Over the span of three striking EPs, Dua Saleh has established themself as a genre-agnostic shape-shifter. Pulling strands from R&B, pop, trap, and gospel, the restless Sudanese American artist and occasional actor locates pathos in brooding backdrops: A menacing club beat, downcast piano, and airy string suite all form sturdy foundations for Saleh’s drifting falsetto and surly rapping about everything from queer romance to wrestling with the devil. They continue to morph on debut album I SHOULD CALL THEM, concentrating their style into a dusky, dexterous homebrew of pop-R&B, rap, and rock songs whose lyrics seesaw between swaggering and lovesick. It’s an inventive and sinewy mix that shifts the dial toward deeper, more expressive songwriting and production.
I SHOULD CALL THEM follows a loose concept—two lovers meet, break up, and reunite against the backdrop of the apocalypse—but the dystopian storyline is less a plot to follow closely than scaffolding for the glowering atmosphere. The electric guitar and explosive drums on “Want” fill out the song’s story about a sometime lover’s magnetic pull, while the intoxicating “Pussy Suicide” follows a loping, waterlogged beat to track Saleh’s romantic back-and-forth: “Was I leading you on when I told you I was really healing?” they ask sweetly. “I think we could benefit from room for breathing.” Later, on the highlight “Unruly,” they cast serpentwithfeet to intone the song’s pensive chorus—“How’d I get so unruly?/How’d I get so wild?”—while Saleh provides boastful counters to answer the question. The pair, dancing over rattling percussion and low-lit synths, are impeccable complements for one another.
Saleh finds unity amid chaotic emotions via their tactile voice, molded and shaped to exceedingly elastic effect. They sound gossamer-light when exorcising a diabolic situationship on “Playing Games” and emit a blood-curdling scream on the thundering climax that caps off closer “2excited.” Saleh most often pitches up into a silvery falsetto, adding a slick, singsong pep to even the most disrespectful lyrics, à la agile vocalists like Amaarae. “Your bitch she always be crowding me/Says I’m her new sexuality,” they boast in a pitch-shifted warble on “Coast,” an otherwise deceptively laid-back track featuring R&B crooner Gallant. Later, they rewire nursery rhymes to filthy ends on “Bo Peep,” one of the few songs where you get a dose of humor to lighten the mood—it takes skill to make a line like “Patty gotta cake that she wanting me to taste” roll off the tongue, and Saleh’s nervy delivery makes it click into place.
Saleh occasionally slips into more generic material—opener “Chi Girl,” despite a memorable chorus dedicated to a girl they met in the Windy City (“Chi girl, what’s the mood?/I like that you’re kind of rude”), doesn’t move much past its initial conceit. “Cradle” also gets stuck in a holding pattern of blown-out drum programming that doesn’t do lyrics like “sparks that fly like fate” any favors. But those are minor missteps, considering how frequently I SHOULD CALL THEM bends toward different, more appealing shapes. Saleh’s breathy performance on the guitar-tinged “Time and Time Again” curlicues into a pillowy, melodic chorus; the slow-groove R&B highlight “Television,” a duet with the underrated New Orleans singer Ambré, is a treatise on desire that builds to a melting climax with fogged-out saxophone and keys. It proves Saleh’s determination to switch things up at every turn, following their own arrow in a way that keeps you on your toes.
