Honey

Honey is an energetic and youthful love letter to Katy B’s clubbing roots.

Katy B is a master of capturing that oceanic feeling when individuality melts away, and every soul rises and falls together on the wave of the beat.

Honey lacks the coherence of her previous albums, but as a love letter to the rave it's eloquent and sincere.

It’s an exemplar of her adaptability, and in a music realm stacked with mind-numbing, homogeneous house numbers, Katy B still occupies a lane of her own.

Where Little Red saw Katy throwing herself into the occasional ballad, Honey is reduced to a pure set of dance music; within these aesthetic limits, though, it may be her most varied record stylistically.

Katy B has a way to go in separating herself from the influx of R&B singers who dabble in dub, but she’s beginning to pave a path worth following.

It’s the spirit of community that defines Honey, a doting mixtape that cherishes the one thing that matters most to Katy B: club culture. From making it past the door to after-hours rejections, Brien’s narrative thrives musically upon teamwork.

Honey suffers when its producers smooth out their rougher edges to accommodate Katy’s chart-star status.

The narrative she introduced with her first single Katy on a Mission--the story of a prospective dancefloor tryst--still dominates, and it’s a subject that barely contains the emotional mileage to sustain a single song, let alone a whole body of work. Her vocal melodies, meanwhile, can feel almost abrasive in their mediocrity. Instead, it’s left to the production to provide the wit, amusement and emotion.

Honey's intentions are noble but the results are mixed. [Jun 2016, p.69]

A cast list as long as Honey’s inevitably produces a patchwork. Some tunes are so uneventful you wonder why they bothered.

This is an album you need to be enveloped by--the louder it is, the better it sounds. [Jun 2016, p.115]

This is not the most cohesive body of work, granted, but oh man does it have some total bangers.

Honey nonetheless comes across as an attention-grabbing experiment more than it does a third proper full-length.

If it were not for Katy's distinctive voice--which she gloriously wields with an Aguilera-like ferocity during the last forty seconds or so of each track--Honey would not survive its own sweetness. At certain moments, however, the energies between Katy and the producers mesh just right, resulting in alchemic varieties of urban pop that glow brighter after each listen.

Honey, when it works at least, is the sound of piecing together the night before: a love letter to not making it home, to the Tequila salt still stuck to your hand, to hands brushing under the cover of the smoke machine. Unfortunately, half of the time, it says precisely nothing and if that unquestionable potential is to be realised, Kathleen Brien has to make a choice.

With nearly 20 production collaborators, the record has plenty of invention--and way too many cooks in the kitchen. ... [A] busy, unfocused record.