The New Jersey singer-songwriter’s five-song EP tries out different frames for her strikingly powerful voice, variously exploring reggaetón, futuristic Americana, and psychedelic club pop.
Don’t operate heavy machinery while listening to Ambar Lucid: Just a couple releases into her career, the songwriter has already demonstrated a natural talent for songs equally capable of distracting your thoughts and seizing control of your physical movements. The New Jersey musician started out with a sort of soft-psych R&B on her debut, 2019’s Dreaming Lucid, which skewed more toward singer-songwriter introspection than pop spectacle. But on last year’s Garden of Lucid, she embraced more luxurious beats and dove into the low end, opening a portal to a sleek alternate dimension. Both contexts served to illuminate her wonderful voice: lethally sharp and surprisingly hefty, slicing cleanly through the open air with just the slightest vibrato, like a javelin.
Lucid’s new release sharpens the portrait of a young songwriter ravenously building a repertoire of frames for her voice. The five-song EP probes five different directions, ranging from Mazzy Star cosplay (“Space Cowgirl”) to movimiento (“Un Animal (Divina Existencia)”) to a song about falling in love with a lizard that sounds like she’s singing from inside a video game (“Lizard”). (Los Angeles duo the Wavys produced the majority of the EP, save for “Un Animal (Divina Existencia),” produced by Julian Cruz and Kel777.) The distance between a song like the vulnerable Dreaming Lucid standout “Eyes” and Get Lost in the Music’s funk-filthy closing track, “The Door,” is far enough to suggest an artist who is still trying to figure out who she is, but somehow Lucid never sounds lost. You get the same sense when she flips easily between Spanish and English, even rhyming the two languages with each other and basically code-switching mid-verse: The 20-year-old wants to try it all, and she can get comfortable anywhere.
The EP rides waves of sheer fervor and endurance. At every turn, Lucid sounds passionate in pursuit of the perfect song, young and restless and incapable of letting up for even a single four-bar section. Her pivot from the first verse to the refrain of “Lizard” is a perfect example: One moment she’s practically bulletproof, rap-singing in staccato bursts and letting her worries bounce off the beat. In the next, she retreats so fully into a softer, hypnotized voice, you’re convinced that this lizard whose presence she dissolves in must be as magical as she says—and that she must have met its gaze in that split second.
Get Lost’s one true shortcoming is that its lyrics aren’t as satisfyingly strange or emotionally evocative as Lucid is capable of writing. (She definitely does not lack a talent for lines that you keep turning over in your head; I’m still trying to pin down “Without you, I don’t know what I would cease to do,” from “Eyes.”) She instead favors some slightly cheaper psychedelic signals: She is “traveling through space and time” on the opener; she urges you to wake up on “Un Animal (Divina Existencia)” and to “get lost in the music with me” on the title track. That last one sounds tailor-made for the club, but instead of racking up vodka Red Bulls, she meets a psilocybin god who schools her in ego death: “Magic mushrooms singing to me/Telling me all of the answers are in front of me.”
In the era of streaming and playlists, the distinction between EPs and LPs might be losing its meaning entirely. But the five-track package still can still be the perfect vehicle for a significant artistic step forward, when not treated as a collection of scraps or between-albums stopover, and instead given proper autonomy and attention (as Sofia Kourtesis did, for example, on her recent Fresia Magdalena). Get Lost in the Music feels more like the toe-dipping that precedes that stride than the step itself: Lucid seems to be trying on some new outfits here, testing which styles suit her best, with one eye on herself and one eye on her next move. Not one of them looks like a bad fit right now.
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