Amber Mark has mastered the art of honoring tradition without being boxed in by it. Like Brittany Howard and Nourished by Time, she’s fluent in the grammar of both the past and the present, bending them until they serve her. The New York singer and producer has long worn her influences proudly—she’s covered Eddie Kendricks and Sade, and her music glows with the layered harmonies and satin instrumentation of ’80s soul and funk. Like the FCC-approved stars she evokes, she rarely curses and tends to ache for touch more than sex. “Hate sleeping by myself these nights/The empty space fills up my mind,” she sang on her debut, her voice blurring the edges of time; it could’ve been recorded in 1985 or last week.
Her 2022 debut, Three Dimensions Deep, framed self-discovery as a cosmic R&B odyssey—otherworldly, stylish, and searching. The following year’s EP Loosies found her loosening the controls, drifting between synth-funk, house, and narcotic sing-rap with effortless grace. Mark channels the polish of Janelle Monáe or Bruno Mars, but she makes it look easier, pulling off the same sweep with half the flash. To her, R&B’s history isn’t costume—it’s language. That fluency underpins Pretty Idea, a record that turns heartbreak and self-questioning into a compact 37-minute survey of the genre’s emotional landscape.
Asked what inspired the album, Mark just said, “Boys.” It’s both a punchline and a mission statement. Pretty Idea came after the end of a long-term relationship, but her curiosity is bigger than any breakup. What is love supposed to do? Is it meant to unmake you? Is it still essential to happiness? She doesn’t chase novelty for its own sake; the familiarity of her questions—and her grooves—is the point. Tradition isn’t an altar she kneels before but a launchpad she jumps from.
The record plays like a slow dance toward self-acceptance. She opens in recovery mode on “By the End of the Night,” promising to dance her way back to balance. Then she falls headlong again—swooning on the airy “ooo,” going “weak in the knees” on the fizzy “Sweet Serotonin.” “Too Much” flips Usher’s “My Boo” into something new and self-conscious: “Is it too much if I’m thinking about you daily?” she teases, the line looping inward. By the time she reaches the closing title track, she’s detached enough to see the full picture: “Your touch when I’m coming home/It’s a pretty idea,” she sings. “Who’s the one that did you wrong?/Maybe I did.”
Mark doesn’t narrate heartbreak so much as inhabit it. On “Problems,” she cycles through coo, wail, and whisper, as if her voice alone could undo the stress. “Cherry Reds,” a wistful folk ballad, lingers on the memory of smoking under trees, her upper register turning the last syllables into soft bruises. “Let Me Love You” grows more desperate with each repetition of its hook until it sounds like an exorcism. She sings in motion, tracing the exact shape of obsession as it breaks down.
If Three Dimensions Deep left space to float, Pretty Idea fills every corner. Mark and her co-producers—Julian Bunetta, John Ryan, and Two Fresh—build arrangements that shimmer with movement: synths, rhythm guitars, and background vocals layered until the air feels thick. Even when the drums drop out on “Sweet Serotonin” or “Too Much,” finger snaps carry the pulse, ghosting the mid-2000s era when T-Pain and The-Dream ruled radio. The duet “Different Places” channels the warped funk of For All We Know as Mark and Ryan circle each other in heartbreak: “You and I/Have we fallen out of love yet?”
That balance—between nostalgia and momentum—is what makes Pretty Idea work. The past is cheap these days, especially when retro styling can be downloaded like a plug-in. But Mark doesn’t treat R&B’s archives as museum pieces; she treats them as context, as heirlooms to wear and reshape. Pretty Idea isn’t about reviving an old sound—it’s about keeping it alive long enough to feel something real again. Mark’s boys may be fleeting, but her sense of lineage is steady, unshakeable, and entirely her own.
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