Beginning with a bout of big, boisterous pop songs, Justine Skye’s debut initially positions her as a possible heir to Rihanna. Rasping basslines and thrusting dancehall rhythms pepper the opening numbers, while the excellent Goodlove sees Skye dance gamely between silken R&B and her best Migos impression. This fusion of velvety vocals and chirrupy call-and-response trap suggests an unselfconsciousness that the rest of Ultraviolet never comes close to living up to. All too soon it descends into a sea of pristine but ultimately nondescript R&B. Don’t Think About It is a safe and stodgy showcase for Skye’s sumptuous vocal, the Nelly-sampling Back For More, featuring rapper Jeremih, is floatier but just as forgettable, while Heaven puts squelchy synths and those maddeningly ubiquitous distorted vocal samples to the service of presentable but dispiritingly generic pop.
More consistently intriguing is the way the record parses modern romance – throughout Ultraviolet, Skye seems torn between “cool girl” nonchalance and something knottier. On the PartyNextDoor-produced Goodlove she is the brash and extremely eager booty call participant, whose disillusion with the situation only surfaces towards the end of the track, when she observes that “I know it’s over when you calling me past two / I know it’s over cause I’m tryna come fast to ya”. Meanwhile, on Don’t Think About It she is more overtly sanguine about a no-strings arrangement, cooing that “I’m cool ‘cause I know it ain’t love”. While there’s something rather sorry about the latter song’s insistence that she “don’t think about” the situation, the former comes tantalisingly close to navigating the melancholic ecstasy that comes with the experience of being both sexually liberated and used – the furrow ploughed expertly by SZA on her album Ctrl. Goodlove never quite manages the same level of rawness, but the fact it is one of the few singles on the record written by Skye suggests that, beneath the gloss, she’s a smarter artist than this album gives her credit for.
