Album Review: Waves by Moonchild
Moonchild’s sixth album swaps love songs for boundary lines and grief that won’t tidy itself up. The writing earns harder questions than Starfruit ever asked.
Almost four years separate Waves from Starfruit, the Grammy-nominated fifth record that brought Moonchild’s first round of guest features and gave the trio wider footing without altering the music’s center of gravity. Starfruit was recorded remotely during lockdown, populated by collaborators like Lalah Hathaway, Rapsody, Alex Isley, and Tank and the Bangas who slotted into the band’s pocket without disrupting it. Amber Navran has said the new project grew from a difficult stretch of personal reckoning, and the love songs that filled every prior Moonchild release have mostly vanished. In their place are songs about cutting people off, surviving hurt without pretending it ends, and telling yourself the truth when you’d rather not. Waves continues the collaborative instinct, but the subject matter tilts sharply.
“Not Sorry” opens by listing everything Navran refuses to be. She’s not a fixer, not a mother, not a source of someone else’s happiness. The chorus is a series of negations, each one sharpening because the first stanza already catalogued the exact behavior that prompted it, which includes the rewriting, the poor math, and the demand to stay small. Rapsody enters second and does something unexpected. She raps the entire section from the perspective of the person being refused, cycling through disbelief, entitlement, and petty grievance. “She got boundaries, I can’t get around,” Rapsody sneers, with parenthetical interjections heckling her own character, then she flips to her own voice: “Your disconnection my redirection, I self-corrected/Spent too much time acceptin’ less than my weight in metal.” Jill Scott’s contribution takes the form of a faux hotline operator directing callers to their momma and advising anyone seeking an apology to hang up.
Most self-care records dodge the admission that comes early on “Ride the Wave.” Navran starts off the first verse: “It hurts and it’s gonna keep hurtin’/Off and on, dull and strong, for the rest of my life.” Astyn Turr echoes that concession, admitting she cried, and will continue to keep crying. “When You Know” shifts terrain, providing the actual leaving scene. Navran identifies the control problem in one flat sentence (“He’s not happy unless I’m in his control”), and what follows pivots to a toast (“Cheers to playing along, she’s letting him be wrong”). “Strong” goes somewhere darker. Addressed to a parent or older figure who couldn’t name their sorrow, the hook asks for someone to cry and hide with her. The track wants shared sadness, not reassurance. With Erin Bentlage as their frequent collaborator, Navran sings about tiptoeing around years of unspoken pain, carrying it in her chest and out the front door.
The accusation turns inward on the neo-soul-inspired “Sick.”
“I’m sick of the lies I tell myself
I’ve been lying for so long, I don’t even know the difference.”
The back end cuts off the usual escape routes, which is a useful correction, and this section pushes it further, thanks to additional production from Chris Dave and Robert Glasper.
“Stay soft, stay loud, stay emotional
Stay big, go in, make them uncomfortable
Everything that you are is gonna go
Don’t you let yourself be the last to know.”
One of the album’s singles, “For Yourself,” picks up a separate thread, speaking to someone stuck in a lopsided relationship. “He can’t love you like you love him” isn’t advice dressed in metaphor. Navran lays out the verse with, “He can’t give you what he don’t have/He’ll take it all and call it his half/Hold on, that sounds like boy math (Fuck that).” Oh my. Lalah Hathaway’s portion reinforces the same directive without softening it.
“Dust off your cape and get your mind right
It’s time to fight, girl, fight for you
Don’t you let nobody take you back there.”
D Smoke’s contribution to “Up from Here” departs from the rest of the tracklist. Where Navran stays internal and relational, Smoke furnishes concrete survival details. Tears hitting cement, knees buckling, a tour van window getting smashed in Oakland and fixed the next day. “I wish I was bulletproof, wear a breast plate,” he raps, before circling to a pragmatic conclusion. Use pain to fuel, use anger to begin the process, accept what can’t be changed. The refrain’s insistence that “nothing can touch me” sits in tension with a set of bars that just catalogued everything that did. On “Nothing to Prove,” Rae Khalil and Brittney Carter each bring a passage grounded in particular kinds of struggle. Khalil tilts combative (“Invincible how I duck and dive them homicide attempts/It’s simple, this MC, you can’t touch”), as Carter goes somewhere more honest.
“For a minute, I was lacking passion, I was stagnant
Now I know that comparison is like a great assassin
Killing everything in reach, killed my faith and killed my peace.”
The encouragement she offers isn’t vague: “Hope you know you need it, hope you know you special, know you pure/Hope you know that you can lean on me if ever you ain’t sure.”
Another logic drives “Counting.” Navran tallies by sevens (”Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight”) as a way to keep someone off her mind, and the numbers themselves become a coping ritual. Gretchen Parlato’s section digs deeper.
“I’m holding on to memories
‘Cause I can’t hold on to you
Should be moving on, but I’m wrapped up without arms around you.”
Neither remembering nor releasing wins. Elsewhere, “Fear (Hey Friend)” with PJ Morton reframes anxiety as a traveling companion worth knowing rather than fleeing. “Advice” draws a simpler line by stop offering of input nobody requested. “Afterglow” closes on a gentler bereavement—someone gone but still felt everywhere, the Luigi to someone’s Mario, a presence in clouds and window reflections.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Not Sorry,” “Strong,” “Sick”