“I love the silliness and the joy that comes with the P-Funk universe,” multi-instrumentalist Emma-Jean Thackray recently told The Guardian. “It’s not like free jazz; it’s Black liberation music for the masses.” On her second full-length, Weirdo, Thackray’s music—bouncy jazz-funk dusted with spiritual overtones and rubbed down by velveteen ’70s soul—does for grief and loneliness what the Mothership did for Black identity. It uses humor and a shuffling beat to get at something deeply serious, to shape it, to say the unsayable. Its 20 tracks wiggle by in a constantly evolving groove that dares you to stay reverent; you might laugh out loud a few times. Though you will have ample opportunities to try, you will not have more fun empathizing with someone’s suffering this year than you will listening to Weirdo.
Thackray initially intended for the follow-up to 2021’s acclaimed Yellow to be a musical exploration of her neurodivergence—a risky proposition for even the most self-aware musician, although for Thackray, a record about her ADHD and autism could well play to her considerable strengths: She writes rhythms that ripple and eddy, and melodies that ping like super balls in a small room. Shortly after she began work, however, her longtime partner unexpectedly passed away, throwing her deep into grief. Weirdo became her way of pulling herself back out. She recorded the album alone in her South London flat, and, save for cameos from Reggie Watts and rapper Kassa Overall, she’s responsible for every sound on the record: vocal harmonies that spread like a fan unfolding, exhaling Rhodes piano, programmed and live drums, flugelhorns, enough synthesizers to make 1974 Herbie Hancock jealous. Her name is listed 123 times in the album’s credits.
Printing that surplus of Emma-Jean Thackrays in Weirdo’s liner notes is meant to be a bit, as is the toaster perched on the edge of the tub on the album’s cover. Both are funny, kind of—but, like the dark comedy of the album’s lyrics, the cheekiness is a mask Thackray wants you to notice. “I don’t wanna go on,” she sings in the opening moments of “What is the Point,” a brutal line whose brutality you nearly forget when the squishy synths and curving groove kick in; her vamp on the phrase “what is the point,” later in the song, is clever, but also tragic, but also vocally impressive, but also inspirational: Her runs are so remarkable, you can hear the music bringing her to a place her words can’t.
