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Solange Flo’

Twenty tracks spanning fifteen years, from teenage pop singles to one of the most formally adventurous albums anyone released in the 2010s.

Solange

Solange Knowles spent the first decade of her career being described in relation to her sister, and the second making that impossible. The transformation was not a reinvention so much as a refusal: she stopped making records designed to be liked and started making records designed to be exactly what she wanted.

A Seat at the Table (2016) is where the general public caught up, but the shift begins earlier, on True (2012) with Dev Hynes, and continues further on When I Get Home (2019), which is the most difficult and most interesting record she has made.

Her method by then was closer to that of a composer or an installation artist than a pop singer: repeated phrases rather than choruses, arrangements that circle instead of building, and a great deal of deliberate space.

What to listen for

"Cranes in the Sky" is the essential track — a list of things that do not work as a distraction from grief, sung over an arrangement that never resolves. It won her a Grammy and it deserved to.

"Stay Flo" and "Binz" come from When I Get Home and show the later method at its most confident: grooves that simply exist rather than developing.

"Losing You" and "Lovers In The Parking Lot" are the True-era singles, and they are still the most purely enjoyable things in the catalogue.

"Weary" and "Don't You Wait" are where the writing is most direct, and "Don't Wish Me Well" is the most emotionally exposed.

"T.O.N.Y." and "I Decided" are from the early pop era and considerably better than that framing suggests.

"Cosmic Journey" with Bilal is the deep cut, and "F*** the Industry" is the one where she says out loud what the later records imply.

Go deeper

A Seat at the Table (2016) is the album to start with and works best heard in full, interludes included — they are not skippable, they are the argument.

When I Get Home is the one to grow into. For the surrounding world, Dev Hynes as Blood Orange, Sampha and Kelsey Lu are the closest relatives.

How to approach the later work: the records after 2016 do not build the way pop records build, and hearing them as failed songs rather than as completed pieces is the most common mistake. The grooves circle rather than climb, the phrases repeat rather than develop, and the pleasure is in the texture. It is closer to how minimalist composition works than to how R&B usually does.

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