The twenty-five-year-old singer-songwriter Summer Walker is a master of confrontational balladry. Her music operates under the soft misandry of the #MenAreTrash mantra, but it also sincerely wrestles with the difficulties of loving them. In song, Walker usually puts herself in conversation with lovers and would-be partners—interrogating them when they’re being shady, questioning their alibis, accosting them when they’re caught in a lie, resisting the urge to make excuses for them. Few performers working today are more effective at expressing the exasperation that comes with a no-good boyfriend.
Like Keyshia Cole and K. Michelle before her, Walker traffics in an argumentative form of R. & B., itemizing misdeeds, lamenting wasted time, and putting the men responsible on notice. “The first one was a fuckup / Second one was a no one / Third one was tryna come up / Fourth one, you said, ‘It’d be different, different, different’ / And I believed you,” she recalls on “Broken Promises.” Her 2019 début album, “Over It,” is full of charming exchanges between an assertive woman and her insecure suitors, drawing upon classic hits by Destiny’s Child and Usher. Walker shows reverence for the R. & B. of the past, but she doesn’t pursue it at the expense of her own sound, which is equally indebted to the rumble of modern rap and the sincerity of classic soul.
Sourse: newyorker.com
