After over a decade of recording silence, listening to the return of Miss Jill Scott is an absolute joy!
“To Whom This May Concern” is an ambitious, passionate and direct album written with the gravity of someone who has crossed the industry, time and his own myth without losing the desire to make music.
Jill is and remains a head girl. An example and a beacon for a generation of singers who have soul in their hearts and veins.
The new album is powerful, sensual and bewitching. A journey that goes from hip-hop to New Orleans rhythm & blues with extreme mastery and class.
The opening is a declaration of sovereignty. Dope Shit and Be Great they set up a lexicon of adult self-determination, not generational slogans but phrases earned late, when the affirmation no longer serves to convince others but rather not to betray oneself. Trombone Shorty's horns push without rhetoric, the writing refuses the motivational algorithmic pose.
The heart of the album, however, is collective. Beautiful People it combines love and institutional suspicion, it talks about systems and communities without becoming didactic. In Norf Sidand, produced by DJ Premier, Scott defends Philadelphia and her body with the same firm tone, flanked by Tierra Whack: two generations, an identical claim to centrality.
The album alternates sarcasm and ferocity. Pay U on Tuesday plays with a jazzy swing with a retro aftertaste, Pressha it is velvet with exposed nerves. In BPOTY convene Too $hort to dismantle the logic of exploitation, between pulpit and sidewalk. Me 4 observe male error without indulgence. In The Math arithmetic becomes ethics: subtract the false, multiply grace. Not self-help, but rigor.
On the intimate side, A Universe And Liftin' Me Up they show a guarded vulnerability, between large winds and measured virtuosity. Love is not dizziness but conscious choice. In Ode to Nikkiwith Ab-Soulthe spoken word tends towards spiritual ambition. With JID in To B Honest a fertile contrast emerges between ornamental lyricism and naked words.
The final triptych, Right Here Right Now, Àṣẹ And Sincerely Dorecomposes the sound path with coherence and measure. No pyrotechnic effects but soulful sedimentation.
Marcellous Lovelace's cover summarizes everything: exposed body, surrounding declarations, conflict and tenderness together. Scott writes letters to men, cities, ancestors, detractors. He writes them with proper names, mortgages, children, aloe vera, desire. Specificity is its politics.
It's not a celebratory return. It's a living archive of what it means to stay intact as the world redecorates. Jill Scott is familiar, complex, irreducibly human. In this panorama, it sounds almost subversive.
Sincerely Do Miss Scott!
SCORE: 7.75
THE VOTES OF OTHERS
Variety – Rating 8.00
Clash Music – Rating 8.00
Mojo – Rating 8.00
Rolling Stone (USA) – Rating 7.00
TO LISTEN NOW
Beautiful People – Norf Side – Pressha
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
An hour of good music. Not to be skipped!
