Dawn Richard - Infrared

Pitchfork 77

In the middle of her new song “Paint it Blue,” Dawn Richard sings to the high heavens, “Even if I wanted too/I could not be with you/How did you paint it blue?” The loaded lyrics define the mood of her newest release, a collaborative 4-track EP with Fade to Mind’s Kingdom (aka Ezra Rubin) titled Infrared. She told us earlier this year that her artistic career was entering the red era, defined by a new vibrancy and “full of rhythm.” And even though the title of this EP is Infrared, a kind of prologue to the forthcoming RED•emp•tion, the atmosphere, the production, and lyrics of this beautifully gauzy and experimental R&B journey, amidst all that red, points to a brief flirtation with a sort of “blue” period as well.

The collaborations between Kingdom and Richard were teased last year in both a Rinse FM mix and at an event called “WAVES: Nexus Re-Morph” for the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. At “WAVES,” Kingdom, Richard, and the visual artist Kyselina™ designed a “non-linear R&B opera” complete with a sixty-minute performance filled with insane visuals, Kingdom’s razor-sharp beats, and Richard’s inimitable voice. The event was supposed to capture “the soul of R&B distorted in space-time, and rendered as a high-tech video vortex.” What we get in Infrared is a concentrated form of that vortex, rendered across 14 engrossing minutes.

Opening up with the three-minute echo-chamber of a love song, “Honest” lays out the themes of the EP: She “just wants to be honest” about the pain of love, the contradictions of break-ups. Her smoky, dulcet voice is at its most raw when she sings lines like “Loving you is like smoking spliffs/It's a temporary high laced with side effects” or “Hate you unless I touch you..I should light this cess smoke until I choke then.”

It's all complemented by Kingdom’s most pared-down and cushioned production effort. In Infrared he’s reached a new level, dissolving down all the best parts of his tropes (very heavy bass, knife-sharp synths, and echoing percussion) into an ideal backdrop for Richard’s velvet voice. He works low key magic all over “How I Get It” where he plays with expectation and hesitance in spectacularly novel ways. As Richard sings “Bitch I don’t lose,” Kingdom lets loose a gentle waterfall of synth notes, elevating her war cry with victorious energy. The two move seamlessly from the swagger of “How I Get It” to the plaintive doubt of “Paint it Blue” and “Baptize.” She sung “Baptize,” the album’s closer, during her set at the Pérez last year. In the performance, a kaleidoscopic beam of light shines down on her as she pleads to her lover and the world at large to let her voice cure all it all, “Don't be frightened by the thunder/Let the water wash all over...So please be forgiven then we'll baptize you.” In the 14 minutes of Dawn’s brief blue period, she and Kingdom did what few can do—build a diorama for love’s life cycle, encompassing everything from death defying adoration, righteous anger, and best of all, forgiveness.