One wonders if her journey to this point could be traced to her use of singing bowls, the ringing therapeutic instruments that line the undercurrent of the album, and that she's started to include in her live performances.Īiko plays the bowls under every song on Chilombo, most often a single note in the background that coordinates with a certain chakra. As she chants on the penultimate track, "It ain't perfect, but everything's beautiful," the song petering off into twinkling bells. "That print in them sweatpants got me weak off in my knees," goes an incredible line from " Happiness Over Everything (H.O.E.)" which fittingly features Miguel and Future.īut the general sense one gets bobbing through Chilombo's expansive, lo-fi-saturated waters, is that Aiko has finally reached the shores of some kind of equilibrium. And, of course, an Aiko album wouldn't be complete without its unabashed dispatches from the bedroom. " Triggered (freestyle)" flips the colloquially-used insult into a genuine and valid emotion: "You muhfuckin' right I'm triggered," she spits. Whereas Trip was Aiko's psychedelic meditation on death and coping, Chilombo finds Aiko taking a step forward as a more healed, and freed, being. Every song began as a raw freestyle, and it was only after her return to Los Angeles she added polish to the tracks, recruiting an eclectic and robust roster of features: Future, Miguel, John Legend, H.E.R., and more. As Aiko softly explains, she laid the foundation of the 56-minute project during a months-long stay on the Big Island of Hawaii - a pilgrimage made after Aiko discovered that one of her family members could trace their genealogy there. We are here to experience Chilombo, her latest record, out now, that's been in the works since 2017's Trip. With her back turned to the room of journalists and industry insiders, the 31-year-old R&B singer dressed head-to-toe in a silvery spacesuit swivels around in her chair to face an intimidating spread of buttons, knobs, and screens this afternoon she is the one manning the soundboard. On a frigid January day in a nondescript studio in Manhattan's Soho, Jhené Aiko is calmly lighting a stick of incense.
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