Album Review: Finally Over It by Summer Walker
Summer Walker is wedded to a saga even as she looks ready to shed it. She isn’t chasing a happy ending so much as deciding which parts of herself she wants to marry and which she’s ready to bury.
When Over It appeared in 2019, Summer Walker cultivated an almost diaristic intimacy. That debut was raw, full of voicemails and half‑sung confessions, and many listeners fixated on the messy details of her love life more than the careful melodic phrasings. Two years later, on Still Over It, she turned that openness into a confrontation with the men and circumstances that wounded her. Now she is three records deep and no longer just processing heartbreak; she is sifting through its debris to decide what has value. The album arrives split into two halves—“For Better” and “For Worse,” a structure she described as choosing herself in the first half and embracing honesty without bitterness in the second. That formal decision signals a shift in posture. She isn’t pleading for clarity anymore but making clear demands. Even the way she frames “better” and “worse” undermines clichés: one half is not love and the other hate, it’s her choosing joy and then testing the promise of that choice.
The visual rollout for Finally Over It has been as layered as the music itself—the album cover, a recreation of Anna Nicole Smith’s 1994 wedding to J. Howard Marshall—sets the tone: a young woman in a wedding dress, standing beside an elderly groom, showered with rose petals. The image is satirical, a commentary on the transactional nature of marriage and the performance of happiness. The wedding motif recurs throughout the album’s promotion: a lie detector test to announce the release date, a dump truck for fans to throw away their exes’ belongings, an escape room for “scary exes,” and a mock wedding reception to reveal the album details. The Anna Nicole Smith reference is particularly pointed. Smith’s marriage to Marshall was widely mocked as a gold-digging move, but Walker uses the image to ask deeper questions: What does it mean to choose security over love? What are the costs of performing happiness for the sake of appearances? The album doesn’t offer easy answers, but it refuses to shy away from the discomfort.
Her voice has changed. Walker still floats between a supple croon and conversational half‑spoken lines, but her lyrical confidence makes the personal feel declarative. On “No,” she refuses domestic servitude: “You want me slaving over a hot stove/You want me ironing and folding up your clothes/You want me to cater to you, never tell you ‘no’/You want me to lose myself just to keep your home.” The dismissal is sung in a tone over Beyoncé’s “Yes” that might once have been apologetic, yet here she relishes the “no” as the track’s hook, marking a boundary with a simple word. “Scars” opens the record quietly but straightforwardly: “I can’t see you for who you are/If you won’t show me what’s beneath those scars.” The demand for transparency is not just an emotional plea but an artistic edict, wanting lovers and listeners alike to confront the bruises rather than romanticize them.
The first disc, For Better, leans into R&B balladry and mid‑tempo grooves and features some of her strongest writing to date. She taps into female solidarity on “Go Girl,” an infectious track where she, Latto, and Doja Cat (who was the highlight) trade verses about luxurious self‑care: “Smell good, feel good, feel good, look great,” and then couple lines later, “Make him come (cum) fast like, ‘let’s race.’ It’s playful and carnal but also flips the script on objectification—she’s the one inviting a man to keep up, but it gets redundant when they all have the same flow and cadence throughout. The government-mandated Chris Brown feature appears on the Mariah Carey-flipped “Baby” that does absolutely no favors, and on “1‑800 Heartbreak,” her melodic lines flutter over Bryan-Michael Cox's bouncy production on the first half, where she sings about feigning happiness while “driving fast in a nigga’s passenger seat,” before dialing an imagined hotline to indulge the pain she claims to have outrun. Paak’s cameo in the second half of the song is as messy as the relationship it depicts. He calls from his mother’s phone because she blocked him, and he confesses that he keeps gaining casual partners while losing parts of himself. His spiraling verse is comic and pathetic, and Walker’s choice to cede space to a man detailing his own shortcomings puts the spotlight on the record’s thesis, where honest self‑reckoning is more compelling than neat resolutions.
The centerpiece of Disc One is “Heart of a Woman,” the record’s first single and its moral hinge. Over gentle keys reminiscent of 1990s quiet‑storm ballads, she interrogates why she keeps forgiving: “Question is why I do the things I do?/Answer I may never find, but I’ll always choose you.” She keeps returning to “Only thing that’s saving you is the heart of a woman,” not for effect, but because she’s spelling out the imbalance directly. She’s naming the way she excuses him, even while she resents the role, but she strips away sentimentality by noting how her patience enables bad behavior. Although the bridge would help take this song further. It’s the rare moment in her catalogue where compassion and exhaustion coexist without undercutting each other. “Give Me a Reason” with Bryson Tiller picks up that thread. She acknowledges the spark (“Time slowed down when we had took a breather”) and her lingering desire to be exclusive, but the chorus centres on why she is willing to give her heart: “You gave me a reason to love you.” Tiller’s verse is less effective; he notes that he’s searching for reason after betrayal but uses clunky clichés about being “caught in [her] region” before getting abruptly cut off. His sleepy cadences contrast with the urgency of her writing, making the collaboration feel like filler.
