As Empress Of, Lorely Rodriguez has spent the previous decade shifting between punchy, upbeat synth-pop and introspective ballads with unselfconscious ease. Even if she’s leaned towards extra mainstream pop, as on 2022’s Save Me EP, the Honduran American manufacturer and singer-songwriter’s key influences have shined via. Whether or not she’s channeling the vertiginous serenades of Cocteau Twins or the contorted stylings of Imogen Heap, her catalog bursts with fizzy, unpredictable love songs in English and Spanish, that have landed her spots opening for pop stars like Carly Rae Jepsen and Rina Sawayama. On her fourth album, the independently launched For Your Attention, Rodriguez dials into an insatiable new groove, reprising an effusive, sensual viewpoint over propulsive dance and electropop. It’s essentially the most intricate Empress Of album to this point, a blinding exhibit for Rodriguez’s surprising vocal and manufacturing means as she reviews the peaks and valleys of heated romance.
Rodriguez executive-produced For Your Attention and tapped a fleet of alternative emerging songwriters and manufacturers to help, together with Casey MQ, Umru, Cecile Consider, and Nick León. The varied unfold is helping map out the album’s mischievously unpredictable backdrops: Those songs corkscrew and pull Rodriguez’s vocals like taffy, twisting into buildings of their very own; it’s as though she took Björk’s Medúlla as a conceptual north celebrity and ran with it at complete pace to the membership. A gap suite of whispers morphs right into a pitch-shifted development at the seductive “Sucia,” whose bilingual singsong verses result in a deliciously bawdy refrain, her voice emerging to a colourful whoop. Later, her backing vocals swarm right into a extra ominous, chittering flip at the standout “Preciosa,” including texture to the music’s deep bass and passionate come-ons. “Entra a mi mar/Mójate ya/Ya tú verás/Que te enamoras” (Input my sea/Get rainy/You’ll see that you just’ll fall in love) she sings gently, prior to her voice crumples right into a cooing, stuttering rhythm.
For Your Attention flourishes at the elasticity of the human voice, whilst its lyrics flip from underhanded fans to the flush of recent affairs. Gasps and hiccups form the fricative beat at the smooth opening identify observe, which dissects a sequence of crimson flags, letting her phrases linger with fading need. Right here she riffs at the awards-season “on your attention” campaigns that actors and administrators run as a metaphor for an unbalanced courting; the road, repeated all through the refrain, takes on a pleading tone that slowly grows extra steely with self belief. “You wrote the script,” she lets in, coming to the conclusion with sharp lucidity. “Your phrases, now not mine.”
