ALBUMS // Erika de Casier – Essentials

Post by Misha

As the summer makes itself more and more official, I find myself more and more drawn to the sweetness of pop music. And its stickiness, the way it hangs heavy in the air outside my window after the cars blasting it have continued down the street.

Erika de Casier’s Essentials is maybe not the first thing you think about when you think about summer tunes, at least not in the big, blasty sense. The airy sultriness of ‘Little Bit’ is arguably better paired with rain than sun.

But it’s been a rainy summer so far in New York. (To be fair, I’m new to the East Coast so maybe that’s how they always are here, I’m not sure.) I’ve always liked summer rain. It feels luxurious somehow. Fat drops the temperature of bath water. The kind that is accompanied by the deep, throaty roll of far off thunder.

In that sense, Essentials is the perfect summer album. Moody, dripping, warm, it is full of fog-on-windows passion and rain streaked heartbreak in equal measure.

I also gravitate towards it for its loneliness, I think. It’s hard right now to feel quite the same way about the bombast of your usual summer club bangers as I do in usual summers. They are meant to fill the spaces in between dancing people packed into tight rooms. They are meant to inspire wild nights and echo into the early morning. They hit different echoing down mostly deserted streets or playing through my apartment that hasn’t been empty on a Friday night in months.

Essentials has all the opulence and escape of a summer club banger, whittled down for a rainy evening alone. Shimmery, immaculately 90s production, buttery vocals, and satin smooth melodies that wrap around you as you hum them around your apartment, listening to the thump of car speakers through open windows and basking in the cool breeze of unpeopled summer air.

Buy Essentials here.