Solange offers a fundamental lesson of those who leave: Home isn’t something you can possess, it lives on without you. Although Houston is the beating heart at its core, much like New Orleans pulsed through A Seat, the music’s spectral, free-associative quality suggests that the idea of “home” is less rooted. Three years after releasing the soul-baring opus A Seat at the Table, Solange has ditched traditional song structure and world-weary lyrics for a sonically and thematically ambiguous record that feels freer, and less burdened by the white gaze. And snatches of vocals from hometown rappers Devin the Dude and Scarface float like murmurs from passing car windows. Black cowboys gallop through the dusk-the clip of hooves a drumbeat. Synthesizers and samples ricochet off the tall, empty office buildings of downtown Houston, reverberating to the heavens. See-sawing bass booms from phantom slabs, wood-grained and candy-painted per local tradition. It’s not literal objectification of the past so much as a future memory of the city, an ephemeral mental grid. Now we have music and an accompanying short film that reconstructs the Houston of Solange’s mind. At the time of the interview, we didn’t know the name of the record, When I Get Home, which indicates that this is an album about return. In a T Magazine interview with Solange published last fall, writer Ayana Mathis described the making of the new album as taking the singer back to “a kind of Houston of the mind.” It’s a city that figures heavily in Knowles family mythology as the birthplace of Solange and her sister.

When i get home singer