You don’t have to be particularly keen-eared to spot Flo’s musical influences. They announce them in the opening seconds of their debut album – or rather actor Cynthia Erivo does. Her guest spot is the latest in a series of high-profile co-signs the London trio has attracted. SZA is apparently a fan; Missy Elliott guested on their 2023 single Fly Girl; rapper GloRilla turned up on this year’s In My Bag; and MNEK, who has collaborated with Madonna, Beyoncé and Dua Lipa, has been their chief producer from the start. Now it’s the turn of the award-winning star of Wicked to do her thing on the intro to Access All Areas, announcing Flo’s mission – “bad bitch replenishment”, apparently – and listing their inspirations: they are, we’re told, “receiving the baton passed on by Destiny’s Child, the Sugababes, SWV”. They doubtless wouldn’t object too strenuously if you added TLC, En Vogue, Zhané and 702 to the list.
Reanimating the sound of the classic R&B girl group for the 2020s really doesn’t seem like a bad idea. It feels different – in recent years, the genre has been almost entirely ruled by solo artists – and, moreover, it chimes with UK rap’s rash of 90s and early 00s R&B samples and a broader nostalgia in pop for the era of Napster and MTV Total Request Live. The old rule that pop revivalism tends to work in 20-year cycles, burnishing the music young artists remember as kids, still holds true.
Understandably, Flo’s timely arrival has been greeted with excitement. Quite aside from the aforementioned celebrity fans, they won the BBC’s 2023 Sound of … poll (beating Fred Again into second place) and the same year’s Brit Rising Star award, and have attracted far more attention in the US than a British R&B girl band of the early 00s ever would have done, scoring nominations at the BET and Soul Train awards. And yet, in the two years that separate their debut single from their debut album’s arrival, the attention hasn’t quite translated to popularity: a couple of medium-sized hits, and streaming figures that are decent rather than extraordinary.
Access All Areas makes you abundantly aware that the charts would be a better place with Flo in them. The songs are punchy and well written, as on the poppy Nocturnal, or Check, which has a faint but noticeable UK garage skip to its beat. The trio bring thick, satisfying harmony vocals without indulging in showy over-singing, and an impressive quantity of attitude to sagas of useless boyfriends and relationships gone wrong: you really wouldn’t mess with the girls singing IWH2BMX, or commanding over the stammering rhythm and rock guitar of closer I’m Just a Girl. They can do slow jams, both of the straightforward bedroom-bound variety (Soft), or the kind that traverse more complicated emotional terrain: How Does It Feel marries its measured pulse to a wrathful, vengeance-shall-be-mine mood.
But Access All Areas also demonstrates why Flo haven’t quite exploded. There are plenty of good tracks here, but no undeniable no-further-questions smash hit: you get the link to SWV or Writing’s on the Wall-era Destiny’s Child, but at present, they’re an SWV without a Right Here or a Weak; they’re a LaTavia and LeToya-era Destiny’s Child without a No, No, No or a Jumpin’, Jumpin’.
In addition, the one period detail Access All Areas’ production misses is that R&B in the era it celebrates thrived on sonic risk-taking and adventure. Quite aside from the songs, the big hits frequently worked by snagging listeners with novelty – even the poppiest of their avowed influences, Sugababes, weren’t above throwing the odd spanner into the works, as on the Gary Numan-sampling Freak Like Me. That sense of innovation is lacking here. It’s great to get Missy Elliott to drop a verse on your single; it would be better still to incorporate some of the head-turning surprise that Timbaland brought to Aaliyah’s We Need a Resolution – or indeed, that the Neptunes brought to Kelis, or Rodney Jerkins to Brandy. It comes close on Bending My Rules, which marries a scrabbly guitar sample to a lurching beat, but it feels like a simulacrum of early 00s oddness, rather than a fresh embodiment of its spirit.
Without that – or the aforementioned killer hit – their debut seems more like a solid start than an obvious smash, a good idea that needs fleshing out before it really comes into its own. There’s a spark about it that suggests Flo deserve the space, time and opportunity to do just that: they’re in touching distance of being genuinely great, but their debut album is a stop on a journey rather than an end in itself.
This week Alexis listened to
Say She She – Purple Snowflakes
As the hardy Christmas annuals start to creep into the charts, something prematurely – and gently – festive but fresh: a lovely cover of the 1964 Marvin Gaye obscurity.
Source: theguardian.com
