#Phlo finister birthday series#

She makes her live debut on 31 July at London's Sebright Arms. We'd call it tantalising, but that suggests this music could be fleshed out, improved upon, when really it's perfect as it is. Last Winter is a classic of dejected electronica where love is a subset of a broader feeling of estrangement. 'Baby, just take a sip,' she invites, sounding like an enervated Rihanna or a Beyoncé minus the sense of entitlement. By track two, Coca Cola Classic, we're hooked. The beats are heavy, the voice/production combo heady: we're sure we read her describe what she does on one website as 'sex, drugs and dubstep'. On Hotel Miami, a lead track from her forthcoming Poster Girl EP (spoiler alert: she didn't quit the biz after all), she offers to play a hooker just for one night in her lover's luxury suite – so consumed is she not by desire, but by a desperation not to be alone, even if the man in question isn't to be trusted. But more than anything we like to think of her as a breakaway character from an Abel Tesfaye song who gets her own show. She has recorded a cover of Nancy Sinatra's Bang Bang over Mobb Deep's Shook Ones Pt 2, a useful précis of her project.

#Phlo finister birthday series#

It's her work on a series of mixtapes with Andrew Dawson (the Weeknd Kanye West Tyler, the Creator), 4AD's A$AP Rocky collaborator Spaceghostpurrp, and Def Jam's Benny Cassette that defines her. 'The sacrifice of being a star,' she declared, 'isn't worth my normalcy.' Rather, she was leaving the music business to pursue other interests (photography and design), discouraged by the trends to 'mimic. It wasn't that she was committing suicide – although you could have been forgiving for assuming as much from the letter. She nearly absented herself and disappeared from view last December when, in an 'open letter' to her fans, she wrote that her 'long road' was 'coming to an end'. This idea of Finister – the woman with the spectral coo – as little more than a ghost isn't just fancy. But Finister is effecting some kind of apotheosis with her exquisite blown beats, ethereal production, and a series of evanescent whispers that only vaguely fall under the rubric 'singing': it's not full-bodied but empty, drained less a voice than a void.

Cassie, of course, was moving in this direction a few years ago. In her hands, it stands for 'ravished and blue'. The background: Like SZA, Jhené Aiko and Kid A, Phlo Finister is remaking R&B, divesting it of its aerobic thrust and projected passion.