Album Review: When the City Sleeps by Alex Isley
On her highly anticipated major label debut LP, Alex Isley sings about love the way most people think about it: after midnight, with nowhere left to hide. One of the year’s best albums.
Alex Isley sees colors when she hears music. She has described changing keys mid-composition because the color a chord produced didn’t match what she needed the song to feel. Perfect pitch inherited from her father, Ernie Isley, synesthesia that wires sound directly to sight—that kind of ear explains a lot about When the City Sleeps, a record where every decision about key and tempo and vocal placement feels like it was measured against something only she can perceive. This follows up on one of our best EPs from last year, When, and, at nearly an hour in length as a major-label debut, not a single one fights for attention, as those previous songs blend nicely into a conceptual effort. They pass into each other the way streetlights do on a late drive, one warm glow after the next.
The songs about wanting somebody are the ones that hit hardest, because Isley is specific where most R&B records settle for mood. On “Ms. Goody Two Shoes,” Camper’s bouncing bass and stuttered drum programming give her room to be funny and filthy in the same breath. She tells whoever walked through the door to rearrange their schedule, then drops:
“Mama taught me be polite but also talk my shit.”
The pre-chorus switches to third person (“She is everything you imagine”) and the shift matters. Isley’s narrating herself from the outside now, watching the performance she’s giving someone and knowing exactly how good it is. “Hands” goes the opposite direction, all inward, all nerve endings. Over Camper’s bass-heavy, sparse production, she asks to be touched with nothing between skin and skin. “No silk, no satin, just touch me with your hands.” The second verse gets granular about palms, fingertips, curves, and the specific geography of where a caress might go. D’Mile’s “Alone” pushes the same impulse to its extreme. She’d move mountains or cancel her plans, she says, for a single moment with this person. The couplet breaks open—“Take me away/Whichever way/It’s not okay”—and the desperation there, three short clauses tumbling over each other, is the closest When the City Sleeps gets to losing its composure.
KAYTRANADA and TEK.LUN built “Mic On” to thump like something you’d hear from a passing car on Crenshaw, and Isley responds by turning the beat into a self-introduction she’s been waiting her whole career to give. She names her neighborhood (West Adams, Arlington Ave), spells out I-S-L-E-Y, and tells you to check the bloodline. “Pitch perfect, literally,” she says. “I was born with it.” The confidence is funny and true at the same time, and KAYTRANADA’s beat gives it the right amount of strut without tipping into swagger-rap territory. Oh Gosh Leotus, who produced four of the LP’s fifteen songs, operates at the opposite speed. “Moonlight On Vermont” floats, and the production barely exists, just enough bass to keep everything from drifting off completely while Isley sings about feet on the ground, floating next to someone, breathing in and out. The title track, also an Oh Gosh Leotus beat, adds James Fauntleroy, whose verse takes the same nighttime restlessness Isley has been singing about and turns it sideways. She can’t sleep, can’t face the moon. He can’t count on her, telling her he wants her all night, not just midnight. They’re both awake for different reasons and neither one will say that outright.
Los Angeles keeps showing up in ways that are too specific to be decoration. “Mic On” puts Isley on Arlington Ave in West Adams. “Westside” describes someone with a couple hundred dollars left to their name, every day looking the same, asking where they can lay their head safe, and this answers with “Nowhere but the Westside/Only thing left that can go right/One stop short of paradise.” Freaky Rob and ABRHM’s production on “Westside” sounds like it was recorded in a car with the windows cracked, and later gives directions that could be literal or not.
“The light is green now, take it as your sign.”
“PCH” sends Isley and Syd down Pacific Coast Highway, remembering promises they made when they were younger. Syd wonders if they’re allowed to reminisce after all these years, and Isley says she still feels the sand, still hears the waves, and the salt in the air never changes. “Where it all began, is this where it stays?” That question is about a person, but it could just as easily be about the city itself. Isley’s writing doesn’t separate the people she loves from the places where she loved them. But her most painful writing comes when she has already figured things out and can’t get her body to follow, and “Fool’s Gold” obviously fits the description. She opens with a question that already contains its own answer.
“What is there left to say about the weather when it’s cold?”
Isley’s holding dreams and ambitions in one hand and fool’s gold in the other, and she knows which one is which. “Starry Eyes” calls the whole situation a “pretty delusion” and admits she’d give the world to someone if it meant they’d see her, but she also knows letting it fade would be easy. It’s the memory keeping her up. “Thank You for a Lovely Time” is still the most devastating cut on the LP. Why does she keep wanting what doesn’t want her? She calls his affection “medicine’s inedible this time around,” and in the second verse, something inside her wants to let go while something else wants to stay loyal to a man who hasn’t promised her anything. She just wanted a damn hand to hold. “Sweetest Lullabye,” which D’Mile produced with a slow-rocking piano line, asks a departing lover to at least make the goodbye beautiful.
“If you really have to lie
Lay here with me beneath the light
Sing the song of you and I
Make it the sweetest lullabye.”
She knows it’s a lie. She’s requesting a better one.
Jeff Gitelman’s “Maybe Again” closes the album in a waltz that matches its off-balance emotional footing. Isley opens by admitting she doesn’t know how the story goes, that she caught a glimpse of something she wanted and it was maybe nothing she was supposed to have. The second verse asks the question the whole record keeps bumping against:
Isn’t it funny?
Ain’t it exhausting to show who I am again and again
And know it’ll cost me?
The bridge goes, “How can I just let this go?/My hopeful side doesn’t know how to just walk away,” and it is the most honest moment she offers. It doesn’t pretend to be brave, doesn’t try to spin the exhaustion into a lesson. She’s tired. She still hopes she’s wrong.
What makes When the City Sleeps a triumph is the distance between those songs and the ones where Isley is completely sure of herself. Depending on who you ask, fifteen songs is a lot for an R&B record, and the When tracks were already proven, but the nine new additions don’t dilute the set. The album cuts are as strong as anything on the EP, and some of them are stronger. The production choices are smart and varied without sounding like a sampler platter. Isley’s voice carries the kind of clarity that doesn't require volume. She never pushes, never strains, and the restraint itself tells you how much power she’s holding back. This is the work of someone who spent fourteen years in other people’s studios, learned everything she needed to learn, and finally had enough to say on her own.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “When the City Sleeps,” “Sweetest Lullabye,” “Maybe Again”