My Luv Notes comes out swinging with new Single
My Luv Notes comes out swinging with more swagger than she’s ever presented listeners with before in her new single, the complicated hip-hop slow jam “Day Late,” and while she’s been known to set the bar all the higher with every song she releases, this one feels particularly important in her white-hot career. Her lyrics are razor sharp, the melodies surrounding them as soft as a heavenly cloud, and though this track was produced with the upmost attention to detail, it sounds more like a raw, improvised song that came straight from the heart than it does something that came out of a major label writer’s room.
There’s not a lot of reverb on the vocal in “Day Late,” but this doesn’t make the song sound dry or unpalatable to pop fans. Actually, the up close and personal nature of the lyrics becomes all the more bludgeoning through this ultra-tight production style, which is a lot more cut and physical than anything on her 2018 LP Words Cry was. My Luv Notes leaves the ribbons and bows on the sidelines here and as a result sounds more adept and professional than most any of her peers on the underground side of this genre have lately.
While the master mix is admittedly barebones, nothing about “Day Late” seems amateurishly simple nor intentionally pandering to the minimalism trend in American indie pop. There’s still a lot of muscularity to the music, but rather than being put through the sonic processor behind the soundboard, it’s left unchecked and full of the same adrenaline that it would have on stage. It’s a sound that every artist tries to capture in-studio but only a handful are actually able to contain within a single recording, and this isn’t the first occasion on which My Luv Notes has pulled off such a feat.
I love the conservative bass parts in this song. They contrast with the percussive components perfectly while enforcing a solid barrier between the vocal track and the other elements in the melody. This artist’s meticulousness is what originally attracted me to her music, and I must say that she’s getting even better at piecing the minute parts of a composition together here. I still think that she could take a slightly more relaxed approach and sound just as compelling, but this look is one that I definitely don’t want her to shelve as she prepares to make her next full-length album.
Coming into my review of “Day Late,” I was expecting to be wowed by what I heard, but I didn’t think I would enjoy this song more than I did the similarly evocative “Mama,” which was also released this year. My Luv Notes keeps dropping game-changers, and though she’s clearly not finished in her creative development (which seems to become a little more diverse in tone every time I hear her work), she unquestionably knows who she is in this single. That’s half the battle for today’s up and coming pop star, but when it comes to this talented woman’s music, conventional standards really don’t apply.
Mindy McCall
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