Dua Saleh's music always feels like it should accompany a slow-motion zoom-in on the artist themself. The camera pans forward. Narrowing its attention with each passing second. Capturing every blink, breath, and gesture as it closes in on their profile. Returning their enigmatic gaze. It feels both intimate and yet profoundly mysterious and pregnant with intrigue. Like you are getting to know this person for the first time and they already fascinate you. You pick up on bits of pieces of their history through conversation, but each of these pieces is queer in shape, and every answer they provide unlocks a chest with a thousand questions inside. Their lack of center is the center. Their fickle outline, an impenetrable firmament.
Not all R'nB singers have to be this way, but I'm glad that Dua Saleh's is, because their music is the kind that I can't really ever see myself getting bored of. There is always some new dimension to uncover, or some finer detail to pour over and rediscover. It's music you can live inside and make a space for yourself within- roomy, moody, and versatile. Like a private club where a different interior designer realized their vision in a separate room.
Dua Saleh's most recent EP Crossover is the product of some very deep ruminations on the way in which their identity defies concrete definitions and is always in the process of transitioning through a new and audacious phase. It's a theme that is given voice across the reflective arch of Crossover, manifesting first in the conical resonance of "focal," a pivoting sequence of pressure points permeating a breathy outlay of beats like light splintering through dark beads of teardrop-shaped, crystalline textures.
Crossover is meant to be a dance album, but it mostly feels like a VIP affair rather than a floor exhibition. The brush of the melody on "buzzin" feels like it is being impressed on your ear lobe one exhaled phrase at a time, and the vulnerability of "tic tic," featuring Haleek Maul, feels too tender at times to survive outside the incubation chamber of your bedroom for more than a full measure.
"fav flav" has one of the crisper and brighter beats on the EP but the real highlight has to be the nail-polish and battery acid stained, plaintive coo of "trash snack" which unleashes the progressive potential of an FKA Twigs and 100 Gecs collab that probably won't happen, but may need to if the universe is ever going to know balance once more- and now we know who could produce it!
With Dua Saleh all things are in flux, with the exception of their prowess as auteur and curator of sound and emotion- in these respects, they are firmly established.
