By day, Erika de Casier deals out soft-spoken come-ons and kiss-offs via throwback R&B. By night, she’s an incognito hitmaker. Last year de Casier lent a steely edge to Floridian producer Nick Léon’s heady summer club cut “Bikini,” and in 2023 she got in the studio with K-pop group NewJeans, co-writing several songs from their Get Up EP—among them the winningly naive “Super Shy.” The Danish singer has quietly left her fingerprints all over pop’s ongoing Y2K revival, but sometimes at the cost of Erika de Casier the solo recording artist. While her last album, 2024’s Still, could often stun and delight—the laugh and twinkling chimes that kick off “Lucky” never fail to make me grin—a spate of unnecessary guest features diluted its creator’s singular talents. Entirely self-written, self-produced, and released on her own label, Independent Jeep Music, Lifetime is a deliberate recentering, de Casier’s attempt to single-handedly distill the better part of a decade into one highly potent vibe.
Forgoing her trademark nostalgia for the ’00s, de Casier has committed herself to pre-Napsterdom in spirit and sound, triangulating three high-concept pop lodestars all released between 1992 and 1998: Janet Jackson’s Janet., Madonna’s Ray of Light, and, at the apex of her altar, Sade’s Love Deluxe. Every song here fades in—how retro is that—on a bed of aqueous synthesizers, buoyed by boom-bap drums. “If you know, what I’d do, do to you,” de Casier coos on album opener “Miss,” her voice enveloped in so much reverb that it dissolves at the edges. One working title for Lifetime was Midnight Caller, an easy shorthand for seduction, mystery, and menace rolled into one. Several tracks (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “The Chase,” “Two Thieves”) even incorporate what are either diegetic dial tones—a noted Janet-ism—or soundwaves shaped to convincingly mimic one.
As “Miss” yields to the hothouse piano and tabla of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Lifetime takes a turn towards Pure Moods, and with that some period-accurate new-age triteness: “Health or disease—you never know what you get/Might as well live gratefully.” But de Casier delivers these songs archly and suggestively—a glimmer in her eye, liquor on her breath—and the lyric sheet is appropriately marked up with each stray “uh,” “uhmm,” “ah,” and “mmh-mhh.” On “Moan,” a spiritual successor to Jackson’s “Throb,” her hypnotic entreaty to “just make love” warps the whole track around it, as represented by an impassioned keysmash: “%!//&”//“/!!/!(()!=“##=”. The syncopated hook of “Delusional,” built around a sample immortalized by Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain,” is irresistibly ear-catching, as is the way de Casier’s tongue catches on “slow mo-tion,” right before “You Got It!” kicks up a spray of seafoam. And once in a while, de Casier will hit on something profound: “The truth was in the bottom of the wine/Bordeaux can make you talk a lot,” she notes, soberly, on the trip-hop standout “December.”
