You Can’t Kill Me

070 Shake’s tormented, cathartic blend of rap and R&B was a thrilling anomaly in 2020, when a pair of star-turn guest features on GOOD Music albums led to her striking debut, Modus Vivendi. Two years later, Shake’s despairing, rafters-reaching voice still holds the same weight, but it’s accrued a more subtle context. On You Can’t Kill Me, her second album, the New Jersey singer-songwriter retains her style while also reining it in, recentering the push-and-pull of romantic anguish that lives at the heart of her music through a more muted delivery. Here, her sound is full of keening synths, electric guitars, and heavy drum beats, furnished by co-executive producer and regular collaborator Dave Hamelin. Even Shake’s delivery is more measured on You Can’t Kill Me, as she reaches for mumbled melodies rather than shout-along choruses, but her woozy, plaintive songwriting doesn’t lose its intoxicating touch.

You Can’t Kill Me is at its best when it offers surprising, welcome wrinkles to Shake’s sound. “Vibrations” opens with over a minute of echoing, ambient vocal experimentation before pivoting into triumphant, head-nodding rap-pop; “Blue Velvet” coasts on breezy, bossa nova strings and hand percussion, a deviation in style that Shake uses for a tormented ballad about a lover’s dress. On the sultry “Body,” a co-production between Dave Sitek and Mike Dean, Héloïse Letissier of Christine and the Queens offers a punchy counterbalance, matching her low-key vocals with Shake’s to evoke the pangs of physical attraction. Yet she rarely stays in a contented frame of mind for long before the eventual spiral. “I wanted your body,” Shake insists in a frayed, last-ditch plea, “but it came with your soul.”

Like Modus Vivendi, most of the lyrics on You Can’t Kill Me focus on difficult heartache and self-reflection, but here she comes to sharper realizations about becoming another source of her own pain. “I wanna drink all night and stay inside/I think I been the problem,” she croons on early standout “Invited,” the words sparse against a billowing, delicately plucked melody. The album traces a loose arc toward moving on from a past flame. By “Vibrations,” a confident Shake is ready to bet on herself and reach the other side: “You will never lead me to where you want me.”

The contemplation and growth takes You Can’t Kill Me a little deeper than her past work, but sometimes the softened vocal delivery underscores her weaker songwriting. Songs vacillate between affecting ruminations on romantic confusion and mushy philosophical musings. On the frictionless “Wine and Spirits,” a dirgey ballad about how fame has deteriorated a relationship, she fumbles over repeated clumsy phrasing. “Yin and the yang is more than just a symbol,” she trills beneath melodramatic peals of guitar. “Life is ’bout balance, war and harmony.” The koan-like setups frustratingly hinder the album’s more gripping moments of self-examination.

Whether in art or in life, Shake appears exceedingly aware of impending criticism. “It don’t matter what you’re doin’/People gonna judge you too,” she warns on “Come Back Home.” Plainspokenness is part of her charm; she sings from the heart of whatever anxious moment is troubling her. On the tense highlight “Cocoon,” she proves it—over a hypnotic, nervous synth line, she describes coming into her own through the uneasy process of outgrowing a partner. “Why you didn’t grow now I don’t know/It’s making me so emotional,” she sings with coolly detached restraint, just before the song detonates with an earthshaking bassline at the last word. Even when she sounds like she’s nearing the end of her rope, Shake stabilizes the chaos with a sharp sense of control.

070 Shake: You Can’t Kill Me

$15 at Rough Trade