Electronic producers have been introducing vocals into their work since time immemorial, but few have handled it with the finesse of Ikonika. On their fresh, pop-flavored album SAD, the UK artist uses their voice to flip the script and sail “as close to their final form as they’ve known,” adding a personal touch to their self-described “sad and sexy” aesthetic, all while ringing up a bar tab of South African bacardi, amapiano, and gqom in service to the club.
“This is an album travelling through seasons in your mind,” Ikonika (aka Sara Chen) says in the album notes, and the statement rings true: SAD nods both to the seasonal “winter depression” thought to be experienced by roughly two million people across the UK as well as the varied emotional states that accompany it. Stepping fully into their joint roles as songwriter, producer, and singer, SAD is Chen’s first full-length for Hyperdub in eight years (following 2017’s Distractions), having first kicked off their association with the label back in 2008, and sticking with them ever since. Many of those ‘10s innovations still show up in Chen’s sound as reference points: The DX7 log drum preset from their opening years has endured, and it resurfaces here as a staple of the amapiano genre that inspired SAD. It casts the record’s shuffling, nervous rhythms in a light-therapy-box glow; when paired with Chen’s much-loved ‘80s synth tones—which slither across the album’s retrofuturist terrain like neon snakes—the album feels fully alive.
Meanwhile, in the spirit of house, the LP’s pithy lyrics pop like affirmations: Phrases like, “I love it when I lose control” (“Drums1 [Take It]”) and “Feel it now, feel your love” (“Sense Seeker”) add uplift to its silken, melancholy soundscapes, ushering in a soft breathiness on the slinky club-pop of “Activate” and diving into ice-cool waters with interdisciplinary artist and writer Tice Cin on “Make It Better.” Other collaborators—among them Dutch grime producer JLSXND7RS and Zambian producer SHE Spells Doom—connect the threads of sci-fi and bass weight on Chen’s sound map. And only Ikonika could weave a sample of their child into a track (“WHATCHUREALLYWANT”) and make it feel like anything other than novelty. Other songs draw on Chen’s part-Egyptian heritage, employing the tabla their dad taught them as a child.
SAD was shaped by Chen’s experience as a new parent, as well as a recent autism diagnosis, but it’s also an exploration of their “reckoning with being queer and trans in public life and its reverberations”—what Chen calls “finding my voice without fear speaking first.” As SAD makes clear, the human voice can be a powerfully expressive tool, allowing you to get up in your feelings without ever leaving the dancefloor.
