere of love/No sense of gravity/Take me away from it all/Transcending clarity.” She blissfully succumbs to its pull. It is perhaps ironic that an artist personally connected to both the Slits and the Sex Pistols by her teenage years would go on to make love songs as intoxicatingly beautiful as this. Those bands resented and rejected love, after all. But punk has always been enamored with reggae, and what Cook does is righteous in its own way: She is herself. By the end of Vessel of Love, it is apparent that an interest in reggae is far from the only thing Cook learned from Ari Up, or the most important thing. She learned to find her voice and make it heard.
