As “hot girl walks” implausibly keep trending on TikTok for yet another summer season, here comes Janelle Monáe to burn it all down. “Hot girl walks,” you see, involve going outside for a moderately paced stroll, often while wearing a monochrome athleisure set, holding an iced latte, and extending your arm overhead to film yourself smiling at the sun at a flattering angle (while, I guess, reflecting on your goals and what you’re grateful for?). Monáe’s version of the hot girl walk wipes away that boring, viral “clean girl” aesthetic and makes the case for getting sexy, sticky, and sweaty this summer, and not to walk, but to float.
So says Monáe on her fourth album, The Age of Pleasure, a hot, horny 14-track joyride that arrived on Friday. It’s the singer/actor/supernova at her freest and most accessible, as she’s powered down the cyborg persona she embodied on her 2010 debut The ArchAndroid and 2013’s The Electric Lady—two heady, high-concept albums replete with ambitious world-building that had listeners doing their homework to connect the dots. The Age of Pleasure demands no such scrutiny; Monáe proved a long time ago that there’s a stroke of genius to her art, and here she just wants to have some fun.
Indeed, the first words we hear out of her mouth on opening track “Float”—as she nimbly raps over horns from Afrobeat legends Seun Kuti and Egypt 80—are, “No, I’m not the same / I think I done changed.” The first few songs are brazen, confident flexes: She doesn’t walk, she floats; she’s haute, not hot; she looks “better than David Bowie in Moonage Daydream.” “Phenomenal”—which wouldn’t sound out of place on Beyoncé’s Renaissance; it sounds like a cousin of “Alien Superstar”—begins with Monáe proclaiming over an afro-funk beat: “I’m looking at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.”
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“Phenomenal” cascades into “Haute,” where horns herald her arrival as she exclaims, “I’m young and I’m Black and I’m wild.” Monáe, who’s undergone a personal evolution in recent years and has come out as pansexual and nonbinary, nods to gender ambiguity on “Haute” as she spits, “A bitch look pretty, a bitch look handsome.” Similarly forthright is “Only Have Eyes 42,” which borrows the chorus of a Flamingoes classic to cleverly hint at polyamory, and which manages to sound both classic and futuristic at the same time, thanks to its fusion of doo-wop and laser sound effects.
Musically, Monáe and her collaborators built The Age of Pleasure largely around Afrobeats and reggae, offsetting bold, dirty lyrics with calmer, mellow beats and a cacophony of trumpets, steel drums, and jazzy pianos. It’s an album that begs to be listened to in sequence, all the way through—which isn’t hard, considering the songs often flow so seamlessly that it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins. Take “Champagne Shit,” with its marching band horns and dancehall synths, which slides so smoothly into “Black Sugar Beach,” you won’t even notice.
It doesn’t all work—some lyrics border on corny, like with the copious swimming metaphors that bog down “Water Slide” and the opening lines on “A Dry Red” (“Hey baby, let me plant my seed”) and “The Rush” (“I look into your eyes and I get that rush / Maybe ’cause tonight you’re gonna be my crush”). Monáe starts to sound more stilted on the back half of the album, which suffers from less seamless transitions and slower cuts like “Paid in Pleasure” and “Know Better.”
Because of the album’s brevity, though, those moments breeze by quickly. Clocking in at just 32 minutes, The Age of Pleasure is indeed a quickie, albeit a satisfying one. Arriving in time for both Pride Month and pool season, it’s an album styled for summertime hedonism; much like Jessie Ware’s recently released and similarly ecstatic That! Feels Good!, but sexier. And like any proper orgy, there are multiple guests on hand here: “The French 75” gets an assist from revered Jamaican DJ Sister Nancy, “The Rush” features Nia Long and Amaarae, and “Ooh La La” has Grace Jones cooing in French.
But the main attraction is Monáe herself. It’s been five years since she released her Grammy-nominated third album Dirty Computer, and since then, we’ve watched her disappear into arresting roles in films like Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Harriet. On The Age of Pleasure, there’s no such persona, nor any alter egos like on albums past. It’s just Monáe settling into the role of her own fine, phenomenal self.
