Overdue Debut Albums with English Teacher, The Dare, Ice Spice, Normani, & Nia Archives: Rapid Fire Review

These debut albums came from artists that people have had their eyes on for quite a while. With their first big swings some hit a home run and others completely struck out.

This Could Be Texas - English Teacher

I remember hearing about a British indie rock band called English Teacher sometime around when their 2022 EP dropped. Somehow that attention got lost in the mix and when they dropped their debut album earlier this year it blindsided me. Without it worked into my plans a full review of the album fell by the wayside, that was at least until it surprisingly won this year's Mercury Prize. I had to grind everything to a halt and cover this record. But that framing isn't entirely true. I have developed a pretty strong familiarity with one of the record's singles R&B. Though I didn't encounter the thoughtful and ferocious indie punk jam until after the album was released, I like it so much I'm surprised it didn't inspire me to review This Could Be Texas on the spot. 

So what is English Teacher, what to they bring and why is it resonating with so many people. A long explanation could do here but I'll stick with a short one, they're Wet Leg with better influences and more pointed songwriting. While Wet Leg established themselves as indie rock slackers joking their way through university pastiche, English Teacher take themselves a bit more seriously and have both the sonic and lyrical chops to back it up. That's been the case since the album's lead single The World's Biggest Paving Slab dropped last year. The song evocatively imagines being reborn as a slab of concrete full of sharp-edged cultural references contrasting with the theatrical bluntness of literally being walked all over, it's a great song. 

That thoughtfulness pervades the entire album and the variety of ways in which it's deployed are impressive. Numerous tracks on the album tale a more somber tone whether it be of a politically or personally charged nature. But English Teacher can't be slandered as a band that doesn't know how to have fun. Such is true of the self-aware defensiveness of I'm Not Crying, You're Crying, a highlight on the first half of the album. It's also true of the previously mentioned R&B which is more of a "throwing your hands up in defeat" type of tongue-in-cheek but one that absolutely has me by my throat. 

Those are hardly the only highlights though. From the commentary on social apathy derived from Not Everybody Gets To Go To Space to the subtle vocal effects bringing home the emotion of The best Tears Of Your Life the band's versatility is extremely impressive throughout. This is an incredibly impressive debut and I'm not surprised it's reached the level of acclaim it has. Plenty of great British bands have emerged in the past few years and the combination of eclectic sonic influences and clever, culturally-bound songwriting certainly isn't exclusive to English Teacher. But they absolutely hang on tight with their more experienced contemporaries on Texas and all I can really say is that I wish I had reviewed it sooner. 8/10

What's Wrong With New York? - The Dare

A few years ago when The Dare first started garnering national attention I reviewed his Sex EP. Looking back on that review now it's clear that I was being EXTRAORDINARILY generous towards a project that has almost no material I actually enjoy. Maybe it was just the elasticity of a lyric about "girls with dicks" coming out of a cis man's mouth on his disastrously stupid breakout hit Girls. Or maybe it was the billing of some kind of zoomer LCD Soundsystem that had me wanting to end up on the right side of history. As it turns out, The Dare has drastically underachieved as a project, falling so far below expectation that all his full-length debut has done is reassure me that I wasn't nearly as harsh on him as I should have been. 

What's Wrong is relatively short sporting just 10 tracks and 27 minutes and it dug itself a DEEP hole right out of the gate. First and foremost the album includes both Girls and Good Time, two stupid awful songs that sucked in 2023 and somehow suck even worse now. It also includes Perfume, one of the most superfluously annoying singles I've had the displeasure of listening to in all of 2024. Despite it all, I went into What's Wrong with an open mind for a few reasons. I'm not the type to take myself too seriously for Harrison's personality and affect, I've been known to praise far dumber and hornier music in the past, LCD Soundsystem might be my favorite band of all time, and I'm willing to admit when an artist changed my mind. 

After the collective conscious consumed this debut album, a viral tweet made the rounds online describing The Dare as "STD Soundsystem." That brief description says more about this album than I could with 3000 words. In fact, his comparison to LCD and insistence on adopting the imagined aesthetic and subject matter of indie sleaze makes this record even more difficult to swallow. Songs like I Destroyed Disco show this off perfectly. Hearing the lyrics "What's a blogger to a rocker?, What's a rocker to The Dare?" immediately followed by one of the flattest and lamest chrouses I've ever heard has got to be a top 5 funniest moment in music this year. You're Invited may be the most embarrassing moment though. The combination of popping bass and crashing drums makes it a near parody of LCD Soundsystem's Thrills and yet the awful lyrics are met, hilariously, with a fucking slide whistle. It tells you exactly how seriously you're supposed to take The Dare. 

Normally I'm not this brash but my god, this album is hot fucking garbage. Even the hardest of Dare defenders will point to his work as a producer to try and extend him some credibility beyond his unearned confidence and grating personality, but this record sounds like H&M Soundsystem. It's by the absolute thinnest of margins that this isn't the worst album I've heard in 2024. 3/10

Y2K! - Ice Spice

Okay, so it felt good to be right about The Dare all along. But now I'm gonna have to eat some words. Back in 2022, I loved Ice Spice's breakthrough hit Munch and in 2023 I loved songs like Boys a liar pt. 2 and Princess Diana. While I gave her EP a pretty middling review I was always holding out hope that Ice Spice could break the extremely tight barriers of her sound in a positive way ad surprise people with something new and interesting. But new her debut album has arrived and it isn't that much additional material all things considered, just 23 minutes. And if you somehow haven't heard, people aren't crazy about it. Though I'm more positive on the record than the regressive and relentlessly sexist hip-hop community, even I have to say I was expecting a lot more from Ice Spice when she first broke through. 

