Caylene is quickly earning herself a well-deserved fanbase for her enriching R&B tunes. late calls is her most recent, not to mention one of her best.
Caylene is a 22-year-old songwriter from Australia, dead new to the scene. Channeling the blasé cool of Doja Cat or SZA, her tunes are contemporary R&B refined to a tee; 808s, heartbreak, and all.
Like so much soulful music before it, late calls pulls from the artist’s experience with relationships, desire, and heartbreak. As potent a cocktail as ever, those feelings are given wind by a backdrop of well-picked samples and lush production.
late calls is catchy from Caylene’s first bar, kicking things off with the chorus hook. Her vocals are more exploratory than ever, twisting above and below her backing track, giving the audience a taste of high, a taste of low, and every note in between.
The production has a classic R&B feel to it, tightened up for 2021’s streaming-era perfectionism. It’s a beat that’s warm enough to have come out of a hardware sampler, but crystal clear where it needs to be – the lows especially. Who doesn’t love a distorted 808, anyway?
Young Nato is who Caylene penned for the production on Late Calls, and fair to say, he’s done a bang-up job. It’s the perfect canvas for Caylene to strut her stuff amongst, and the confidence from both parties simply bleeds through.
If you’re a fan of Drake or early-days FKA Twigs, there’s a good chance you’ll be into Caylene as well. At the very least, it’s grand to know that there’s talented individuals like her making R&B that sounds truly international from their homes in Australia.
late calls is out now.
