Milestones: Temporary Highs In the Violet Skies by Snoh Aalegra
The album where Snoh Aalegra sings about wanting everything from love but settles for singing about wanting.
Prince discovered Snoh Aalegra. In 2014, he came upon a singer-songwriter of Swedish-Iranian heritage who did not yet have any following in America and had only released one EP. Prince started mentoring her for two years. However, he died in 2016, and the doors to her musical future closed with him. But she did not let that stop her.
Shahrzad Fooladi was her original name. Born and raised in Uppsala, she was the daughter of parents who emigrated from southern Iran before she was born. Enköping was the town she grew up in, and it was small enough for her to be the only immigrant child in her school class for two years in a row. Her parents got divorced; she moved to Stockholm with her mom, and at the age of 13, she signed an artist development contract with Sony Music Sweden. Her mother contacted every label listed in the yellow pages and got somebody to listen to her demo. However, nothing resulted from that, and Sony ended their collaboration without any release. She continued creating music under the name of Sheri for years, mourning the death of her father in 2009 and realizing that Sweden is too small for her dreams. “No idea is too crazy or big in the States. People don’t dream so big in Sweden.”
Los Angeles, 2012. Through the help of her family, she got to No I.D. She requested him directly to collaborate. He listened to her demos and changed his mind. By 2017, she released her debut album titled FEELS, produced by No I.D., featuring Vince Staples and Logic and having her song “Time” sampled by Drake in his album More Life. 2019 brought her Ugh, Those Feels Again, with “I Want You Around” reaching No. 1 on Adult R&B Airplay chart for two consecutive weeks and “Whoa,” featuring Pharrell reaching No. 2. Roc Nation signed her to their company and Tyler, The Creator called her an inspiration to himself. By any reasonable criteria preceding breaking out into a hitmaker, she broke out.
Temporary Highs In the Violet Skies tells you what the album is about, and it is rather simple. She is indecisive, wants somebody and knows that she should leave. The production of “Indecisive” changes in the middle of the track, the tempo getting slower, while Snoh’s voice changes from worried to monotonous. This structural change reflects the lyric change. It is not an epic build-up to a revelation; she is stuck. This state permeates throughout fourteen other tracks as the artist tries to examine every side of being indecisive without coming up with any solutions. It is a lot of circling; whether it is empathy or monotony depends on your personal experience with this.
The Neptunes open “In Your Eyes” with their classic four-count beat, and for about three seconds you are expecting a Neptunes event. But you do not get it. This track’s tempo is rather medium. Pharrell does not show himself prominently, using ad-libs as the second voice only. Snoh sings “Some things don’t work and that’s the way love goes,” and the line gives you the impression that she has already broken up with her partner by the second verse. To hire The Neptunes and to ask them to stay in the background says a lot about what she was looking for during these sessions. She did not aim at creating hits; she aimed at making mood, and she trusted her production team to give her this.
Tyler, The Creator turns everything upside down. He produces “Neon Peach” and appears on it, blaming her, apologizing, contradicting himself, arguing in his verses in the way people argue when they know that they are losing. Snoh responds to him in kind. They exchange accusations about who is to blame for their break-up, and none of them is right. This track is funkier, louder and livelier than anything else on the album. She calls him “the funniest person I’ve ever met” and says that “working with him never felt like work”. You can tell that. “In the Moment,” their other collaboration, is the aftermath of the previous track, more gentle and already resigned. Together these two tracks are the best version of Snoh Aalegra that exists on this album. She does not need to whisper everything anymore.
On the title track interlude “Temporary Highs,” which is shorter than a minute, the mood sounds like somebody is talking to themselves in a dark room. On “Neon Peach,” the contrast between her calm and Tyler’s chaotic makes the track hot. But most of the album lies somewhere in between as the production and vocals work at medium speed and everything falls into the rhythm that does not catch fire and does not burn out. It just hums on, as non-committal and indecisive as she is.
This album becomes more interesting the second she stops being polite. On “Just Like That,” she is direct in expressing her desire for somebody’s company in physical terms. “Picture perfect like a painting” is the maximum of code language she uses, which means not at all. “We Don’t Have to Talk About It” goes in the opposite direction, refusing to analyze a relationship that is dead even before it started.
“You say we in it for the long haul
I didn’t even get to U-Haul”
This line is both funny and sad and very specific. She becomes more sharp each time she stops beating around the bush. When she retreats into the mood, everything blurs.
Not every track on the album tries to become a complete piece, and some of them benefit from the brevity. The two tracks called “Temporary Highs” and “Violet Skies” lie in the heart of the album, one being a fragment, another one a complete piece and together naming the whole project. The violet skies are the in-between color. Not day, not night. “Taste” runs two minutes, being a short examination of temporary desires and knowledge of them. “Save Yourself” ends in less than two minutes. Shorter tracks tell their piece of the story and leave before proving anything, and this honestly saying of something without any fuss fits the album’s concept much better than those which circle the same feelings for four minutes and come up with nothing new.
She stops circling on “Everything.” She wants all of this person, not parts, not the comfortable moments. The desire is complete and naked. “Dying 4 Your Love” follows, being desperate in a more uncontrolled manner. As the title says, she is not asking to be loved; she says that the desire is killing her. Back to back, these two tracks are the moment when the indecision falls off and leaves space for something more raw. If every song contained such a high amount of stakes, the conversation about it would look different.
Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album at the 64th ceremony positioned her among the contenders next to Jazmine Sullivan’s Heaux Tales and Silk Sonic’s An Evening with Silk Sonic. She did not win, which was expected. But this nomination proves that her lane got institutional approval: the contemplative R&B with expensive production without any pop crossover can get nominated, even though the sales figures are low. The girl, who grew up in Enköping watching videos of Whitney Houston, decided to dedicate her life to this type of music. “I am forever a student,” she told Vogue Scandinavia, and the phrase is a good revelation. She learned the forms of American R&B so perfectly that she can reproduce them flawlessly. In several years, it becomes hard to understand how much of the production is hers and how much belongs to the forms.
On “Save Yourself,” she tells her lover—or herself—to go. Under two minutes, no resolution, no big gestures. Just the repetition of the word save and a voice sounding tired of going in circles. She sang about temporary highs for forty-six minutes, and her final move is admitting that she did not find a permanent one. She just says stop.
Great (★★★★☆)