Like most people who have managed to extract long-term success from reality TV stardom, K Michelle is well-versed in the art of the overshare. The Tennessean singer has forged a career from self-exposure, both as the star of VH1’s Love & Hip Hop franchise and on her run of hit tell-it-like-it-is R&B records. Yet her fifth album sees her take her no-filter frankness to newly discomfiting levels. On opener Just Like Jay, she outlines her recent struggles (illness, romantic betrayal, her departure from Atlantic Records) and their emotional impact (“for the first time, I wished myself dead”), while The Worst details a relationship so dysfunctional it leaves you seriously concerned for the narrator’s psychological wellbeing.
Whether real or imagined, this onslaught of vulnerability can prove rather disquieting. Yet beyond the heartbreak-ravaged rants lies more questionable content. The Rain is a New Edition-sampling bedroom-ready slow jam drowning in a sea of stomach-churning references to moisture. It is, unfortunately, a motif that continues into Supahood, a love letter to non-committal criminals whose dubious message is underlined by coolly menacing production.
Sonically, Supahood is an outlier: All Monsters Are Human centres on the slick, soulful, 80s-style R&B that has provided the foundation for K Michelle’s career – a nostalgic but reliably classy mode. Yet, far too often, her rich, glassy vocals are coated in the kind of vocoder effect that makes them glitch and ripple nauseatingly. It only adds to the creeping sense of unease. For all its pleasingly classic R&B stylings, this is a record laden with ill-advised smut and disconcertingly dirty laundry.
