Ingénue by KD Lang

Ingénue, k.d. lang's second solo album, came out on Sire and Warner Bros. in 1992, and it finds the Canadian singer leaving the country-leaning sound of her earlier records for a smoky, late-night room. Ben Mink, her producer and collaborator, dubbed it "post-nuclear cabaret" and pointed to Marlene Dietrich as a major vocal touchstone for lang at the time; even the sepia sleeve, with lang gazing downward beneath thin, elegant lettering, tips its hat to a Dietrich collection.

That mezzo-soprano is the whole show: velvety, unhurried, curling around slow-burning songs that take their sweet time getting where they're going. "Constant Craving" is the one everybody knows, a swaying, hypnotic sigh of a song. The album became the biggest pop-chart success of her career, at home in Canada and around the world.

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