Album Review: BERNARR. by Durand Bernarr
The Cleveland singer’s self-titled fourth album is funniest when it’s broke, best when it’s tired, and still good when it’s in love.
Seventeen tracks (with an All-Star production and songwriting team) is a lot of album for anybody, and it’s an especially bold number when your last record won a Grammy at fifteen. BERNARR., the fourth studio album from Durand Bernarr and his first since BLOOM took Best Progressive R&B Album in February, goes wide on purpose: funk, workout-instructor counting, therapist’s-couch confession, yacht rock, and several flavors of love song. Most of it works, and a surprising amount of it is great. The best material comes from directions you wouldn’t predict for an R&B album.
On “Sugar Family,” gas is so high he had to pray just to drive his car; the price of eggs nearly made him faint; daddy’s American Express is “pressed.” The chorus, “this jam needs bread, your cousin, your auntie, your brother, everybody chip in,” is built on a pun so obvious it shouldn’t work, but the names around it are real: big Reggie, Aunt Kitty, the brother who has bills of his own. It’s a family song and a recession song at once. On the Chic-inspired “SHARP!” the best line is the one about the person’s parents getting together “for a night of heated fellowship” and creating a masterpiece. The dance-driven “EFFORT.” goes further (the cadence of a gym instructor) to talk about what happens when someone doesn’t try hard enough in a relationship. “I don’t think you tried hard enough last night, thought you came in heavy, but it gave light.” The joke eventually turns literal: “go outside, touch some grass, extend your life, maintain your spine, hydrate daily, more than twice.” They’re funny about real things, not funny about being funny.
The record has more than comedy in it, though. “sleep” asks, “What did I say yes to?” while insisting there’s still so much left to do. Bongo ByTheWay-produced “Undivided” apologizes for being unavailable: “Wish that I could give you time, but it’s something that I can’t provide right now/I wanna give my attention, my capacities won’t let me divide right now.” He talks about time the way “Sugar Family” talks about money, as a resource he has already run through. On “Am I Okay?!” he sits on a therapist’s couch, says he’s run out of fucks, says his heart is in a rope, asks to be pulled up, asks to be shown how to get home. “AYO!” with BJ the Chicago Kid covers adjacent ground with a looser grip: “Turbulence comes with flying, it’s not rocket science.” And then, near the end: “The devil didn’t do it/Life just happens/We all got issues/Grab your tissues.”
The album is named after Bernarr Ferebee Sr., his father. “River” opens with that: “Papa wasn’t a rolling stone, but he taught me to move like water/Mama said chase your dreams ‘cause she knew I could go much further.” Self-affirmation for the rest of the song: “You better move out of the way, I’m like a mighty river.” The dedication is on the cover. It stays there.
On “HELLO!” he wears the occasion plainly. “Look ma, they really like me,” a Sally Field riff, sure, but followed by “state of twenty years, thank those joyful tears,” and the number is real: he started posting YouTube covers in 2008 and didn’t hold a Grammy until 2026. The bridge chants “Do your big boy” with a giddiness nobody could fake. The second verse dips into math metaphors (“Four plus four equals eight/So if you slow you better get up out my way”) that feel more like filler, but the song’s honesty about how long arrival took gives it weight that cleverer writing might not have.
The love songs run quieter. On “BLOOM” (the song, sharing a name with the album before it), he asks for “permission to have my way with you, even if I already have the answer,” then: “I crave to be in agreement intellectual first.” And then: “I am the safe word, you couldn’t be safer.” “Wild Ride” with James Fauntleroy has a tossed-off ease: “I don’t care where we go, don’t even need to know, just go,” that keeps it loose. “soft.” with Khalid and “My Life” are gentler; “Isn’t it nice, all this gentleness” on one and “Baby, can’t you see this is heaven” on the other don’t cut as deep as the album’s harder material, but Bernarr sounds genuinely at ease inside them. “10,000 Lifetimes” with Sevyn Streeter closes the love-song run with “Our love is off the chain,” and Streeter’s verse, where she’d have him “tatted on my chest so you know it’s yours,” gives the duet a physical specificity the quieter ballads don’t reach for.
Big Sean on “Waiting” turns in the liveliest guest verse; he’ll be “fair like cotton candy and teddy bears and Ferris wheels,” then one bar later he’s at “your auntie house, your mama house, we can do it like nobody’s there.” The whiplash between carnival and bedroom gives the song an energy nobody else here can match. Vic Mensa on “Homesick” runs a similar play: “I’m ‘bout to run off like a dad on Maury/Knock out like Tyson Fury, quick fast in a hurry.” On “I Found Myself,” he says he hated everything that made him who he is, then discovered his breath, “inhale less than exhale,” and centered himself. The second verse says he peeked in the rearview to see who he had to leave behind, and it broke his heart. That kind of long-range pairing with songs full of variety is something you can only pull off on an album this size. Daddy tried his best, but that American Express is pressed.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Sugar Family,” “Am I Okay?!,” “EFFORT.”