It was no coincidence that James Blake’s synth tempest “The Wilhelm Scream” preceded the Beats 1 rollout of Kacy Hill’s “Foreign Fields” last week. Blake built his career on minimalist digitized piano ballads and delicate, lost-in-the-woods vocals; it was spareness as aesthetic, a Kinfolk-ian complexity on musical scaffolding. So it makes sense that Kanye West, an artist who hits upon a sound he likes and subsumes it wholly (see: Coldplay, Kid Cudi, Bon Iver, Travis $cott), and has called Blake his favorite artist, would find a way to add a similar brand of austere melodica to his in-house arsenal over at G.O.O.D. Music.
Hill’s first single, “Experience”, released a few months before she signed to West’s imprint in December, is brighter, more neon, but similarly delicate in style to “Foreign Fields”. Everything hinges on her strong-as-silk falsetto. On “Foreign Fields”, it builds over a Blake-ian path of strong piano chords, a Morse patchwork of drum pads, and handclaps, before melting into the whirr and clatter of the song’s inner machinery. And from the din emerges grand design: Like Blake or Zola Jesus or Austra’s Katie Stelmanis—amongst other contemporary, classically-sculpted synth-pop acts—Hill’s spiritual predecessor is Kate Bush.