Uzoechi Emenike is best known for his Top 10-scaling duets with more famous artists including Stormzy and the Swedish singer Zara Larsson. It’s a state of affairs the musician is immediately keen to flag up and rectify on his debut album. The cringey but admittedly memorable opener Background is half moody electro track, half skit revealing the right way to pronounce his moniker (it’s emin-e-kay), before Correct delivers an onslaught of camp braggadocio outlining why listeners should respect the south Londoner as a solo proposition.
The album bears out these boasts, to an extent. Correct is an infectiously spasmodic slice of afrobeats-infused pop, while Crazy World’s crackling beats and insistent soul samples provide an arresting bed for Emenike’s dreamy vocals. Occasionally, however, it can feel as if he is courting the charts in a slightly soulless way: Colour, a tropical pop track featuring US star Hailee Steinfeld and umpteen zeitgeisty production bells and whistles, is cookie-cutter stuff made for Spotify playlists.
For the album’s second half, Emenike takes a different tack, gratifyingly evoking 90s R&B on tracks such as Honeymoon Phaze and Girlfriend, a song about a man having an affair, furnished with a fluttering snare and a killer lyrical refrain (“Neither you or your story’s straight”). The fluctuation in sensibility, from people-pleasing pop to something more sophisticated, suggests Emenike is hedging his bets. It’s not the most heartening approach but, for a man desperate to step out of his collaborators’ shadows, it’s probably a canny one.
