Erika de Casier is Deliciously Uncomplicated on Lifetime

It’s been a year since we last heard from Erika de Casier, the Portugal-born, Copenhagen-bred singer and producer. Her 2024 album Still was a love letter to the 2000s—to the prime days of Aaliyah, Mýa, and mid-career Janet Jackson, where her singing was very head-register, vibrating, and close-mic’d. So much of it was light and beautiful, sweetly and sensually entrenched in the not-so-yesterday flourishes of Black club music and Afrofuturism. As far as Danish pop music goes, “Lucky” and “Test It” are some of the finest places your curiosity can reach. And de Casier has honed her collaborative craft recently too, working with NewJeans on “Super Shy” and They Hate Change on “Ice” before making “Bikini,” one of last year’s best songs, with Nick León. But her new self-produced album Lifetime, released as a “surprise” last week—though folks were talking about it online at least a month before it hit streaming—props de Casier up by her lonesome, letting her MTV-inspired, Y2K-revivalist heart simmer in the playful slipperiness of her own cosmic rendezvous.

Lifetime isn’t a complete departure from de Casier’s dance-pop urges either, but a lot of these songs take cues from ‘90s trip-hop—but don’t think Portishead or Massive Attack here; the down-tempo breakbeats are far more two-step than sensationally jazz. Think Ray of Light, not Dummy. Written between August 2023 and November 2024, de Casier’s melodrama on Lifetime is nocturnal and chewy, rich in trance yet deliciously uncomplicated. There are even moments on the record, especially “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Miss,” where de Casier takes melodica notes and injects them with a rap-hued, electronic recreation of a hazy Frou Frou joint. There’s a raw template present too, as the music flirts with hi-fi spotlessness while noodling gently in the pockets of imperfection. On “You Got It!,” the samples are buried in the mix; on “Delusional,” synths wander beneath a creamy, ‘90s hip-hop expanse. You can hear the air in these songs.

“Lifetime” warms itself up with gratitude from post-breakup clarity. “It lingers in my body when I realize that love is all we have,” de Casier sings, just moments after recalling the blue sky on the day of her birth. She addresses her love interest and her younger self, offering grace to the latter, a warning to the former, and an embrace to both: “Spent a lifetime looking for you.” The Cypress Hill-sampling record scratch at the dawn of “Delusional” opens the door for a boom-bap backline that flutters in reverse, while “The Garden” and “Two Thieves” compile sexy and sharp textures of nirvana. de Casier’s “Insane in the Membrane” interests linger in the cushiony “December,” a moodboard of psychedelic coos and sonic renewal. Drunk on closeness, it’s a sultry side of the singer-producer we’ve come to know quite well. In the lyric sheet for Lifetime, de Casier even includes “:P” and “:'(” emoticons in the bliss of her wine-bottom vulnerability.