We are always, it seems, overdue a Rihanna album. The Barbadian superstar is currently putting the finishing touches to an all-dancehall album, expected to drop sometime in the near future, a record that makes perfect sense. From 2010’s Man Down through to 2016’s Work duet with Drake, Rihanna has been channelling island-born sounds into mainstream US R&B, accelerating the symbiotic relationship US pop has enjoyed with its Caribbean neighbours ever since ska artists rerecorded soul and R&B hits in the 60s.

If Rihanna was planning to lob a breezy dancehall flare into the middle of the summer, someone else unexpectedly got there first: Santigold. Released unexpectedly a week ago, I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions is another record that comes as no surprise.

No mere tropical pop arriviste, the Philadelphia-born Santigold (government name: Santi White) has been repurposing dancehall and reggae since her arrival on the New York scene around 2007. Creator, her breakout single, featured a sing-song refrain that owed its cadences to the Jamaican playbook. “Me, I’m a creator/Thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place up on the radar,” she chanted.

She was also a facilitator. White mentioned in a 2012 interview that she had played Major Lazer’s dancehall-heavy Pon De Floor to Beyoncé; a sample found its way into Run the World (Girls) in 2011, expanding the superstar’s sound.

White’s vocal style gravitated easily to sing-song declamations. She grew up listening to her parents’ reggae records, and has visited Jamaica regularly since childhood; she studied music at degree level with a component on Afro-Cuban sounds. In 2008, around the time of her debut album (when she was releasing records as Santogold), she teamed up with fellow Philadelphian and air horn enthusiast Diplo (Wesley Pentz, also in Major Lazer) and put out a raucous dancehall-inclined mixtape, Top Ranking: A Diplo Dub.

Announced on Twitter the day before its release, I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions finds this eclectic artist offering up a beguiling summer tracklisting, a decade on from her debut album. The Gold Fire Sessions unexpectedly unites 10 feather-light tracks featuring syncopation and keyboard bubbles. These songs crossfade into one another as though an actual DJ-ed party were going on. More than any particular dancehall artist per se, it’s a blithe and poppy set that recalls the innocent lilt of Lily Allen’s first album, cut through with the considerations of an industry veteran trying to keep her art valid.

As long as White has been writing, she has been writing about writing, mulling what she will and won’t do for fame. I Don’t Want, the title track, lays out her manifesto once again. “I don’t want no regrets/ Wasting my time, not saying what I meant,” she sings. “I don’t even want none, let them think they won.” Her melodies tend to be playground-simple, but – unlike most pop music, with its discourse of fame at all costs – her feelings about pop tend towards a candid ambivalence.

A former A&R who has long written for other acts, White has released three albums of her own sparkling but commercially underperforming music. Her most significant title, at least as a summation of her modus operandi, is 2012’s Master of My Make Believe.

Here, though, White seems unfettered by expectation, and on a deadline. These sessions were pulled together alongside producer Dre Skull (Andrew Hershey) who has been responsible for hits by current dancehall artists Popcaan and Vybz Kartel. White and Hershey convened in the months before White was due to have twins, and White unexpectedly found herself in a flow-state; she finished the last song, Gold Fire, just weeks before the birth.

Although nothing is exactly under-produced, the governing principle remains loose. White is so sweet-sounding, you might blink and miss the commentary of songs such as Crashing Your Party (“gimme that bow, gimme that stone, gimme that rake, I’m gonna take my place”) or Gold Fire, the most fully realised piece of music here. A purring White trades lines with some barely there African-sounding guitar and a distant clatter of minimal percussion: reggae, for sure, but more a distant echo of it.

The most explicitly dancehall track by some distance is actually Don’t Blame Me, which sees White ceding half the song to the mercurial Shenseea, an up-and-coming Jamaican MC known for her gynaecological stylings. On Don’t Blame Me, Shenseea’s “body” is “clean” and “sexy”, but on her current single, Pon Mi, it’s her “pussy” that’s “clean” and “fresh”. Don’t Blame Me is a playful earworm that cuts across the grain of this album’s more thoughtful moments, an excuse for White and Shenseea to strut around in “tight shorts”, refusing to take the blame if someone else’s man happens to admire them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Listen to Santigold – Don’t Blame Me.

A close second in the dancehall stakes is Wha’ You Feel Like, another track that toys with sexual expectation with a synthesised giggle. “So you think you know what a girl like?” wonders White, eyebrow arched. “Tell me, gonna give it to me all night?” The track is barely there: just a few beats, White’s vocal – which is melody and rhythm all rolled into one – and a few whistles, ramping up the excitement.

Poppiest of all, by contrast, is Valley of the Dolls – a track buoyed by parping trumpet, whose chorus suggests Lana Del Rey after a few cannabidiol smoothies. “Look at me with the drop top back, watchin’ with your mouth open in the valley of dolls,” White trills. The reference is to Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 novel of that name about broken dreams and diet pills, made into a movie in 1967.

According to White, a handful of these tracks have been half-finished for a while, dating from previous sessions with Diplo, or with Ricky Blaze, the dancehall producer who co-authored Santigold’s awesome 2012 single, Disparate Youth.

The internet is full of discussions about the difference between mixtapes (usually free, the better to use samples) and albums (paid-for, or streamed, and more expensive to produce), and whether the notionally more free-wheeling mixtape, with its lashed-together brio, might often eclipse its more official sibling format. There is plenty of grey overlap: I Don’t Want is one of those mixtapes you can buy.

Without disrespecting Santigold’s previous output, however, it feels as though I Don’t Want might be a case of the right set at the right time. The Gold Fire Sessions takes advantage of the spontaneity afforded by rapidly music consumption, by catching another dancehall wave at the precise moment it crests.

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