There was a marked tonal downshift between Nia Archives’s kinetic 2022 EP Forbidden Feelingz and its comparatively ruminative follow-up, Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall. The British singer and jungle producer’s first full-length release, Silence Is Loud, balances these varied tempos, though it’s still rhythmically driving throughout. Where Sunrise’s modified pacing and gentler tone opened up space for the music to turn inward, the new album mostly pushes forward in a way that jettisons its capacity for introspection.
The result is that Archives’s reflections sometimes want for passion. On “Nightmares,” she details her exasperation with a former lover as though she’s reading lines rather than bearing it all. And when Archives recounts her partner’s adequacies or shares her personal struggles, the observations are genuine but often make for inelegant scaffolding. “Blind Devotion,” for one, ends abruptly before the two-minute mark, while “Crowded Roomz” never locates a salient or memorable hook.
While catchy melodies and canny writing touches frequently elude Archives on Silence Is Loud, there are a few bright spots throughout. On “Cards on the Table,” the line “My eyes are brown with a hint of hazel” is deployed in a way that’s vivid and disarming. Elsewhere, Archives movingly sings about the absence of a lover on “Silence Is Loud (Reprise),” which slows down enough for the emotions to register, and “Out of Options” finds her effectively communicating that she’s at the end of her rope in a relationship by repeating the same three lines over and over.
At their best, Archives’s brassy pipes are reminiscent of Amy Winehouse’s, and she simultaneously comes off as ethereal and powerful on “Killjoy.” Throughout the album, Archives discusses being stuck in her head and illustrates the conflicts between her environments and her mental state at a given moment. Likewise, it often sounds like she’s both narrating a scene and retreating back into herself on tracks like “Tell Me What It’s Like.”
Silence Is Loud tells a fairly coherent story, of a person trying to salvage a relationship but weighing skepticism about how worthy it is of being saved. Archives, though, is ultimately unable to wring enough pathos from the narrative she presents. She’s a skilled designer of breathless jungle soundscapes, stocked with immersive details like aquatic synths, endless breakbeats, and jagged basslines, but she hasn’t fully mastered the autobiographical soul-pop mode.
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