Last year, Katy B was widely credited for bringing vocal finesse and feminine pop appeal to an increasingly aggro dubstep-crossover arena. She dropped a fantastic Benga-backed debut single, "Katy on a Mission", that vocally wrung out both elation and longing over his abrasive, buzzing stutter-step. And she kept that streak going with a couple of guest spots on Magnetic Man's self-titled record: The eerie come-on "Crossover" and the ecstatic jungle throwback "Perfect Stranger" were album highlights that proved her voice could breach the barrier of heavy-duty bass and plant its feet firmly atop it. Two UK top 5 hits later-- "Katy on a Mission" and the Ms. Dynamite collaboration "Lights On"-- and members of the English music press started to peg her as the next singer to bring crossover legitimacy to bass music.
Turns out that'd be selling her a bit short. After pairing up with Rinse FM's tastemaker station head Geeneus and co-producer Zinc, Katy B has used On a Mission as a chance to posit herself as a genre-spanning pop singer who isn't tied down to a single thing, no matter how well it suits her. It's a move that makes a lot of sense, since versatility is the key to a good dance album-- let the voice establish itself, and the niche will either find itself or get broadened in the process. "Katy on a Mission", "Lights On", and "Perfect Stranger" reappear here in radio-edit lengths, and these three tracks help define her as someone who can play off dubstep and funky basslines with a tone that drips with cool defiance, stings with melancholy, and still grabs at you when it's being reduced to a skeletal echo. But there's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else.
The big standout here is "Broken Record", a four-on-the-floor thump with electro underpinnings and a breakdown that perks up longtime dance fans with a judiciously dropped "Amen" break. It's one of those club-tested/radio-ready tracks that sounds good anywhere, not out of focus-grouped button-pushing but the way Katy sells it: coyly yearning and melodically sweet on the verse, intense and swooping on the chorus, wracked with ambiguity throughout. And then she finds another gear when the song finally shifts into the titular hook near the end-- the way she rolls her delivery of the line "like-a-bro-ken rec-ooooord" is the stuff that song-length buildups were made for. And there's more of that going around on the other new tracks, laid out in a number of different modes-- the trapped yet defiant punchback of opener "Power on Me", the sour resentment of "Why You Always Here", the slyly perilous seduction that drives "Witches Brew". It's a repertoire that gives her the appeal of a 1990s rave diva with contemporary pop-R&B refinement, minus the Auto-Tune.