Empress Of’s For Your Consideration is a celebration of Lorely Rodriguez’s voice as both an artist and vocalist. Where a similar artist might use synth pads as musical accompaniment, Rodriguez inserts the hum of her own voice. On the title track of her fourth studio album, the Honduran-American singer rearranges her breathing into a shuffling rhythm, while “Femenine” samples her vocals to serve various functions, including as percussion.
For Your Consideration can’t be classified as hyperpop per se, but the album’s sonic manipulations and their queer implications owe something to the subgenre. “Femenine”—the title of which subverts the Spanish language’s binary gender system, ending with an ambiguous “e” instead of a masculine “o” or feminine “a”—is about a woman’s desire to dominate a man. The song’s angular melody is pitched down, often mid-syllable, to emulate a masculine voice before Rodriguez responds in her natural tone.
Mixing R&B and electronica isn’t uncommon in pop music today, but For Your Consideration boasts an unusual combination of production polish and musical eccentricity, harking back to Björk’s early solo albums and Timbaland’s work with Aaliyah. The acoustic guitar-driven “Baby Boy” feels both airy and earthy, its quick 4/4 beat emulating the sound of a baby’s heart in utero.
The album’s title suggests Rodriguez’s hesitation about the self-marketing that celebrities are tasked with mastering, but she isn’t shy about putting her emotions at the forefront of these otherwise sonically ultra-processed tracks. Closer “What’s Love” frankly lays out the vulnerabilities of a relationship: “If love can’t make you, break you, shake you, then what’s love?” If past Of Empress songs like “When I’m with Him,” from 2018’s Us, presented Rodrigeuz as unhappy and alienated, like a character out of a Sally Rooney or Otessa Moshfegh novel, For Your Consideration is the sound of an artist living in the moment.
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