Lead single Think U The Shit was at least novel at the time. It seemed like Spice may be leaning into a sillier demeanor than many of her contemporaries. But now that the full album is out and is absolutely full of similarly gross bars, it's clear there's a lack of creativity at its core. Gimmie A Light came next and it's somehow even worse. The song sees Spice losing her most reliable skill, her flow, and completely failing to replace it with anything else. While the next single Phat Butt is decent, it still doesn't hold a candle to the best work on her Like EP. So that's the low standard set going into this album and it delivers accordingly. 

The defining quality of this album is sometimes being just okay. There are parts of Oh Shhh I think are decent, but the flows could be pulled straight out of multiple songs in her past and the uninspired Travis Scott verse doesn't help things. Speaking of features, Ice Spice herself ruins Bitch I'm Packin long before Gunna even has the chance to. The biggest hit on the album so far is Did It First with Central Cee. While Spice handily outperforms Cee on the song I do think they have quite a bit of chemistry and it's the one features on the record that actually sounds like he belongs.

Unfortunately, that's most of what there is to say about this record. This album has become a punching bag and as you'd expect it isn't as bad as many would lead you to believe. More than anything else the album is boring with an occasional dose of cringe. But even that is far less than what was expected of Ice Spice by supporters when she first emerged a few years ago. It's through that lens that we can get at Y2K for what it actually is, far from an all time disaster album and closer to a regular old disappointment. 4/10

DOPEMINE - Normani

This one isn't quite a debut in the same way the others are because, of course, Normani was a member of pop group Fifth Harmony. So she's coming into this record with both the success and recognition of that project, but also various singles she's released to quite a bit of success in the years since the ending of Fifth Harmony. On DOPAMINE though, we're getting a full album's worth of Normani for the very first time.With the awareness of both FH and Normani's previous solo work that I had I was pretty sure what to expect from DOPAMINE and the confident R&B stylings I was anticipating are exactly what she delivered. 

Opener Big Boy is built around a sort of clumsy OutKast reference but for the most part its a punchy, catchy song. Though I don't think any of the album's singles are necessarily home runs, I think they're at least a favorable bunch. All Yours has some of the best vocals Normani puts to record on the record and a good combination of tempo and energy shifts. It's breathy chorus is a bit strange but I like the rest of the song. I'm also pretty fond of the spicier Candy Paint whose rattling beat is one of my favorite on the record. Even the Cardi B-featuring Wild Side which is a full 3 years old at this point still mostly hits the right notes. 

On top of it's R&B the album also occasionally serves up an irresistible pop sentimentality. The first instance is one the groovy Take My Time which stood out as a deep cut highlight to me right away. Even though the song loses a bit of its stickiness in the second half, it's still a favorite of mine. A more reserved take on this comes on my other favorite song on the album Tantrums. The song features a killer James Blake performance in the second half and his influence on the production side of things shows. 

This album certainly isn't perfect. For one I think it only has a handful of true highlights among many other songs that are passable, but not extraordinary. Despite the album ultimately being unspectacular, it it is still enjoyable and I was surprised by just how much Normani's confidence and swagger carries throughout the record. She's always been a compelling vocalist, but on DOPAMINE she proved that she has the personality to carry a record all on her own, even if I'm hoping it's just the start of even better things going forward. 6.5/10

Silence Is Loud - Nia Archives

I'll admit, of all 5 of the artists I'm covering today Nia is the one I was the least familiar with going into her debut. Her name popped up frequently as her distinctive style of drum and bass and jungle commanded by her own vocal presence and songwriting struck a chord with music fans on her early EPs. If that sounds familiar, it's because I covered Kenya Grace's debut album earlier this year. While the styles of dance music the two are adopting differ slightly in aesthetic and drastically in energy, I was hoping Nia could surprise me with as promising of a debut as Kenya did. 

The records final single Cards On The Table pops up early in the tracklist and in my opinion it shows off exactly what the appeal to Nia Archives is. With cascading drum and bass soaring brightly in the background she serves up a shockingly sweet vocal performance weaving around catchy refrains with her distinct vocal presence. Nia's biggest his Forbidden Feelingz has been out for three full years now and yet I think it's the sharpest and most flavorful embrace of dance music that the record has to offer. Even if its prescence on a debut feels a bit silly given the level of exposure it's already reached in the meantime, I'm still always happy when I hear it. Elsewhere on the record songs like Nightmares, Crowded Roomz and () also show off Nia's ability to weave her personality and emotions into these punchy tracks.

But that's where the record can sometimes slip up. The production is strangely inconsistent, with certain moments of the instrumentation feeling absolutely smothering when it really should be Nia's voice taking point. But elsewhere there are times where I really just want the thumping beats as front and center as possibly but they're frustratingly coy. I also think the record suffers from similar issues to Kenya Grace's where the extent of these instrumentals is still relatively limited. Certain songs on Silence Is Loud feel like less interesting remakes of singles that preceded the record. Regardless though, Nia is certainly an artist worth looking out for. Her ability to use her impassioned vocals to command these often rambunctious and dancy instrumentals is impressive and when her songs are at their absolute brightest it's irresistible. Even on a debut album that seems to run out of ideas, she's a force I find myself unable to look away from. 6/10