Song You Need: Abra’s not-a-comeback comeback “FKA MESS”

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist.

It’s underrated how much Abra‘s presence when she first emerged in Atlanta in 2015 — one of the key figures in the ascendence of Awful Records — helped the city maintain its momentum as a singular font of creative energy in North America. Her early lo-fi club R&B sound, desolate and hazy with an Aaliyah-indebted control of melody, had the anything-goes genre collision mentality of ILoveMakonnen while charting its own path. In a tale as old as time, major labels soon took interest and her career stalled; despite two excellent 2021 singles that saw her reemerge with a sleek new electro-focused sound and production assists from Boys Noize, Abra’s return felt tentative.

It’s important to note that each new Abra song confirms that she’s not willing to get drowned out in the overstuffed streaming landscape that’s grown since she debuted. “FKA MESS,” Abra’s new single, channels the casual and meandering quality of her early work without entirely sacrificing her newfound desire to step out of the fog and into the light. Going back behind the boards as producer, Abra crafts a six-minute experimental pop excursion: layers of mall-ready drums pop and shimmy while a Cure-reminiscent electric guitar strums out a doleful lead melody. Abra takes a more spectral presence here, drifting around the music like steam on the dancefloor and wrapping herself in the glory of ecstatic moods rather than pushing anything immediately concrete. As impressive in its reimagination of retro tropes as some of Dev Hynes’s work as Blood Orange, “FKA Mess” indicates that perhaps what Abra needed wasn’t so much a return as a reawakening.