No amount of emotional clarity can substitute for the barbed specificity and desperate rhythmic phrasing of Walker’s strongest writing, largely abandoned on Finally Over It in the name of self-restraint. Instead, she disappears, along with guests Anderson .Paak and Bryson Tiller, into a tedious stretch that brings to mind a certain subgenre of YouTube tutorial: How to Make a ’90s Slow Jam Type Beat in FL Studio. What Walker has not surrendered in the pursuit of growth is the near-pathological obsession, shared with her contemporaries across genres, with overtly referencing R&B hits of previous decades. “Baby” first samples and later interpolates Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby,” sullying the promise of an everlasting duet with a dispassionate performance from Chris Brown, who continues to patronize major-label releases with the enforced ubiquity of a mafia racket. “No,” a midtempo, boundary-setting anthem, begins with a sample of Beyoncé’s 2003 song “Yes” and then firmly rejects the gendered domesticity famously pledged on Destiny’s Child’s “Cater 2 U.”
Walker is at her most effective as a songwriter and memorable as a performer when she makes room for the pistol-toting, drunk-dialling heroine of Over It and Still Over It, the very character she seems to be forsaking on this album. Still, the journey isn’t without lessons learned. By disc two, it’s clear, for instance, that she fares better when her costars are women. “Robbed You,” a set-up fantasy featuring Atlanta compatriot Mariah the Scientist, is more esprit d’escalier regret than warning: “I should have robbed you/I should have popped you,” Walker sings, crafting a hook from imperfect anaphora. On “Go Girl,” she proffers a clipped self-appraisal that lands more like statement of fact than affirmation, finding natural rhythm with Latto’s boastful drawl; true beauty seeks to convince no one. Both handily outrap Doja Cat, who trails with the overworked affect of someone shooting for latter day-Eminem but landing closer to Qveen Herby. On the Kanye-referencing “How Sway” with Sailorr, Walker is at her funniest and most compelling: “You ask me if I’m flexible, I’ll do a split/I wanna get your name engraved in pink glitter right on my blick.” When Walker represses that streak, she inevitably shrinks. “Allegedly,” featuring Teddy Swims, is, at best, a bore—a belter whose just-familiar-enough genre fusion and generic flyover-country allusions suggest it may find favor with whomever chooses songs for contestants on The Voice.
In the months preceding the release of Finally Over It, Walker repeatedly selected flashes of aqua that inevitably hinted at Tiffany Blue and the luxury bridal associations of Tiffany & Co. She launched a promotional website whose landing page resembles a wedding invitation. Most recently, she turned up to The Jennifer Hudson Show in a wedding dress, turning the show’s familiar “tunnel walk” into a bridal march. If that weren’t literal enough, the album’s cover—photographed by Richie Talboy—doubles down on Walker’s matrimonial third act: The image is a reference to Anna Nicole Smith’s 1994 wedding picture, in which a stone-faced Smith clutches a bouquet of flowers in one hand and the sallow hand of octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall in the other. What is less clear is whether Walker intends the cover as a celebration of the transactional nature of love or a critique of its parallels in her chosen industry or a rejection of both. One hopes, as Walker lingers at the altar and at an apparent crossroads of her own, that she has considered what awaited history’s most recognizable and maligned sugar baby after she crossed the threshold.
