In 2021, an unlikely song emerged as a contender for song of the year—Vector and Goodgirl LA’s Early Momo, a sinuous love song that skillfully evokes the feeling of a freshly budding love story. In the video, the pair cozy up on a fluffy bed draped with white sheets, behind the kitchen counter bathed in an orange glow, in the living room, on the floor, huddled over a laptop and an improvised studio set up, exchanging loving stares. As Vector sings into the microphone, his eyes crumbling under the weight of his affection, Goodgirl LA runs her bedazzled fingers over his thigh, her bottom lip curling inwards in a sly smile. It’s a feeling we can all relate to, either through lived experience or vicariously through the myriad romance films or reality shows that line our screens. This is the impression we’re left with of Goodgirl LA before she embarked on a hiatus. She’s an enthusiastic champion for love, whose feathery vocal textures and name suggest a charming innocence.
Goodgirl, the titular opening track of her latest EP, presents a starkly contrasted version of the singer. A soft brooding melody rises, staccato keys leap out of the somber composition, “I was never looking for love in Lagos,” she gently intones. Later in the song, over the chorus, she sings “Cos’ my brain don burst and my eyes don tear, I no be good girl again/ Good girl really gone bad/ I’ve gone too deep I can never turn back.” Here, at the entry point to the album, she lays bare the central animating force of the album which is that in the intervening period between her last release and this project, something fundamental has changed: she has been shorn of her innocence and, in return, been bestowed with a disillusioned, almost cynical, view of the world.
We hear this in her voice, sodden with emotion, somewhere between rage and wistfulness, as she sings “Don’t know where I lost my conscience, maybe na for TBS, can’t find it, can’t find it.” This metamorphosis or change of form is not only visible in her lyrics, it pervades every facet of the album. In the visual trailer to the project, she’s splayed on a white bed, whose brightness seems almost perverse in the dark room she’s situated in. The room stretches into infinity, faint glows from far-flung galaxies whispering to her from the distance. “In that moment,” a disembodied voice rumbles, “the past doesn’t haunt it guides.” What do these words mean and what might they bring to bear in our parsing of the album? Her aesthetic has also undergone bracing change. No longer the chipper, braid-wearing ingenue, she now wears black, silky wigs with roughly cut bangs. Colors, save for the occasional beige or red, have been sucked out of her wardrobe, leaving a selection of black outfits that range from futuristic to erotic.
When in Giga, an emotionally-charged song in which she plumbs topics such as her androgyny and being written off by certain people, she sings “I be weirdo, I be darkhorse,” an unvarnished statement of identity, it hits with the forcefulness of a supersonic train. Not because they’re especially profound but because, viewed against the other layers of the album, these words pack sizzling urgency and irreverent candor. The storytelling on the album is sublime, evoking vivid scenes and snapshots from the singer’s life. In the second verse of Giga, she jettisons the cavalier swagger of the first verse for a more vulnerable disposition and shares affecting anecdotes from her life. Alluding to her hiatus, she sings about how people told her to give up and return to school. “Me wey I stubborn, stubborn pass malu,” is her rebuttal.
While the album confidently takes on mammoth themes—rising above life’s obstacles, identity, and coming into one’s own person—it’s not shy of moments of unfettered fun. Gbesoun, a party starter replete with slinky, earworm melodies hand-crafted by Andre Vibez, opens with “I be party animal chopping all their rhythms like ofe,” portending the exulting atmosphere that will soon follow. In Buss It, where she excavates the ruins of a relationship that imploded due to her conceit, she skillfully surfs a Sexy Drill beat, layering it with quick-fire flows and cheeky lyrics. The result is a thumping party starter. If this album was intended as a bold reintroduction, after a protracted hiatus, then it succeeds brilliantly. In Goodgirl, the theme of metamorphosis, of evolution, is not cosmetic, we feel it palpably in every line she trots out and the spectrum of soaring melodies that populate the project’s universe.
