By Devyn Tammons

Seeing a career resurgence of late, the pop/R&B icon’s 9th studio album has more than a few head scratching moments.

Usher Raymond has been making music professionally for nearly 30 years since his debut “Usher” in 1994. He’s been a household name since “Confessions” took the world by storm 20 years ago in 2004 (and maybe even before that). His talent has always been apparent, from dancing to his incredible voice, he was born to be a star. And for all intents and purposes, he has been. Though he might have slightly fallen out of the overall pop culture zeitgeist for a brief moment, in 2024 he’s as big as ever. From an iconic Tiny Desk Performance in the summer on 2022, to a couple of Vegas residencies in 2022 and ’23, to headlining Super Bowl LVIII , it’s hard to go anywhere without hearing his name lately. With just a couple of days set before headlining the biggest show of the year, Usher then announces a 24-leg nation-wide tour and releases his 9th album. “Home Coming” is a fitting name for an album all things considered, of but does the record actually live up to it?

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is: not really. Despite everything that’s mentioned above, “Coming Home’s” biggest infraction is that it feels lazy and uninspired. The core of what makes Usher great is still very much there, though you have to dig through a lot of bloat and junk to find it. Sadly, even Usher Raymond is not immune to current pop trends, such as sampling, flipping, and reworking older pop songs (akin to “I’m Good (Blue)” by David Guetta and Bebe Rexha). He does this to Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” and turns it into “A-Town Girl”, which, funnily enough features Latto who is also guilty of doing this with her song “Big Energy”. Of course, sampling has been a staple in hip-hop for decades now, and when done right (producers such as The Alchemist or Kanye West are masters of this) can elevate a song to new heights. But this feels different. Using the same exact melody and just changing the lyrics a bit doesn’t add any value to the new song nor the original.

The songwriting on the record leaves much to be desired. “BIG”, the 11th track on the album is the biggest offender of this here. With a poor beat and lyrics such as, “When I was a kid I would go to McDonald’s, I would never order the small, I would get it big,” easily being some of the worst of his career. It highlights the root of the problem with the record – it desperately needed an editor. It needed someone to tell Usher “no”, and to not indulge in every half-baked idea he had. A perfect example is putting a song from the motion picture “The Color Purple” seven tracks in, which is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the album and ruins what little flow it had and is an obvious ploy to boost streaming and sales numbers. The same goes for ending the album with the remix of “Standing Next To You”, a song by Korean K-Pop sensation Jungkook. It’s admittedly pretty catchy, but again just does not fit.

Songs such as “Keep On Dancin’” and “Stone Kold Freak” aren’t actually half bad, and sounds like something that maybe could’ve fit on an older album such as “Here I Stand” or “Raymond vs Raymond”. They highlight what the record could have been, had it had a little bit more focus. In the end, “Coming Home” is a 20 track, hour and six minute long record that does very little to justify that runtime. Despite the eight year gap between records, it’s clear very little time and effort was actually put into it. It’s incredible what Usher has been able to accomplish up to this point in his career and his legacy is set, but when we look back on his career decades from now, “Coming Home” will likely be long forgotten.

Rating: 3/10