On “Big Boy”—the opening track of her debut album, Dopamine—Normani makes it clear she’s arrived. “Only ever see this type of shit in the movies,” she sings over blaring horns and clattering percussion. “Only ever see this type of shit once in your life.” Taken in combination with the striking album artwork, which sees Normani strapped to a shiny black rocket, it’s a statement of intent: Normani is finally ready for launch.
“Finally” because, as any Normani fans know, it’s been a long road to lift-off. First rising to fame as part of Fifth Harmony—the girl group that became The X Factor’s greatest success, selling nearly 15 million units in the United States alone—Normani appeared to be the member best equipped to become a solo success, thanks to her exacting taste and jaw-dropping abilities as a dancer and performer. And, with a handful of collaborative singles that hit the top 10, as well as the Max Martin-produced banger “Motivation,” which received critical acclaim for its power-pop sound and Y2K-throwback video, she came out of the gate swinging.
Yet as the years rolled on, the distance between Normani’s beginnings as a solo artist—she first announced an album was on the way six years ago—and the release of said album has been the subject of heated discussion. (Indeed, the URL for the website announcing Dopamine winkingly reads wheresthedamnalbum.com.) More recently, it emerged that the delays were due, in part, to both of her parents being diagnosed with cancer, prompting a period when Normani’s focus was, understandably, trained on her family and not her career. (They have both since recovered.) Yet the enthusiasm of her fans around the project has never abated—a fact that she’s grateful for. “It’s been a journey of endurance, so I’m most excited about finishing what I started, finally,” she tells Vogue of releasing the album.
Finish it she has, and then some. Dopamine is packed to the rafters with genre-bending hits that nod to the heyday of some of Normani’s biggest influences: the thundering percussion of Timbaland, the effortlessly raunchy wordplay of Missy Elliott, the silky-smooth vocals of Brandy. (The latter even makes an appearance on the standout track “Insomnia,” her feathery ad-libs threaded through the background.) But it also showcases Normani’s more vulnerable side, not least on the atmospheric James Blake collab “Tantrums,” which charts the dissolution of a relationship over reverb-laden synths and skittering beats. It turns out Dopamine was more than worth the wait—and with its rollercoaster ride through the history of R&B, it fully lives up to the euphoric promise of its title.