From the moment she exploded onto the scene with the frank, yearning “Girls Need Love,” Summer Walker has always been a soul singer. While the content on her proper LPs (2019’s sterling Over It and its sprawling 2021 follow-up Still Over It) tends to skew in the direction of contemporary R&B’s moody reverb-drenched toxicity, the records on her stunning Clear EP and the arrangements of her more intimate live performances present a Summer Walker who is chiefly concerned with the raw vulnerability of true soul music.

Subtitled Soft Life, Summer’s newest project acts as a sequel to 2019’s Clear EP. Eschewing the Auto-Tuned dejection of her studio albums, Summer spends Clear 2 asserting herself as both a disciple of Erykah Badu and the neo-soul tradition as well as an artist consciously working in the legacy of Black women blues singers. Anchored by carefully curated live instrumentation, Summer delivers some of her strongest studio vocal performances as she sorts through the intricacies of contemporary Black romance. The precarious position of Black American couples has birthed generations of era-defining music. For Summer, neo-soul is her tradition of choice. “Hardlife” finds her employing a variant of Erykah Badu’s ringing vibrato against a lush, but not overwhelming, soundscape of gorgeous drums and piano. “It's the audacity, what you have asked of me / You say you want me soft, but give me a hard life,” she sings.

Clear 2 is a series of conversations — debates with Black men, discussions amongst Black women, and reflective soliloquies inside Summer’s own head. The EP champions the resilience of the Black woman, especially in the face of a society that refuses to love them openly and unconditionally, if at all. Like any great blues singer, Summer is refreshingly honest and specific, there is no beating around the bush here. “Tired of seein' all these, all these / Spanish and these white bitches / Livin' they soft life with they feet kicked up,” she sings in the second verse of “Hardlife.” In the chorus of “Mind Yo Mouth,” she parrots problematic advice like “They say, ‘Hush girl, mind your mouth / You don't wanna harm his ego, no.’” The specific phenomenon of constantly showing up for Black men despite them, at times, willingly participating in the subjugation of Black women while still demanding loyalty and emotional labor from them is one that Black womanist scholars have been unpacking for decades, and Clear 2 showcases Summer’s contributions to that canon. She employs an airy falsetto backed by plaintive guitar on “How Does It Feel” as she waxes poetic about feeling underappreciated in a relationship, and on “Pull Up” she balances providing a space of intimacy for her and her partner before reminding him to pull up his pants and protect himself from the terrors of white supremacy waiting outside of their door.

The two features on Clear 2 are both men, each representing a different archetype of black men. J. Cole acts as a mentor and a stalwart supporter of his Black woman peers in the music industry in the touching “To Summer, From Cole (Audio Hug).” “I'm sendin' you, SZA & Ari my love / Y'all holdin' us down, y'all holdin' the crowns,” he raps across a mix so warm and tender it literally feels like an audio hug. Childish Gambino, who seemingly cannot stay away from music under that moniker despite several retirement teases, appears on “New Type,” a tense look at the conflict and resentment that often coexist with feelings of lust and loyalty. Gambino reaches to the depths of range for an almost cartoonishly gravelly tone that drags the song to the edge of parody. Aside from that singular blunder, Clear 2 continues to impress with standouts like the touchingly autobiographical “Set Up (2017)” and a peace-affirming spoken word conclusion in “Agayu’s Revelation.”

Summer Walker has never sounded as in her element as she does on Clear 2, and it’s high time for R&B’s mainstream to start meeting her in this Badu-lite space instead of making her feel like she has to bend to contemporary radio conventions on her studio albums.

Key Tracks: “Set Up” (2017) | “Hardlife” | “To Summer, From Cole (Audio Hug)” | “Pull Up”

Score: 78