Hit The Right Spot

Ari Lennox “Pressure”

There’s a lot to find charming about “Pressure” – the pleasing curls of the melody, Ari Lennox’s coy delivery, the light and relaxed tone of the groove – but the thing that puts this song over the top for me is a small detail. It’s the way a small snippet of vocal sample is dropped in as sort of punctuation, an unintelligible but raw and raspy vocal that contrasts sharply with Lennox’s more silky vocal tone. It’s deployed brilliantly but sounds like it might have started as a happy accident, like some stray fragment that happened to fall at the right spot of a ProTools session. It’s an unexpected texture that grabs the ear and highlights the best qualities of Lennox’s voice while nodding towards a more uninhibited style as an aspirational state. In a song where Lennox is coaching a guy on exactly how to fuck her, it comes across like establishing a goal – “I want you to get me there.”

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