Amber

The album is loosely structured as a wayward path to self-acceptance. Mark begins with poise, vowing on “By the End of the Night” to rebound on the dancefloor. She’s quickly swooning, swathing a new paramour in her perfume on the buoyant “ooo” and going “weak in the knees” on the sprung “Sweet Serotonin.” “Too Much” features a nifty interpolation of Usher’s “My Boo” as she second-guesses her enthusiasm. “Is it too much if I’m thinking about you daily?” she sings coyly, more to herself than her crush. By the album’s end, she’s removed enough from the doomed relationship to consider her own role in its demise. “Your touch when I’m coming home/It’s a pretty idea, a pretty idea,” she croons on the title track. “Who’s the one that did you wrong?/Maybe I did, maybe I did.”

Mark doesn’t really tell stories in her songs; she lives the turmoil, her lithe vocals tracing the flutters of the heart. Survival anthem “Problems” showcases her range, her voice variously a coo, a wail, and a feathery prayer as she tries to will away stress. Folk ballad “Cherry Reds” clings to a warm memory like an heirloom: “Smoking Cherry Reds/In the trees,” Mark trills in her smooth upper register, stretching the last word into four wounded syllables. She’s just as pained on “Let Me Love You,” where her background vocals become increasingly distressed. The sticky hook—“Why won’t you let me love you?”—is an exclamation by the song’s end.

The open spaces and pained harmonies of quiet storm are the go-to style for R&B singers working through such dark nights of the soul, but that’s one tradition Pretty Idea breaks from. The core producers—Mark, One Direction songwriters Julian Bunetta and John Ryan, and duo Two Fresh—supply a dense, full-band sound. The arrangements are shimmery and lush, every little crevice filled with (at minimum) keys, synths, rhythm guitar, and background vocals. It’s as if they’ve spackled all the negative space that defined Three Dimensions Deep. When the drums drop out on “Sweet Serotonin” and “Too Much,” finger snaps reminiscent of the days when T-Pain and The-Dream ran urban radio subtly keep the meter. And on duet “Different Places,” which channels the warped funk of For All We Know, guitar melodies swell and recede as Mark and John Ryan trade woes. “You and I/Have we fallen out of love yet?/Doing all these circles/Round around the subject,” Mark sings. These songs are retro, but they’re not stagnant.

That’s a hard balance to strike. The past goes for cheap, in spirit if not actual cost (chill, JNCO). What if all the best things have already happened? What if all the sweet serotonin your brain struggles to produce because you’re too pumped full of dread and cortisol could be solved by Alien:Earth or Supreme Clientele 2 or Toy Story 5? Pretty Idea is an album about boys, of course. But I admire its regular relationship to the past. Mark presents R&B’s archives not as sacred texts or exotic loot but as context, precedent, pearls from grandma’s attic that can look nice if you style them just so. This customization is what pushes her music past pastiche. Mark’s boys are all hers.