Today, many artists can credit quarantine and TikTok to their meteoric rise to fame, and Fousheé is one of them. After gaining popularity from her “Deep End Freestyle,” she continued to build off that momentum in the following year with an R&B album titled “time machine.”
Now, a year later, Fousheé is back for more with her sophomore project “softCORE.”
Album Highs:
Going into this album blind would shell shock the average Fousheé fan as it is a stark turn from her previous work.
In “softCORE,” the Grammy-nominated singer balances her soft melodic style and punk rock. The first song “simmer down,” has the energy of The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb,” filled with raging guitar riffs and high-pitched screaming. The songs are not pure metal, however, at times being fused with electronic hardcore.
Constantly cutting back and forth between her different styles, this album is full of variety.
In addition, there is only one feature from Lil Uzi Vert on the track “spend the money.”
Album Lows:
At first, the two styles seem to be in a battle for your attention as songs jump back and forth between soft airy melodies to 200bpm rager music. In general, this balance is the greatest struggle on the album.
With only 12 songs lasting for 27 minutes, this entire album seems to speed by, especially with the fast pacing of some of the songs. There is not much room to digest the project without listening to this multiple times.
Overall:
When talking to Okayplayer, Fousheé described her reasoning for this sudden change in style as being due to the anger she felt during the time opening for James Blake.
“I just remember being really frustrated [that’s] just where I was emotionally with life,” she said. “The project ended up being me expressing that anger and finding balance.”
“softCORE” is a fun project due to the amount of freedom Fousheé poses. With the lack of boundaries, fans were given a gem of an album within her growing discography.
Many artists within the past couple of years have been testing the waters within rock music, such as Willow, Jean Dawson, Rico Nasty, and more. Even acknowledging that, "softCORE" seems to stand out among all of the other projects that have been released. T
hough lyrically not the most impressive, the hooks, choruses, and production lead to a quality project.
I would give "softCORE" a 6.5 out of 10.
Best songs:
"spend the money"
"die"
"i'm fine"
