Lorely Rodriguez deserves her flowers already. The Honduran-American avant-pop auteur, better known as Empress Of, has spent a decade studying romantic grooves – coding hook-up synths, jazzy off-beats, and heartache-tinged insomnia into harmonically sedative intervals of vocal soul. Whereas 2015’s ‘Me’ was a requiem for doomed romances, ‘For Your Consideration’, her first full effort since leaving XL Recordings, is a bolder exploration of pop’s electronic soundscapes that shuffles turntablism and low-key escapism into chromatic highs that linger on the lips for weeks.
On ‘For Your Consideration’, Rodriguez’s metaphors are diffused for a hit of physical decadence. She sings about stealing kisses, submission and bad decisions, being easy to eat, easy to love, and curing melancholia with touch – musing on the transactional nature of sex and intimacy, and how situationships can be a complicated mess from the start. “I was in love with a [film] director and he was announcing his For Your Consideration campaign for the Oscars,” Rodriguez spills in a press release for the LP. “He took me up on a hill and said he was emotionally unavailable and he kind of broke my heart”. The title track’s vulnerability is deliberate and Empress Of gets straight to it: “You wrote the script / Your words, not mine” she weighs amidst a wave of synths and space-shifting alt pop delirium. “Lights, camera, action, close up / The moment’s on you”.
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From there, the record cuts romantic dissatisfaction with Sade levels of confidence. ‘Feminine‘ is a Club Space romp that reverses roles to be dominant in the key of Sofia Kourtesis’ ‘Madres’. ‘Preciosa’ slips into ‘Talk That Talk’ energy, reciting “entra, entra, entra a mi mar” over a dimly-lit trap riddim, with “Fácil” and “Sucia” flashing bilingual coos, rave ambitions, Neptunes overdubs, and a desire to be touched (“and that’s it”). ‘Kiss Me’ and ‘Baby Boy’ lean into pop’s weak spot for rough sex, piano chords, and ‘My Everything’ while ‘What Type Of Girl Am I’ refuses to pick sides, disclosing a ‘fuck on the first night’ aura that recalls ‘Cenizas’ and ‘Foxbase Alpha’. ‘Cura’ is an infectious, post-club high, epitomizing the friction that’s between sexuality and separation: “I came to forget you, but I love you more than before,” Rodriguez sings in Spanish – letting her voice swoon, multiply, and sweat out a LuckyMe house beat because ‘el ritmo a mi me cura’.
Similar to 2022’s Save Me, ‘For Your Consideration’ rewrites post-breakup dance pop with clarity. ‘Lorelei’, a song written in Montreal in the heart of winter, is very much an Empress Of number – a glitchy mood piece that nods heavily to Stereo, Club Pelicano, and Machine Dreams’ influence on trip-hop. “I wanna be sweet, but there’s too many scars,” Rodriguez sighs, before her voice endlessly loops into a dreamy wash of adlibs, desyncs, and inflections that recites an affair from the girlfriend’s perspective. It’s evocative and like much of Empress Of’s entire discography, it’s a reconfiguration of laptop material and pop expectations. It subverts heartbreak, makes it sexy, and silhouettes a continuous desire to distort dancefloor traditions with experimental come-ons. If her latest is any proof, Rodriguez is finally comfortable with herself – not just as a writer who excels at leaving melodies on your tongue, but as a lover, a dancer, and her own shooting star.
9/10
Words: Joshua Khan
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