When I Get Home (album)


When I Get Home is the fourth studio album by American singer and songwriter Solange, released on March 1, 2019. It is the follow-up to her 2016 album A Seat at the Table and explores Solange Knowles' hometown of Houston, Texas.
Knowles produced the album alongside a variety of collaborators, including John Key, John Carrol Kirby, Standing on the Corner, Chassol, Jamire Williams and Pharrell Williams. The album also features contributions from several high-profile musicians, including Sampha, Playboi Carti, Gucci Mane, Panda Bear, Tyler, the Creator, Metro Boomin, The-Dream, Abra, Dev Hynes, Steve Lacy, Earl Sweatshirt and Scarface.

Background and promotion

Knowles began working on the album in a rented house in her home-town of Houston, after completing a tour in support of her previous album A Seat at the Table. In an October 2018 interview with , she revealed that a forthcoming album, recorded between New Orleans, Houston, the Topanga Canyon and Jamaica, was near completion. She said of its sound: "There is a lot of jazz at the core... But with electronic and hip-hop drum and bass because I want it to bang and make your trunk rattle."
On February 27, 2019, Knowles released a teaser video on social media, and shared the album's track listing on February 28. The video references the Houston rapper Mike Jones and his well-known cell phone number. She also set up a page on BlackPlanet, a social networking website aimed at African Americans, and shared teaser images for the album on the site.

Composition

The album blends "cosmic" jazz, hip hop and R&B, and has also been described as psychedelic soul, "new-age trap" and a "drowsy funk throwdown". It is also influenced by chopped and screwed hip hop originating from Knowles' home-town of Houston, as well as drum and bass. The album has been described as an ode to Houston's hip hop scene, and is narrated by a range of sampled African-American women from its Third Ward, where Knowles grew up. In writing the album, Knowles was inspired by the use of repetition in Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants as well as music by Steve Reich, Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra. She also noted that the album was more focused on what she had to "feel", compared to A Seat at the Table's focus on what she had to "say".

Critical reception

At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, When I Get Home received an average score of 89, based on 24 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
Reviewing the album for AllMusic, Andy Kellman claimed that "From the early moment where Solange makes like a group of harmonizing, sunlit Janet Jacksons, it sounds custom made for a basking joy ride that tops out around 20 m.p.h. and slows just enough to accommodate get-ons and drop-offs for a variable group of companions including a lover. It comes across as both spontaneous and deliberate." Malvika Padin also praised the album in the review for Clash, declaring that "The album is driven by an assured sense of direction, always aware of where it's going, never losing itself even as it experiments." In the review for Consequence of Sound, David Sackllah concluded, "Solange's latest mystifies and stuns, leaving you awestruck as she cements her legacy as a true generational voice."
Israel Daramola at Spin wrote that the album "is expertly crafted, curated, and aesthetically dazzling; choreographed, extremely self-serious and self-absorbed; intellectualized, sonically adventurous, but often feels too rehearsed and neat." Kuba Shand-Baptiste at The Independent stated that it "give voice to the endless frustration of being black in the world, to be punished on that basis, and to support the urge we all often feel to push back against it all". She added that "there are melodies slow enough to sink you into a state of tranquility, and beats hard and strong enough to push you to sway and dance while that happens".
Jem Aswad at Variety wrote that "When I Get Home is a challenging and satisfying follow-up to A Seat at the Table, one that will probably baffle some fans but intrigue and engage even more". Jon Pareles at The New York Times observed, "The black solidarity that was Solange's strongest message on A Seat at the Table is still there in 'Stay Flo' and in 'Almeda,' where she praises 'Black skin, black braids, black waves, black days' and insists, 'These are black-owned things' over rattlesnake drum-machine accents. But most of the album has her musing on more private, domestic matters and looking inward".
The Observers Kate Mossman wrote that "Solange has made a record that sounds at times like a collection of demos – fleeting impressions of fluid, contemporary soul songs that fizzle out the moment they're laid down, like a Snapchat album. It's in keeping with the increasingly avant-garde nature of R&B production today, which can be heard in everyone from Frank Ocean to Ariana Grande: songs feel like sketches; hooks and choruses matter less; and music is conceived, perhaps, with visuals in mind – in the manner of Beyoncé's "Lemonade". This kind of music demands a lot of the listener – short songs are harder on the attention span than long ones. It's as though Solange is saying: here is a mood, and here is another… but perhaps, with our increasingly insular listening habits, a "mood" is exactly what we want our music to be."
PublicationAccoladeRank
Afisha Daily The Best Foreign Albums of 201911
The A.V. ClubThe 20 Best Albums of 20196
BillboardThe 50 Best Albums of 201927
ClashClash Albums of the Year 201914
ComplexThe Best Albums of 201915
Consequence of SoundTop 50 Albums of 201918
GQThe GQ Staff's 21 Favorite Albums of 2019
GQThe albums that made 2019 great again9
The GuardianThe 50 Best Albums of 201919
NMEThe 50 Best Albums of 201914
PasteThe 34 Best Albums of 201925
PitchforkThe 50 Best Albums of 20195
PitchforkThe 200 Best Albums of the 2010s81
StereogumThe 50 Best Albums Of 201946
TimeThe 10 Best Albums of 20192
UproxxThe Best Albums of 201939
ViceThe 100 Best Albums of 2019

Film

Directed and edited by Solange, the creative vision behind the 33-minute film was inspired in part by the devastation of Hurricane Harvey in Houston. Music video director Alan Ferguson, filmmaker Terence Nance, visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite, and video director Ray Tintori contributed to the editing process with additional credit given to Autumn Knight and Robert Pruitt, according to Pitchfork.
"The film is an exploration of origin, asking the question how much of ourselves do we bring with us versus leave behind in our evolution,” Solange’s representatives said in a statement. “The artist returned to Third Ward Houston to answer this."
The film accompanies all seventeen tracks in one continuous narrative or visual album with various aspects dedicated to Houston's history including its hip-hop scene, for instance, the chopped and screwed remix style and mixtapes of DJ Screw. The 17th track "Sound of Rain" is accompanied by a surreal, game-world animation akin to Second Life that features original artwork by Satterwhite.
Solange premiered the film in nine local venues for members of the Black Houston community including "her mother’s old hair salon; Unity National Bank, the only black owned Texas banking institution; and Emancipation Gym the only public park open to African Americans in the Jim Crow era."
A 41-minute director's cut of the film was released on all platforms on December 12, 2019. The director's cut features new sequences, as well as a previously unreleased track titled "Dreams."

Commercial performance

When I Get Home debuted at number seven on the US Billboard 200 with 43,000 album-equivalent units. It is Knowles' third US top 10 album.

Track listing

Notes
Samples
Musicians
Technical