Pink Sweats — the singer and songwriter David Bowden — simply retains getting nicer. He has already racked up tons of of hundreds of thousands of streams with singles and EPs since 2018; now, he has launched his official debut album, “Pink Planet.” He’s connecting to an viewers that craves consolation and reassurance quite than stress and strife.
From the start of his solo profession, with the only “Honesty” in 2018, Pink Sweats revealed a voice crammed with longing: a tenor climbing immediately into falsetto, steeped in soul music and tremulous with sincerity, within the lineage of Michael Jackson, Usher and, currently, Justin Bieber.
He took his time earlier than stepping ahead on his personal. Bowden, now 28, performed music in church — he took his father’s place as a drummer — and went on to work as a songwriter, a producer and a studio musician (at Philadelphia’s famend Sigma Studios). There’s deep professionalism behind his affability.
In the songs on his three Pink Sweats EPs — the bare-bones, guitar-and-vocals “Volume 1” in 2018, the blues-tinged “Volume 2” in 2019 and the R&B productions on “The Prelude” in 2020 — Pink Sweats most frequently introduced himself as a fondly importunate lover. But whereas he was discovering his type, he additionally prompt he was aware of the temptations of cocaine and alcohol, and that amongst his companions (in “Drama” from 2018) had been robust guys, “real hitters” who “might shoot.”
On “The Prelude” — six songs that additionally seem on “Pink Planet” — Pink Sweats labored with hitmaking collaborators just like the producer John Hill, and he dabbled within the Weeknd’s form of blingy paranoia in “Icy” and “Not Alright.” But that persona suited him far lower than songs like “17,” which hopes to “love you as strong when we’re 92/The same as 17.” (In 2020, he launched a remix that includes members of the Okay-pop group Seventeen.)
For practically all of “Pink Planet,” Pink Sweats is determinedly healthful, benevolent and sweetly humble. But he makes it clear that his mission is to create music that’s a refuge from bleak realities. The album’s opener, “Pink City,” states — over gospelly organ and choirlike vocal harmonies — “It’s hard in the city, the city where I’m from” and resolves, “You can build you a city and call it home.” Halfway by the album, within the spoken-word “Interlude,” he explains over somber piano chords that listening to all types of music on the radio was “an escape, because the world I was living in wasn’t always so beautiful.”
The songs name for love, intimacy, devotion and forgiveness, for love that transcends all of the small stuff; it has unironic titles like “Heaven,” “Paradise,” and “So Sweet.” In “Beautiful Life,” over puffy synthesizer tones, he coos, “I want to keep you here for the rest of my life”; in “Magic,” he vows, “I’d travel miles just to see you smile, my love,” with a lead guitar doubling his voice.
The album reaches again to classic soul with 21st-century instruments. It’s an affirmation, in its chord progressions and preparations, of greater than half a century of pop, notably Black pop: of doo-wop, soul and previous and new R&B. There are echoes of Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, Bill Withers, George Benson, the Jacksons and Prince, together with hints of U2 and Ed Sheeran. Dovetailing previous and current, the rhythm monitor of “At My Worst” begins with 1950s-style finger snaps and swaps them for trap-era drum-machine ticks, as Pink Sweats pleads, “Know I’m not perfect, but I hope you see my worth.” (The album consists of two variations: the unique and a duet remix with Kehlani.)
As an album, “Pink Planet” extols constancy and continuity, each to a companion and to an extended musical heritage. In a precarious second, it’s cozy, and never from obliviousness however from dedication. Its edge is that it refuses to brandish one.
Pink Sweats
“Pink Planet”
(Atlantic)
