Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)

Conceived and first composed on her laptop at home, with some vocals recorded in her bathroom, Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two is lo-fi and highly sophisticated-exquisitely analog and experimentally techy. It begins with a radio signal tuning in, and it asks its listener to participate in their own process of attunement, to listen to familiar sounds anew, and open ourselves to an alternate Amerykah. An organism at once cohesive and discordant, it flows, jams, grooves, bounces. It transforms. Kameryn Alexa Carter explores how the album reaches toward the past and dreams up new futures, in the process suggesting that the veil between the two temporalities is nearly translucent. New Amerykah Part Two occupies a hybrid space: haunted by sonic ghosts of the dead and the living through its samples, interpolations, and lyrical references. It moves through the permeable boundaries between genres. The album and Badu herself are cyborgs-soldering human-made technolog-from the prominent synth, to her titanium suit on the album's cover and the nature-made human-from the children clapping in delight at the end of “20 ft Tall” to the relatable anguish of being a recovering undercover overlover.