Album Review: Days of You. by chromonicci
A beatmaker’s second vocal album runs on groove and desire, convincing enough when the details show up.
SoundCloud’s beat scene had a small window where Black producers could carve out real space in electronic music, making instrumentals alongside Monte Booker, KAYTRANADA, and TEK.LUN without anybody asking them to justify why they belonged. When that window closed, Dallas producer chromonicci felt it. He’d coined his own subgenre tag, “niccibounce,” in a college classroom because nobody else was going to classify what he did for him, and he talked publicly about how the wider electronic world didn’t have room for him once the pocket that did collapsed. His debut vocal album, Fold the Light., came out in 2024 as a meditative, healing-centered record. Days of You. drops the spirituality and replaces it with want. Every song here is about chasing somebody, catching somebody, almost ruining something with somebody, or pledging yourself to somebody you probably shouldn’t trust yet.
The fact that chromonicci produced every track himself is the record’s biggest structural advantage. He thinks like a beatmaker who happens to sing, and the songs benefit from that order of operations. His hooks are short. “Jump on, jump on my love,” “Goddamn, you fire,” “Baby, you’re my favorite” all need the instrumental bed to do half the emotional work. On “GEMINI.,” the twin-flame concept would flatten out if the beat underneath weren’t pulling double duty, keeping the track buoyant while the lyric stays fixed on a single plea. “FIRE.” runs the same way, stacking a two-word hook across verses that glide on conversational infatuation, never pressing toward any lyrical density. A traditional R&B vocalist might oversing these melodies to compensate. chromonicci tucks his voice into the production instead, and the restraint keeps the songs from outrunning their own ideas.
The best-written joint on the LP by far is “FAVORITE.,” and it earns that by being specific where everything around it stays vague. The situation is familiar enough. A hookup that became a habit, visits stretching from one day to three, then weekly. But the details tighten it. He mentions DC and New York as the two cities the relationship bounces between, drops the “Marvel” pun on the D.C. connection, and then, in the second verse, admits he’s scrolling through the other person’s photos when he thinks he heard his phone go off. That small, slightly embarrassing moment does more than any of the record’s bigger romantic declarations. The attachment is creeping up on him faster than he’ll say, and the word “complicated” keeps surfacing like something neither person wants to deal with yet.
The most particular piece of writing on the record is “DAISY.,” and it carries the title’s meaning. The narrator talks to someone from last spring, remembers April and green trees and thirty-two white teeth, mentions going “sky blue back in ‘23,” and name-checks “auntie Rose.” The outro folds “daisy” into “days of you” into “déjà vu,” which gives the LP its name and its closest thing to a thesis without ever announcing one. Where most of these cuts blur their subjects into interchangeable pronouns, “DAISY.” puts a face and a season and a color on the person being remembered. It is the one cut that sounds as if it could only have been written about a specific human being.
BeMyFiasco gives “ON U.” real help. A Dallas singer-songwriter who came up through Phonte’s +FE Music label and contributed vocals to Robert Glasper’s Everything’s Beautiful sessions with 9th Wonder, she enters after chromonicci spends his verse on accusation and grudging self-awareness, singing “I could put this all on you, but that’s lazy/Better find a reason self-respect would have saved me,” then flips the track’s center of gravity. Her verse bites back: “I know you wanna blame me ‘cause every time it can’t be you.” This switches from “Never thought that I’d be stuck on you” to “Never thought that you’d be stuck on me,” and suddenly the track has two unreliable narrators instead of one. That exchange lends the song a shape it wouldn’t have as a solo cut. “SUPERSTORE.” does something lighter with its feature, staging a flirtation between chromonicci and Avara as a meet-cute in a store, complete with traded questions and a recognition gag, “Haven’t we met before?/I think that we danced last night.”
A few tracks expose the limits of chromonicci’s writing when the production isn’t filling in the gaps. “STUPIDLOVE.” has a usable premise. Rose-colored glasses, common sense abandoned at the club, bad decisions repeating themselves. It restates that premise so many times without adding new information that the song starts to feel like a single paragraph stretched across three minutes. “Don’t hold me accountable/Baby hold my hand” is a sharp enough flip, but the verses around it keep returning to the same confession with no new angle. “WAISTLINE.,” featuring Abby Jasmine, runs into a similar ceiling. The cut is built for movement, all hips and chemistry and body language, and Abby Jasmine’s verse about throwing it back “like it’s nostalgic” has personality, but the writing doesn’t go anywhere past the opening physical description. Both songs depend entirely on groove and vocal layering to justify their full runtime, and on the page, they read closer to extended hooks than to finished compositions.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “FAVORITE.,” “SUPERSTORE.,” “DAISY.”