Dolled-up Brooklyn R&B singer Ian Isiah is a sex-positive star-in-waiting. His glam image and pansexual appeal work in tandem with his raunchy songs, panty droppas with a nod to the progressive. His music relishes overabundance, matching a voracious sexual appetite with wondrous, multi-tracked layers of Auto-Tuned artificiality. His voice is often distorted to the point of near androgyny, and he sees his look—invoking what Little Richard called “the gay thing” in an interview used as a skit here—as a political act of subversion. Isiah’s new project, his first in five years, called Shugga Sextape Vol. 1, is a showcase of casual attractions and titillating thrills.
Isiah came up in New York City’s GHE20GOTH1K scene, known for its mix of hip-hop culture and electronic music, and he is both a carrier and a product of that style. Produced largely by electronic producer Sinjin Hawke, Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 hedges toward the dancefloor, with icy synths and bump-n’-grind-worthy rhythms that venture as far as dancehall. He can flip into “Love in This Club”-levels of horny excess or turn a bedroom scene into ceremonial sex magic with the erotic dream logic of Eyes Wide Shut.
Isiah’s 2013 debut, The Love Champion, packed the steamy R&B of The-Dream into club-forward electronica. It was obvious he had pipes just like Terius Nash, but he wasn’t quite as sharp as a songwriter. But the songcraft was functional, and the songs almost whimsically lewd. If nothing else, that project sketched out the idea of what he wanted his music to sound like, serving as a blueprint for what has followed. Where his old songs blindly tried to reimagine what Jeremih sex jams might feel like produced by someone like Hudson Mohawke, his new songs are like transmissions from an alternate universe where the sensual and the divine not only commingle but are worshipped at the same altar.
Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 doesn’t just sound sexier; it sounds more self-assured. Isiah, having performed alongside Blood Orange for years, now seems to relish the spotlight. His growing command of Auto-Tune allows him to paint with a much broader color palette. The stunning pageantry of “Bleach Report” layers his vocals as if he’s being backed back a choir, his voice refracting like light catching a colorless diamond. Throughout the ménage à trois paen “Bedroom,” Isiah’s glazed warbles melt into synth arpeggios, and he sounds completely in control dictating positions, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out who exactly he is addressing. “Killup” mixes whine-friendly dancehall with a capella, dropping out the snares so he can make a pitch-corrected sentence seem like one run-on word.
The nonstop shape-warping shimmer that distorts images for much of Shugga Sextape Vol. 1 clears for a two-song serenade at the close, and the purity of Isiah’s crystalline vocals really shines through. In these instances, he makes the erotic feel like gospel. And it is in that contradiction, where sex becomes spiritual, that Ian Isiah seems to prophesy R&B’s future.
