The most impressive aspect of Santigold’s genre-fusing catalog is her ability to move effortlessly between tempos, tones, and musical modes—from reggae to rock to indie-pop—almost on a dime. A song like “Nothing,” from the artist’s fourth studio album, Spirituals, is lyrically significant—in this case filled with evocative suggestions of pushing against an overbearing, unidentifiable burden—but it’s the track’s full-bodied sonics, replete with phantom-like exhaling and undulating synths, that really stick in one’s memory.
The other element that makes Santigold a suis generis indie artist of the last 15 years is her disarming voice. She’s particularly stirring on songs like “Ushers of the New World,” where she champions the next generation of young radicals, but she sings with a hesitance that movingly suggests that she’s doubting her own generation’s capacity for transformation. Elsewhere, and true to Santi’s commitment to serving feeling and sensation more than a narrative or thematic schema, the singer’s delivery of the middle section of “Witness” is almost incomprehensible, but her mush-mouthed vocal jumble is integral to the mood she sets.
The signature reggae and dancehall vibes that came to a head on Santigold’s underrated 2018 mixtape I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions are largely replaced on Spirituals with overcast art-pop stylings and hip-hop accents. Not unlike “Big Boss Big Time Business,” from 2016’s 99¢, or “This Isn’t Our Parade,” from 2012’s Master of My Make-Believe, the standout “No Paradise” splits the difference, marrying a tropical shuffle with an airy sense of unease and some sputtering bass notes that are more fully embraced on the subsequent track, “Ain’t Ready,” with some drill-rap menace courtesy of Illangelo and SBTRKT.
Spirituals works to show off Santi’s facility with carrying complex, shifting rhythm, but its sequencing can sometimes prove to be jarring, most notably the leisurely pulse of “Ushers of the New World” alongside the jolting synths and plunging 808s of “Witness.” Throughout the majority of the album, however, Santigold reacquaints us with her stylistically eclectic wheelhouse, its songs bursting with texture and surprising choices in both vocals and production. Her least celebratory album to date, Spirituals is nonetheless ornate and often frenetic, managing to give her pent-up anxiety a kind of release.
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