(Warner Records)
The singer spans early 00s hip-hop, ambient tunes and pop bangers in her impressive major-label debut
The question of where 27-year-old Raveena Aurora fits in the current pop climate is an interesting one. Her independently released 2019 album Lucid was critically acclaimed, but her major-label debut inches her towards the mainstream, at least in theory – it’s both dazzling and impressively eclectic.
Among the guests lurk not just Vince Staples – on the fantastic, Neptunes-esque Secret – and avant-garde LA singer-songwriter-producer Tweaks, but Asha Puthli. The Bombay-born singer’s extraordinary career takes in everything from collaborating with Ornette Coleman to ethno-fusion, to a brace of revered, idiosyncratic, oft-sampled disco records. Here, Asha’s Kiss feels like Raveena’s loving homage to the dreamy, drowsy atmosphere of Puthli’s mid-70s classics Space Talk and Flying Fish, a mood that predominates in the album’s second half.