Scenery by Emily King

Emily King needed a change of scenery, so she went and got one. Her third album, Scenery, came out on ATO Records on February 1, 2019, her first for the label, and it was made far from the New York City streets she grew up on, in a garage in the Catskill Mountains that she and producer Jeremy Most turned into a studio. Most had worked with her on 2015's The Switch, and the reunion pays off in a record that glides between pop, R&B and neo soul, with dream-pop haze, post-disco bounce and flickers of gospel, jazz and tropical color.

Much of it is about shaking off an old love while falling into a new one. "Look at Me Now" taunts a lover with spiteful glee, a bright xylophone and funk guitar straight out of the Queen playbook, and it drew a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Song, while the album itself was up for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. The closer, "Go Back", circles round to the move out of the city.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.