Charlotte Day Wilson Cyan Blue

Charlotte Day Wilson’s second album opens with “My Way”—which is not a cover of the Sinatra standard, but it’s a no less emphatic statement of purpose for the Toronto singer. Beginning as a Tropicália-tinged folk reverie before blossoming into a soulful, piano-pounding slow jam, the song is a testament to Wilson’s refusal to be boxed in by the parameters of genre, while still epitomising the untouchably cool attitude and straight-talkin’ candour we demand from our R&B queens. Where past signatures like “Work” and “Doubt” were carefully plotted exercises in slow-building tension and rapturous release, with Cyan Blue, Wilson sounds more comfortable with allowing her songs to unspool in unpredictable ways. “Forever”—a collaboration with Swedish sensation Snoh Aalegra—rolls in with a heavenly chorus hook that you expect to tee up a big beat, but Wilson is happy to just let the song float away on a cloud bed of drifting piano chords. And while “Canopy” fills out its minimalist guitar-plucked/finger-snapped production with sassy kiss-off quips like some bygone Y2K-era TRL smash, it’s followed by a wistful, piano-led (actual) cover of “Over the Rainbow” embedded with field recordings of children playing in the background, as if Wilson was lost in her own blissful midsummer daydream. But with the closing “Walk With Me”, Wilson’s dual affinities for in-your-face lyrics and in-your-head atmospheres coalesce to glorious effect. “Just walk with me,” she pleads in a song that documents a difficult conversation between two lovers drifting apart, but saunters about like a late-afternoon stroll, threading the needle between ’70s psychedelic soul, ’90s R&B and 21st-century bedroom-indie aesthetics—a perfect portrait of Wilson doing it her way.