Solange Wants to 'Make Your Trunk Rattle'
Just weeks after her big sister took Houston to Church, Solange teased us with news of a follow-up to 2016's sensational A Seat at the Table.
The details are part of a T: The New York Times Style Magazine cover story—one component of the magazine's annual "Greats" package that places Solange alongside five other artists including Carrie Mae Weems and, uh, George R.R. Martin.
In the profile, writer Ayana Mathis examines Solange as the "polymathic artist" who's always been the more versatile (and fame-averse) Knowles sister. Mathis winds through the 32-year-old's varied career that began here in Houston's Third Ward—a neighborhood with "a habit of birthing great black women"—and launched into the worlds of fashion, dance, music, and performance art.
Toward the end, Mathis dives into what we know so far about her yet-to-be-completed album:
The making of it has taken Solange to New Orleans (where she often lives), Jamaica, California’s Topanga Canyon and back to a kind of Houston of the mind. “There is a lot of jazz at the core,” she emailed me a few days after our meeting. “But with electronic and hip-hop drum and bass because I want it to bang and make your trunk rattle.”
The emphasis is ours, of course, in recognition of the most Houston sentence ever. Mathis continues:
The record will be warm, she says, fluid and more sensual than her last one. But, seasoned as she is, she’s still nervous. “I have this fear living in my body about releasing work,” she says. “I don’t know any artist that doesn’t feel that before they hit the send button.”
As for the release date? Mathis writes the album will drop "this fall," with one ominous qualifier:
The record will likely arrive into the world fully formed at some mysterious and unexpected moment, like a meteor cratering into the culture. But she will not be rushed.
To which we say: Take your time! A Solange album might be the one welcome surprise of the 2018 news cycle.