"I've been learning lessons I don't wanna know"
On her bracing second solo album, Brittany Howard uses ferocious funk as an outlet to process romantic dissolution.
Brittany Howard - What Now
On her tremendous new album What Now, Brittany Howard is ready to talk about her divorce— not as an excuse to wallow in self-pity, but as a means of liberating herself from it. “I told the truth, so set me free,” she howls on the title song, charting a course that’s equal parts confession, recrimination, exorcism, and deliverance.
The result is Howard’s most affecting album yet, not because it finds her exploring a new set of gifts but because it finds her working with enhanced focus and clarity. She remains uncommonly gifted at blowing up intimate blues into stadium-swelling, rafter-shaking bursts of emotion. And she still knows how to find a groove in anything, rendering What Now a veritable encyclopedia of nasty funk. What’s new is her heartbreak, the album’s emotional catalyst and throughline.
That throughline is essential, as What Now’s 38 minutes fly by in a dizzying rush of inspiration. Equal parts soul shouter and arena rock shaman, Howard presides over a grand tour of blues and R&B, dance music and trippy psychedelia. Every song feels like a big gesture, and even the quietest moments feel momentous; there’s nothing here that isn’t given outsized emotional resonance thanks to rumbling low end, monstrous rhythms, and Howard’s mighty roar.
To help document her catharsis in immaculate detail, Howard enlisted producer Shawn Everett— he’s previously produced an album for Howard’s old band Alabama Shakes, mixed and engineered her solo debut, and conjured the scuffed-up majesty of Alvvays’ modern classic Blue Rev. He’s the perfect collaborator for What Now, capturing Howard’s muddy grooves and thunderous wails with vivid clarity. Not for nothing does critic Claire Shaffer call this a “sound nerd’s” dream.
Many of the album’s most visceral moments come when Howard directly engages with the dancefloor. “Prove it to You” ventures into house territory with a hard-edged, relentless beat. “Another Day” dreams of a better world amidst skittering cymbals, jingling bells, and fat bass riffs— a din pitched somewhere between Sly Stone and On the Corner-era Miles Davis. In the propulsive “Red Flags,” Howard sings over a hypnotic groove, powered by the ruthless thump of live drums.
The slow jams and quiet interludes are nearly as funky. On the aptly-named “Patience,” Howard eases into sultry falsetto. “To Be Still” offers a two-minute reprieve from the album’s glorious commotion, but even here she finds the pocket of a deep, laconic undertow. One of Howard’s most arresting rhythmic inventions is “Power to Undo,” a late-album banger built from a rudimentary acoustic guitar riff.
Given Howard’s bravura synthesis of Black music idioms into something seamless and inspired, an obvious reference point is Prince. The difference is, the Purple One’s concoctions were always willfully weird, the perfect vehicles for his excursions to the outer limits of spirituality, sexuality, and personal expression. Howard harnesses familiar sounds not to highlight idiosyncrasy but to offer succor, as if this musical lineage is the stretcher she collapses on as she ails from a broken heart.
As she probes that broken heart, her lyrics run the gamut of grief, introspection, acceptance, and anger— the latter directed both without and within. In “I Don’t,” a twinkling Curtis Mayfield groove, Howard sounds resigned to romantic ruin: “Does anyone even care/ That we don’t smile with our eyes anymore?” In “Red Flags,” she describes the rush of new love as a kind of recklessness, with potentially dire consequences: “The best time that I ever had/ That’s when the worst times started.”
Most potent of all is the title song, a relationship postmortem that functions as an emotional timeline. Amidst distorted bass and squealing guitars, Howard veers from introspection (“I don’t wanna confuse you for fulfillment”) to accusation (“you’re fucking up my energy”) to ripping the Band-Aid off (“if you want someone to hate then blame it on me”). It’s an evocative and heartwrenching divorce diorama.
Many of these songs feel more like crude sketches than great works of poetry, notable not for their refinement so much as their jagged edges. But if Howard isn’t a top-tier songwriter, she is an exceptional conjurer of mood. On What Now, she conjures the stormy weather of heartache to riveting effect.
My rating: 8 out of 10
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