If “Finally Over It,” the third studio album from the Atlanta singer and songwriter Summer Walker, were the best R&B release of this year — which it almost certainly is — that would be more than enough. It has been a particularly dry stretch for the genre, but even when it’s fertile, Walker is at the top of the class: a sensuous and detailed singer with an appreciation of history that doesn’t hold her back from making decidedly modern music.
But “Finally Over It,” organized into two discs of nine songs each, is also one of the funniest releases of the year, and that is what sets Walker apart — not only from her peers, but from a more straightforward version of herself that still lurks within.
First, there is the title: “Finally Over It,” which follows “Still Over It” (2021) and, before that, “Over It” (2019). The album’s artwork depicts Walker as an Anna Nicole Smith figure, stoic on the day of her wedding to an elderly, wheelchair-bound but expensively coifed man. Resigned but purposeful.
Many of the songs are straightforwardly beautiful, carefully paced evocations of lost love sung in an elegant and sweet voice that she metes out carefully, in droplets of tenderness or angst. But those are somehow less powerful than the songs in which Walker rolls her eyes, sighs deeply and sings in a manner so offhand, it’s as if she forgot it was a song altogether rather than a bemused berating.
On the magisterial “Robbed You,” she concludes that a feckless partner would have been better as a mark, singing about how easy it would have been to take advantage of his trust. On “No,” her partner uses up all the gas in the car, then wonders what’s for dinner, and she’s simply had enough. The plain-spoken exasperation of “FMT,” about falling for the same patterns time and again, is palpable.
Her lyrics are best when they take unpredictable turns of wordplay. “I got super shy lips,” she sings bouncily on “How Sway,” then concedes, “But I got me a Ph.D. in yap-anese around him.”
Walker has a knack for bringing in like-minded comic cynics: GloRilla and Sexyy Red on “Baller,” Doja Cat on “Go Girl.” She even gets outfunnied by the deadpan wit of 21 Savage on “Get Yo Boy,” an arched-eyebrow warning to a man — as elegant as any Aaliyah number — about the friend of his who’s been angling to take his place. That said, there is a curious and perhaps distracting amount of guests on this album. At times, it feels as if Walker has set a table, then wandered away during the meal.
Walker understands that these humorous vamps are all the funnier for being retrofitted into very traditional formats. Her production is a callback to the husky and propulsive soul music of the 1990s, full of swagger that cradles a hard-earned vulnerability. But without an overlay of humor, her more conventional songs here — the pretty and tragic “Stitch Me Up,” or the brawny hit “Heart of a Woman” — feel a touch incomplete. Setups without punchlines. Nevertheless, she’s the most intriguing and ambitious soul singer of her generation, even more so when she stops keeping a straight face.
Summer Walker
“Finally Over It”
(LVRN/Interscope)
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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