An album review of Erika de Casier’s Sensational.

Written by Felix Jones

Erika de Casier is back with another bag of silken RnB jams, steppy garage jives and club adjacent oddities. Sensational is the multi-talented artist’s second album, following the 2019 classic, Essentials. Whilst there are certainly similarities between the two works – de Casier’s hushed singing style, with its pillow-talk-closeness – anyone expecting an Essentials II should proceed with caution. Her first album fluttered between genres and tempos but rarely strayed far from the revived 90s RnB vibes she conjures so well, whereas this new work unveils the nimbleness of de Casier, as she nestles her vocals into anything and everything, from pure unadulterated pop to ambient Drum and Bass soundscapes.

Riding shotgun with de Casier is the Danish electronic music producer Natal Zaks (AKA DJ Central, El-Trick, Palta, etc.), who co-produced the album with her. The duo’s apparent appreciation for turn-of-the-millennium music creates the conditions for a wonderful case of artistic fission. de Casier noted in an interview with Loud and Quiet that her founding musical inspirators were the likes of “Destiny’s Child, Aaliyah, Usher, TLC”, and any other devilishly smooth act shown on MTV between the late 90s and early 00s. Harking back to the same era many of Zaks’ productions nod to the bass cushioned UKG, DnB and Jungle producers who flipped RnB jams to supply the ravers with something to move to. The reverberations of this era can be heard throughout the album, but rather than making cheap copies of past denizens, the duo amalgamate, reshape, and innovate to create an album that redresses 90s nostalgia in a 20s silhouette. 

The second track, “Polite”, conjures so many big names when trying to place it in a musical timeline. The hook (“I can’t deny it: you’re on my mind”) interpolates Tupac’s “Ambitionz Az a Ridah”. Where Tupac delivered in true Gangster Rap style atop a hard West Coast beat courtesy of Snoop Dogg’s cousin, de Casier flows through the Zaks instrumental switching between singing and rapping/speaking to create something that would not sound out of place on a Sade record. To accompany the track de Casier has also treated us to a video, in which Bianka, the classy businesswoman, finds herself on a dinner and salsa dancing date with a rude man who shows little decorum.

“Make My Day” follows and straddles the border between affectionate ballad and kitsch teen pop song, before being rounded off with a brief and breezy G-Funk flow, leaving the listener questioning, “what on earth is coming next?” Answer: more of the good stuff. Turning to love affairs gone wrong, excitable flings and the fickle materiality that surrounds fashion and clothing the album assembles a collage of 21st-century life; the intricacies of modern dating in “Secretly”, the choking feeling that a fast-paced lifestyle can bring in “Busy”, the unease of letting someone down in “No Butterflies, No Nothing”. 

Tying a knot at the close of the album is a personal highlight, “Call Me Anytime”. Zaks draws upon his production alias, El-Trick, to sculpt an ambient Drum and Bass soundscape that employs rolling drum breaks and soaring synths with the usual bass weight of a DnB track being omitted. The result is a beautifully weightless track on which de Casier can float, and listeners can drift. The track further represents the dexterity of their productions, taking on an almost vaporwave mellifluence in contrast to the crisp rhythms that form the rest of the album. 

Having stressed the point that these two artists have included so many different styles within the album, it is important to note that there remains an enigmatic thread of consistency throughout, which sews together the patchwork of influences. This mysterious thread is spun by de Casier and Zaks’ careful extraction of all that was good from that golden era of music around the millennium, and the respectful repurposing of it to create a unique sound that is both familiar and novel, which can only be described as the sensational sound of Erika de Casier, queen of Alt-RnB.