Summer Walker

Summer Walker

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Essential Albums

  • Still Over It
    Still Over It
    Still Over It

    Summer Walker's debut full-length, Over It, was a critical and commercial success after its release in 2019, with the Atlanta singer-songwriter's jolting, honest lyrics and love of ’90s R&B combining for a potent opening salvo. Its spiritual successor, released two years later, tells the story of what happened in the time since Walker's rise to fame; its chronicles of love, loss and new motherhood draw on her relationship with Over It executive producer London On Da Track and its attendant highs and lows. “Do it your own way and do it beautifully, do it special,” Cardi B instructs Walker on the postscript of the exacting opener, “Bitter”. Throughout Still Over It’s ensuing tracks, Walker—with help from guests like the Miami hip-hop duo City Girls, fellow real-talking singer-songwriters SZA and Ari Lennox, and production gurus The Neptunes—runs with Cardi’s advice, revealing exactly why her music struck a chord with listeners almost instantly. Walker’s feathery voice gives her lyrics added world-weariness, with songs like the spare “You Don’t Know Me”, an acoustic ballad where she takes stock of her long-term relationship’s inherent superficiality, and “Closure”, a trap-snare-framed lament over her inability to shut down a bad-news lover, made even more striking by her blend of conversational delivery and naked vulnerability. Still Over It doesn’t merely wallow, though; “Ex For A Reason” is a cheerfully delivered warning to a former flame who has dared to come back into the picture, its sunny, upbeat music making Walker’s threats sound deadly serious, while “Dat Right There” is a self-assured boast aided by The Neptunes’ 23rd-century roller-rink production. Still Over It finds Summer Walker demonstrating her idea of the best revenge; she might be thinking of her past entanglements now and then, but she’s processing her emotions in her own way—and making art that shows how she refuses to bend to even the most heartrending circumstances.

  • Over It
    Over It
    Over It

    Summer Walker doesn’t look the way she sounds. The Atlanta singer’s face tattoos are more in line with the aesthetic of her hometown’s many hip-hop superstars than that of ’90s golden-era R&B acts like Mary J. Blige, Xscape and SWV, but the makeover feels right for the moment. On Walker’s heavily anticipated Over It, which follows her 2018 breakout mixtape Last Day of Summer—as well as the CLEAR EP—the singer recontextualises some familiar-sounding frustrations and reckonings about hard-earned romantic truths by way of throwback sounds and contemporary real talk (all of which sounds even richer thanks to Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos). “Did I ever ask you to take me to go shopping in Paris?/Or go sailing overseas and just drape me in Gucci?” she asks on the Bryson Tiller duet “Playing Games”. “No, I never had an issue, go to the club with your boys, baby/I never wanted you to stay too long, just wanted you to show me off.” Later in the song she borrows a few bars from “Say My Name”, Destiny’s Child’s eternally catchy ballad of the underappreciated lover. Over It is indeed peppered with references to the R&B of Walker’s childhood: Producer London On Da Track utilises a vintage 702 sample for “Body” and builds the beat for “Come Thru”, which features Usher, on the keyboard line of the ATL icon’s 1997 “You Make Me Wanna...” The album also boasts guest spots from Drake, 6LACK, A Boogie wit da Hoodie and long-dormant moody-R&B hero PARTYNEXTDOOR. The vantage point of Over It, though, is wholly the singer’s own. The exchanges in Walker’s verses sound like they could have been grafted directly from text messages or pulled from a FaceTime conversation. “Am I really that much to handle?” she opines on the title track. “You wanna be a good friend to me/Why don’t you pour up that Hennessy/Light up a few blunts so we can get high,” she sings on “Tonight”. “Too much Patrón will have you calling his phone/Have you wanting some more,” she advises on “Drunk Dialing…LODT”. Walker’s words are so relatable they seem destined to become social media captions. Over It, then, is a project whose title betrays its maker’s constitution, one certain only to leave fans wanting more.

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About Summer Walker

Summer Walker isn’t big on diaries or therapy. Instead, the low-key R&B powerhouse finds solace in the studio, where angst, lust and self-doubt morph into mesmerising confessionals. For Walker, putting it all out there is healing: “Pro Tools sessions are my diary pages,” she tells Apple Music in Up Next: Summer Walker, the documentary film about her ascent. “That’s why a lot of my songs are emotional.” As a child growing up in Atlanta (where she was born in 1996), Walker would wait until her mum went to bed before going into the bathroom to record videos of herself singing songs and playing guitar. When she posted those clips on social media, the reaction was immediate—she had something. Her songwriting style—which she explored on her first two releases, Last Day of Summer and CLEAR—is both mysterious and bare-bones; the more she reveals about her heart and mind, the more captivating she becomes. “I don’t really need the pain/But I love to feel the pain,” she admits on “Deep”, a song that wrestles to distinguish between sex and love. To listen is to witness Walker working it all out in real time. Summer continued sorting through her feelings with subsequent projects. For 2021's Still Over It, she explores all the dimensions of relationship drama, whether she's teaming up with City Girls for an upbeat anti-ex anthem ("Ex For A Reason") or lamenting social media messiness ("Bitter"). For CLEAR 2: SOFT LIFE, Summer distances herself from petty drama even as she reckons with romantic dysfunction. Tracks like "How Does It Feel" see her dealing with someone who treats her love "like an option". Floating over tranquil instrumentation for "Finding Peace", she sounds like she's found it. In a tumultuous world, she might not always be able to, but her fans will always return to watch her try.

FROM
Atlanta, GA, United States
BORN
11 April 1996
GENRE
R&B/Soul

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