“Chief Don’t Run” was my favorite of Jidenna’s singles before this album, and it still stands out as a highlight of the album. “A Bull’s Tale” is the opening credits for Jidenna, and it gets its point across-he’s The Chief.

This track is appropriately dramatic, showcasing Jidenna’s lyricism and storytelling abilities and highlighting them with production that sounds like something from a war movie. The album opens with the appropriately mythic “A Bull’s Tale,” featuring with a monolog from Uncle Palmwine (MC Chief Obi), before giving way to a great percussive beat. Who knows what the next album is going to look like now? (I’m hoping it’s two hours of him staring in a mirror and gassing himself up via verse, but that’s just me.) Which, in all reality, is nuts coming from a debut album-usually you have to wait until the second album to see how an artist grows and develops over time. “Knickers,” in particular, really suffers because the excellent wordplay of the verses set a bar too high for the chorus to maintain.īut Jidenna seems to have realized this with The Chief, compiling songs that all seamlessly blend and blur articulate verses with witty hooks, tight production, and a creative structure. Look at the singles that didn’t make it onto this album, “Extraordinaire” and “Knickers,” in each case the verses completely overshadow everything else on the track. Jidenna is a shockingly talented lyricist, with a chameleon-like flow to boot, so when he’s tried to fit himself into a pop-song structure, the chorus usually suffers. The most commendable choice Jidenna makes here is in his distinction from typical pop stylings.

The album overall, though, is better characterized by the recent singles “Bambi” and “The Let Out,” with their easygoing flow, light production, and addictive hooks. The Chief, like most of Jidenna’s work so far, is a breezy, enjoyable time, bookmarked only by heavy-hitting tracks like “Chief Don’t Run,” “Long Live the Chief,” or “2 Points,” that showcase Jidenna’s superior lyricism. This is also the first full-length to come to us from Janelle Monae’s promising Wondaland Records label, and they couldn’t have picked a better debut than this.

After blowing up onto the scene with 2015’s Classic Man, Jidenna has finally brought us a full-length album, The Chief.

Jidenna the chief album