I've been following City Girl since 2017's Loveless Shadow EP. This was a little while before I had any idea of what they were attempting to accomplish or the music that inspired them. All I knew back then was that City Girl made simple but elegantly layered synth-pop set to easy on the ears breakbeats and I loved it. What I eventually grew to understand, was that City Girl's sound harkened back, somewhat indirectly, to the balanced and progressive R'nB popular in Japan during the '80s. A style that would eventually acquire the designation city pop. City Girl's ineffable cool seemed to presage both the emergence of Youtube channels dedicated to lo-fi beats to "relax/study to" as well as the present fascination with clean, futuristic R'nB and funk. Two things that I will forever be in awe of them for.
While City Girl hasn't changed their style since that first EP, they have allowed themselves to make complex rhythmic pieces and songs that are more welcoming to collaboration. Case in point, mearly every track on City Girls most recent LP C-Girl has a guest on it. From opener, "PACK IT UP BOY," where vocalist tiffi delivers an elastic performance, chiding lustful paramours for their unrequited affection and the joys of mercing dudes in video games, to later cuts like the plastic sunset rinse of "LET GO," which sounds like it could have been pulled from the Light in the Attic Pacific Breeze comp, if it weren't for the presence of vocalist ry carving through each incoming neon tinted measure like a dolphin breaching through a cresting wave.
C-Girl definitely feels like City Girl making an entry into the world of mainstream R'nB at times, but I think that this is mostly a consequence of mainstream R'nB finally tuning into the frequency the producer has been emitting all these years. The results speak for themselves, and I'm not complaining.
