For six long years Normani was the most overlooked member of Fifth Harmony, a so-so girl band fused together in 2012 on the forgotten US variant of The X Factor. When they split in 2018, she quickly became the pop connoisseurs’ choice for assumed solo breakout success, a decision supported by a string of subsequent collaborations with acts including Khalid, Sam Smith and Calvin Harris.
In the summer of 2019 she unleashed Motivation, a Max Martin-assisted, 00s pop-infused banger with a splashy video that recalled Beyoncé’s solo superstar arrival with Crazy in Love. From the outside, things looked rosy. Then Normani disappeared; songs were sporadic and untethered from a body of work; fans trolled her online, bemoaning perceived wasted opportunities to capitalise on her momentum. She resurfaced in February, trolling those fans right back with the launch of her website, wheresthedamnalbum.com, on which she announced the damn album.
A struggle for an identity after emerging from a manufactured pop band is par for the course, but with Normani there were extra issues in play. After 19 years in remission, in 2020 her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. A year later her father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Music, unsurprisingly, took a back seat.
Now, on Dopamine, the bright pop of Motivation – a song Normani recently dismissed as “mid” and her label’s choice of single – has been replaced by an expertly curated deep dive into her passion for R&B. After years of placating other people’s musical whims, both in a band and as a solo star trying to make her mark, you sense she needed to draw a line in the sand – and if nothing else Dopamine feels like a statement of intent.
Things start brightly with the swaggering Big Boy, a southern rap-influenced head-knocker punctuated by delicious horn blasts and the kind of clattering beat Timbaland would kill for in 2024. Braggadocious lines about platinum hits and “Billboard shit” are interspersed with kiss-offs to someone deeply undeserving of Normani’s attention. Recent single Candy Paint treads a similar path, its hypnotic, bare-boned beat seemingly created by hitting a few pots and pans, with an elated Normani riding the minimalist wave with the confidence of B’Day-era Beyoncé. The nonchalant Little Secrets channels that 2006 album more directly, referencing the chorus of Upgrade U but flipping its focus from improving a man to dismissing a prospective beau’s current partner: “let me upstage your bitch” Normani states with airy assurance.
The 28-year-old has talked about not having the confidence to record a song such as Big Boy when work on the album first started in 2018, and there’s a definite sense of Normani figuring out an artistic identity throughout Dopamine’s 13 tracks. Occasionally she’s overpowered by her musical reference points, or the sonic imprint of her collaborators. The sultry slow jam Lights On could have nestled easily on Janet Jackson’s Damita Jo album, all whispered backing vocals, tactile sensuality and orgasmic moans. It’s not a bad song – like Jackson, Normani is able to perfectly distil a mood – but it feels overfamiliar. Insomnia, meanwhile, sounds so much like classic Brandy – mid-tempo, cocooned in detailed, layered backing vocals and broken emotions – that when the actual Brandy takes over in the final third you forget about Normani altogether. Anchored by thick bass rumbles and a swirling sense of foreboding, the James Blake collaboration Tantrums is perfectly competent, but his croaked yelp eventually comes to take up too much airtime.
It’s also one of the few moments the album lyrically deviates from its two core moods: chest-puffing confidence on the one hand, and loved-up sensuality on the other. On Tantrums’ story of the collapse of an old relationship, there is at least a sense of raw emotion bubbling to the surface, Normani’s voice cracking ever so slightly when she sings: “When they ask you who loves you like I do / Baby, don’t you say my name.”
In a music industry that gives so few second chances to female artists in the pop sphere, and even fewer to dark-skinned women straddling both pop and R&B, a debut album can feel like the be-all and end-all.
Dopamine understandably strives hard for perfection, but it can feel strangely anonymous at times – such as the way her yearning for a faraway love on Distance is suffocated by a polished sheen. But when Normani fully lets loose, as on the gyrating Grip, and the house-inflected Take My Time, there’s a real sense of that superstar everyone hoped to see back in 2018 finally taking centre stage on her own damn album.
• Alexis Petridis is away
