Usher Is the Smooth R&B Chameleon We Know and Love on ‘Coming Home’
For over two decades, Usher had one of music’s most impressive release runs. While his Nineties and early Aughts R&B peers floundered as new generations of the genre came and went, the chameleonic crooner adapted, experimenting with dance music while maintaining his particularly seductive swagger.
It’s been eight years since Usher released a solo album and six years since A, his collaborative project with Zaytoven, the longest break he’s taken from releasing music since he was a teenager. In recent years, we’ve entered an Usher revival of sorts, spurred by a successful Las Vegas residency that has provided countless viral clips of famous women like Issa Rae, Keke Palmer and Doja Cat living out every girl’s dream of being serenaded by the star. With a much overdo gig headlining the Super Bowl halftime show coming up, there was no better time for Usher to come back with new music, and a lot of it. His latest, Coming Home, is appropriately titled: the star’s sprawling, twenty-song LP is nostalgic and familiar as Usher leans into the past without making it feel stale.
Usher’s opens his ninth album with three straight features: Burna Boy on the bouncy, horny, double-entendre title track, Summer Walker and 21 Savage on the “Lovers & Friends”-esque “Good Good,” and The-Dream on the the trap-inflected “Cold-Blooded.” The unexpected highlight is the Billy Joel-sampling “A-Town Girl,” featuring Latto, a bright and catchy pop moment where Usher perfectly flips “Uptown Girl” to celebrate his Atlanta-born love: “Shawty’s an A-Town girl/Got her own money but she never pays to get inside/No lie.” It’s the kind of ridiculous sample only Usher can have fun with — and successfully make work.
The majority of the album is Usher on his own, keeping the momentum up and dance-y. The slow jams are never too slow, outside of his duet with H.E.R. for The Color Purple soundtrack (“Risk It All”) which is ill-advisedly weaseled into the middle of the album. It’s sandwiched between synth-y, optimistic love song “Keep on Dancing” and “Bop,” a lustful, mid-tempo invitation for a lover to return back to him, with maximum yearning: “Girl I miss you like Jodeci/Girl, I miss you like ‘Pac/Girl, I miss you like Aaliyah/Come back and make this song stop/Don’t let this turn into a bop.”
The song’s teeter-totter between the two extremes of Usher’s music: cookout-friendly party jams and sex playlist classics. While none are massive fails, the hour-plus of new music isn’t as focused as Usher’s past albums; it comes off a a bit like him throwing everything he’s good at at a wall and seeing what sticks. Even though the album comes close to overstaying its welcome, it mostly goes down smooth; Usher’s not trying to be any other kind of pop or R&B star. And at the very least, the album is a reminder that he is pretty great at a lot of things. Glad he came home.