Obsession is old R&B, made new. Magic Fades pull influence from same concepts as your old favorites; lust, heartbreak, and the sweetness of new love. The hook of Obsession, is those timeless influences being heard through the distortion of a cloudy ether. It’s easy to hear bits of Prince, The-Dream, R. Kelly, and the entirety of songs teenaged girls in the early 90s cried to. There’s no shortage of syrupy sweet vocal lines and audio hugs to be had in the mist of frustration and reverb. “She Beat All The Haters” may, in fact, be an unreleased song created by Justin Bieber and neurolinguistic scientist to melt hearts and transform a girl’s virginity into a woman’s treasured memory. “Maxxed Out” at its core, epically maps the moment that a dude first gets hypnotized by a Ciara-esque body roll. The time when the sine curve from waist to hip becomes the alpha and omega of his universe. On the periphery, all of the other things that happen in a relationship.

Nine songs into Obsession, very close to the end, there’s a near formless track, “Basically Us”. The song consists of little more than wooshing space sounds, a tinkling piano that sounds like a lullaby, electronic flutes, and an echoed falsetto telling the listener “I won’t have this shit anymore”. It sounds like an abstraction of an infinite number of arguments, had by lovers at the end of their ropes, where endless frustration erupts tenderness. Everyone’s been there. Take a memory regression trip through time and flashback to your parents arguing while you were an infant; it would sound much like this song. This has all happened before, it will all happen again.

- raythedestroyer