Lizzo - Big GRRRL Small World

Pitchfork 75

Twin Cities artist Lizzo seems to have fans and collaborators in just about every pocket of the music world: Sleater-Kinney invited her to open for their reunion tour; fellow Minneapolitan Prince featured Lizzo and bandmate Sophia Eris on last year's PLECTRUMELECTRUM; Ryan Olson produced much of her debut LIZZOBANGERS. She's a true triple threat, equally searing as a rapper, soul singer, and personality and an unstoppable force on record, as amply proven with single "Batches and Cookies" (and its buttered-up hunkfest of a video) and with previous groups GRRRL PARTY and the Chalice. Big GRRRL Small World comes off as the work of an already minted star—her introduction to the small world, which she's already stepped over, laughing.

Big GRRRL Small World—named for a line on LIZZOBANGERS, and Lizzo's label BGSW, on which she released the album—finds her reckoning with her sudden fame, and also the things that plague it: white culture vultures, terrible dudes (consigned on "Ride" to the "Support Group for Men Without Lizzo," a demolishingly hilarious couple of bars), people who need her references RapGenius'd clear for them, needy people, misogynists. It's all delivered with sheer glee, and some of it is among the most wicked fun committed to record in 2015.

It also sounds gorgeous; largely produced by BJ Burton (Low, Sylvan Esso, Poliça), the album is full of unexpected turns and immaculate codas. Lizzo bends each track to her will, twisting them until they're anything but obvious. "Ain't I", the closest thing here to a LIZZOBANGER, begins with references to reparations and Russian czars but ends with a distant, slightly untuned piano interlude and distorted guitar squeals. The ballads speak the language of vulnerability but twist R&B tropes to different ends. Standout single "Humanize" begins as a shimmering post-coital reverie sung in feather-soft voice and ends smothering and alone, with a voice like the feather's sharp end.

Lizzo's lyrics on "Humanize" complicate everything, full of reversals ("your skin is warm—it keeps me up though I am tired") and pinprick-perfect lines: "No, you can't lay on my shoulder, there are spikes and scales and your cheek would just press them in." It's an exhausted, near-existential sigh: one of yearning for connection but unable to find it, particularly when the ones you're supposed to connect with are the aforementioned terrible dudes. "En Love" begins as another sumptuous soul piece, Lizzo's besotten cooing resting upon beds of '90s synth pads, until Lizzo drops the punchline—"with myself!"—and turns the track into a trap jam. Lizzo's force of personality prevents the switch up from being mere gimmick, as does her generosity; she dedicates a verse to her best friend, and to her listeners.

Indeed, the most straightforward tracks on Big GRRRL Small World, such as empowerment ballad "My Skin", are explicitly about and for everyone who looks like and looks up to her. This—not only her indie friends, or her crystalline production, and especially not her place in any made-up taxonomy of female rappers she's been placed into—is largely responsible for her whirlwind success, and Lizzo knows it. "I love that because I am a woman and because I rap and I look the way I look, I can connect with the demographic of people who feel like they have a voice in me," Lizzo told Billboard. "I get to speak to these people who did not get spoken for in this genre." Big GRRRL Small World succeeds because it's just that: a showcase for the small world, a keepsake for the big grrrls.

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Bon Iver's Justin Vernon produced LIZZOBANGERS.