SiR’s stately croon exudes grown-and-sexy. The Inglewood, California, R&B singer-songwriter’s style is careful and studied, influenced by the timelessness of Stevie Wonder and John Mayer’s sensitive edge. His 2019 release, Chasing Summer, was a gauzy yarn that still holds up in the field of modern R&B. With its bounce and levity, the LP balanced odes to good weed, chasing skirts, and the city he loves with fleeting explorations of discomfort. He had a jazzy attitude in a landscape that skewed pop, establishing himself as an artist with a texture all his own. He stood as a man in control.
Nearly five years later, his latest album, Heavy, comes with a bevy of admissions that SiR, in fact, has had a lot of growing to do. Even as he’s honed what’s become a hallmark sound, his inner turmoil spills into the world around him, and he spends the album trying to trace its paths. When talking about Heavy in 2022, he suggested that it comes from becoming a better husband, a father, and a mentally healthier person. You can hear these obligations pulling him toward the light. “You make me wanna be a better man,” he sings on the smitten single “Nothing Even Matters,” which he’s said is the best song he’s ever made about his wife.
“Nothing Even Matters” is nestled toward the end of the track list, which sees SiR go from carefree ne’er-do-well to hopeless fuck-up to man-in-progress. That he can’t quite figure out how to quit bad habits like benders and breaking hearts makes the album both uneasy, and — as he asserts in one of the album’s best songs — “Only Human.”
SiR is at his best on Heavy when he can complement his arsenal of classic production — funky bass lines, regal horns, boom-bap drums, his own heavenly harmony stacks, and his signature smoky guitars — with empathetic songwriting that builds out the lives of people who matter to one another. However, the songs’ strong moods can often be more communicative than their lyrics; he can conjure an internal battle, but the forces he’s up against are less well-drawn, leaving you to wonder why he’s struggling so much to be faithful and accountable. “No Evil” oozes discontent, with vocal contortions from SiR that are new and haunting, but it’s also tough to parse, an incoherent swirl of mythological and celebrity tropes.
This lack of clarity can be a common obstacle between artist and audience when musicians class a project as being particularly vulnerable, as SiR has with this one. Yet, while Heavy lacks the depth of storytelling that might’ve crystallized his stakes to strangers, it’s a solid showing of his undeniable style.
