When I Get Home

With soothing production, enveloped with numbing vocals, she leaves you in a state of utopia. This surprise album of 2019 was something we didn’t know we needed.

Remarkable... a lovingly assembled production that rarely goes where you expect it to — but, like Solange herself, always puts across a clear sense of place.

“When I Get Home” is a challenging and satisfying follow-up to “A Seat at the Table,” one that will probably baffle some fans but intrigue and engage even more.

When I Get Home is universal because of Solange’s deep respect for her own home. The way she switches beats and flows constantly surprises, even on a tenth listen, unraveling new riches each time. Solange’s latest mystifies and stuns, leaving you awestruck as she cements her legacy as a true generational voice.

In a year where R&B and hip hop have proved the most innovative and original genres Solange has delivered a brilliantly crafted record that places her right at the top.

Knowles’s instincts guide the cultural conversation in a way that feels healing, intentional and authentically collectiveminded. A well-constructed spell, cast with intention. [May 2019, p.63]

They're rich articulations of home, longing and identity, the denuded production allowing a shivering vulnerability to pierce their core. [May 2019, p.32]

The music itself feels like a sort of cocoon enclosing the singer. It doesn't use reverb and distant samples in the way ambient music does, to suggest the world opening up around it. It leaves great amounts of space between the beats, as A Seat at the Table does, and then ties up the ends with searching synth chords (jazz band Standing on the Corner backs her for much of the album). The sense of engulfment is uncanny.

The 19 songs form a 39-minute-long cohesive whole which looses its meaning once shuffled or reorganised. What could come across as a mash-up of jam sessions slowly reveals its internal coherence.

Although the album is punctuated by spoken-word interludes--bits of poetry, self-help, comedy and tribute--it is designed to flow as a whole, gradually infusing a room like incense or the smells of home cooking. ... And Solange’s voice is sure-footed and playful, confident that the music will follow her every whim. ... Outside a few prominent guest raps, Solange and her musicians slip the collaborators into the background. This is her space, her sanctuary.

It's a reclamation of a history that often doesn't tells stories about black cowboys or black musical innovations. However, it is a recollection of what inspires Solange, and more importantly, how she wants to inspire the next generation from Houston.

The album rewards repetition, in listening and in execution.

All credit to Knowles, though, whose vision is so cohesive that the 19 short tracks feel like one long, utterly immersive piece. [Jun 2019, p.86]

A beautiful stream of consciousness, Home is the sound of an artist, donning a cloak of creative freedom. It’s a look that suits her.

While When I Get Home is a valiant effort and (thankfully) distinctive to mainstream music’s consistently homogenized landscape, it could’ve benefited from less freeform and a little more stability.

Some portions sound raw enough to have been generated on the spot, prioritizing feeling over "proper" songs. Certain tracks offer little more than riffing and moodscapes, yet all 19 are shaped into a concise flowing whole with subtle twists and turns.

When I Get Home, on the one hand, is a portrait of Solange, following the success of A Seat at the Table, leaning to the point of falling into all the most pretentious aspects of that record. On the other, When I Get Home is a complex and fascinating exercise in reconfiguring a whole history of black music for the post-modern age. ... Yes, When I Get Home is overbearing in the way it wants to announce itself as art, but the album also makes that easy to forgive.

When I Get Home is an album, yes. But ultimately, it’s a sleepy, uplifting antidote to the often painful reality that black people, particularly black Americans in Solange’s experience, have been increasingly facing in recent years. We’re in the midst of ever-escalating chaos. But here Solange has come, offering us a chance not just to rest, but to relish in that languidness.

Solange’s growth as an artist has been one of music’s most fascinating stories, and, like A Seat at the Table, When I Get Home serves as a thrilling reminder that this is just the beginning of the futures she still has yet to unpack. If she can make a party-friendly album so meaningful, we’ve barely even witnessed the tip of her vision.

Overall, When I Get Home is a triumph, and is the kind of album you put on to reach your calming, safe place, when you get home at the end of a long day.

In 1995 at the Source Awards, Andre 3000 made an iconic callout: “The South got something to say.” In under 40 minutes, Solange re-asserts the claim on a grander scale: the South has still got something to say.

Though the songs are broken up into two- and three-minute arrangements, they seamlessly blend with the interludes to create a continuous mood piece designed to be absorbed in one 38-minute listen. In contrast to the more traditional song structures and insinuating melodies on “A Seat at the Table,” the new album lacks a signature tune. Only the reggae-flavored playfulness of “Binz” cuts through the haze on the first few listens, though shimmering moments of beauty flutter to the surface throughout.

There are “interludes” and “intermissions” aplenty; the blissed-out Beltway has shades of The Girl from Ipanema in its melody, and Binz is as catchy as a playground clapping game--but both are over before you know it. Exit Scott (referring to another street in Houston) uses a gospel sample that could--and would, in the past--have been stretched out to make a hit single, but here it is, just one minute and one second long.