Disc Two, For Worse, is darker and more confrontational, drawing on various sounds and boasting songs that, at times, threaten to undermine the record’s cohesiveness. “FMT” (short for “Fuck My Type”) has Walker acknowledging that societal expectations would have her date a man who “will equal your fame,” yet she rejects that transactional logic: “I must be missing something; genuine love, and passionate touches, laughter/I hate this transactional stuff.” She flips between cynicism and sincerity—trading a “broken heart for a good life”—and invites listeners to consider how class, celebrity, and loneliness intersect. Sonically, she sings over a pop production with acoustic and string elements that pack a punch; however, Summer’s vocals are lacking. But not every track on the second disc digs that deep. “How Sway” is fun because of its hyper‑sexual banter (“Text me a quick selfie so I can sit on it”), yet the breathless delivery, plus the useless SAILORR feature, feels like a palette cleanser rather than a fully formed song.
“Baller” suffers from over‑stuffed guest verses and ruining Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s “The Closer I Get to You.” The NeNe Leakes intro (“Tonight’s event is proudly sponsored by big dicks, rich niggas and black cars”) is intentionally campy, but the central premise of needing a shot‑caller to fund her lifestyle (“Take me to the mall so I can spend a couple dollars”) feels shallow compared to the self‑affirmation elsewhere. While Summer Walker only provides the hook duties, GloRilla’s verse is the strongest (I know, I know she may not be the best in R&B songs, but she stood out compared to others). She boasts about having “a side nigga just like [her] side parts” and flips independence into a punchline. Monaleo (who was sadly underwhelming) and Sexyy Red (atrocious), however, lean into expected tropes about rich men buying guns and designer clothes, draining the hook of its satirical power. The track works as a club banger but sits awkwardly next to the introspection that surrounds it. Brent Faiyaz hops on “Number One” for a late ‘90s vibe that makes Summer sound like a feature on her own track, becoming another snoozer that keeps piling up the skip button.
What makes the second somewhat tolerable are the songs that dig into ambivalence rather than caricature. “Don’t Make Me Do It/Tempted” plays like an argument with herself; she repeats “I’ll do it if I have to” over a slow burn and asks why pleasure always comes with pain, while also interpolating 702 (and the second half weirdly sounds like the toot-toot-beep-beep song). The dual title hints at temptation as much as threat, and her layered harmonies evoke internal dialogue. “Get Yo Boy” is a playful but cutting reminder that loyalty has limits. She warns a partner that his friend is hitting on her and explains that the friend is studying his phone to find her location. Her admonition is a challenge to men who value bro culture over respecting their partner. 21 Savage responds with a verse that doubles down on misogyny, threatening to retaliate if she steps out. His presence shows the very double standard she’s mocking and is an example of a guest feature that inadvertently strengthens her argument by revealing the dynamic she seeks to outgrow.
The trilogy’s conclusion is drawn most poignantly in the last tracks. “Stitch Me Up” is a plea for healing disguised as a sex song. “We done fucked for like hundreds of times,” she admits, “I was scared to put my guard down and go slow,” then confesses she needs someone to “stitch me up, come pick me up when I’m down.” The request feels like someone squeezing their wounds closed. It’s less about a man rescuing her and more about learning to ask for help. “Allegedly” finds her wrestling with the idea of being “in love, allegedly” while recognizing that “forever young is just a quote on a T-shirt.” Teddy Swims’s gravelly tone blows her out of the water, solidifying the best feature title, and he renders commitment as something they’re still trying to believe in. When reaching the title track, there’s relief in her voice: “Oh, it’s over/All the mess, over/All the stress, over.” She accepts a proposal, singing, “Love is for better or worse, so I do,” and marvels that someone wants to take her and “all I carry.” Rather than closing on triumph, she leaves us with a vow that acknowledges her baggage and his willingness to shoulder it.
Taken as a whole, Finally Over It justifies its two‑disc concept by tracing a journey from self‑focus to candid confrontation. The first half’s cohesion comes from Walker’s narrative control, and unfortunately, one feature that complements her: Mariah the Scientist on “Robbed You” was nondistinct on every level, Chris Brown basically wash-rinse-repeat his features like he always does, and Anderson .Paak’s cameo turns a breakup hotline into a farce. The second half is murkier, deliberately so, mirroring the complicated path from anger to closure. A few guest verses fall back on clichés, the writing isn’t always strong, and not every beat switch is seamless (despite being her best-produced album), but the ambition never feels like an attempt to paper over thin material. Walker’s willingness to show contradictions, to celebrate desire and reject transactional romance, to savor friendship while indulging petty fantasies, and to invite male voices that expose their own immaturity.
Summer is no longer asking why men behave badly. She is outlining what she will and won’t tolerate and simultaneously examining why she stayed. After spending three albums untangling betrayal, Walker doesn’t arrive at a neat conclusion so much as a personal truce. She can commit without surrendering herself. She can crack jokes about exes and still cry when she sings about needing someone to “stitch me up.” For an artist whose earliest success was built on vulnerability, there is power in the way she now uses that vulnerability to enforce standards rather than beg for love. The “lover girl” trilogy ends not with closure but with agency, even if the material came back with mixed results.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “No,” “1‑800 Heartbreak,” “Don’t Make Me Do It/Tempted”