Atlantic Records/Mason Rose
As “hot girl walks” implausibly keep trending on TikTok for yet another summer season, here comes Janelle Monáe to burn it all down. “Hot girl walks,” you see, involve going outside for a moderately paced stroll, often while wearing a monochrome athleisure set, holding an iced latte, and extending your arm overhead to film yourself smiling at the sun at a flattering angle (while, I guess, reflecting on your goals and what you’re grateful for?). Monáe’s version of the hot girl walk wipes away that boring, viral “clean girl” aesthetic and makes the case for getting sexy, sticky, and sweaty this summer, and not to walk, but to float.
So says Monáe on her fourth album, The Age of Pleasure, a hot, horny 14-track joyride that arrived on Friday. It’s the singer/actor/supernova at her freest and most accessible, as she’s powered down the cyborg persona she embodied on her 2010 debut The ArchAndroid and 2013’s The Electric Lady—two heady, high-concept albums replete with ambitious world-building that had listeners doing their homework to connect the dots. The Age of Pleasure demands no such scrutiny; Monáe proved a long time ago that there’s a stroke of genius to her art, and here she just wants to have some fun.
Indeed, the first words we hear out of her mouth on opening track “Float”—as she nimbly raps over horns from Afrobeat legends Seun Kuti and Egypt 80—are, “No, I’m not the same / I think I done changed.” The first few songs are brazen, confident flexes: She doesn’t walk, she floats; she’s haute, not hot; she looks “better than David Bowie in Moonage Daydream.” “Phenomenal”—which wouldn’t sound out of place on Beyoncé’s Renaissance; it sounds like a cousin of “Alien Superstar”—begins with Monáe proclaiming over an afro-funk beat: “I’m looking at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.”