Eight years disappear the moment Miguel opens his mouth. The Los Angeles crooner—equal parts R&B sensualist and guitar-slinging futurist—returns with CAOS, an album that sounds less like a reinvention than a reaffirmation. Since his 2010 breakout “Sure Thing,” Miguel Jontel Pimentel has thrived in the liminal space between sweat-soaked intimacy and cosmic wonder, his voice fluttering from a devotional whisper to a falsetto built to part the heavens. Where many of his post-Usher peers chased virality or the next bedroom anthem, Miguel dove inward, treating the studio as his chapel. CAOS, his first full-length since 2017’s War & Leisure, confirms what’s always been true about him: he doesn’t chase trends; he shapeshifts around them.
Despite its title, CAOS is an elegantly controlled combustion. The opening track, a shimmering overture co-produced with Ray Brady, splices the MUSYCA Children’s Choir into a spectral backdrop of Spanish murmurs and acoustic guitar, like a prayer caught between dimensions. Miguel’s instinct for theatricality remains undimmed—he’s still the guy who can turn a simple coo into an existential plea—but here, the drama feels more grounded. “RIP” rides a twitchy drum pattern and neon-slick synths that evoke Ready for the World’s cybernetic R&B, as Miguel wails, “I rip when the weight bears down,” collapsing the sacred and the synthetic into one restless motion. Elsewhere, “New Martyrs (Ride 4 U)” could’ve lived comfortably on Kaleidoscope Dream, all supple basslines and flickers of desire, while “Angel’s Song” echoes Wildheart’s psych-rock seductions, proof that Miguel’s voice can still glide from lust to revelation without warning.
But CAOS isn’t built for nostalgia. Its finest moments feel like transmissions from a parallel Miguelverse—one where the hedonism of Adorn collides with the melancholy of War & Leisure. “Always Time,” produced with Dave Sitek, is one of the album’s quiet marvels, Miguel threading his falsetto through thick air, the song expanding and contracting like lungs in slow motion. “Nearsight [SID]” strips everything back to his voice—a choir of Miguels, all yearning, all burning—and reminds you that no matter how complex the production, the center of his music has always been his human instrument.
Still, the record stumbles through its middle stretch. The Spanish-language “El Pleito” is intimate but inert, its brevity undercutting the emotion it reaches for. Several of the self-produced cuts crawl where they should levitate, sketching ideas that never fully bloom. It’s the rare stretch where Miguel’s ambition feels hemmed in by his own restraint. But he regains altitude on “COMMA/KARMA,” an interstellar communion featuring George Clinton, whose cosmic funk lineage Miguel reimagines as PG-rated mysticism. Over sushi, sake, and weed smoke, he toasts to love, enlightenment, and maybe just vibing too high to care which comes first.
That’s the paradox at the core of CAOS: an album about unraveling that’s performed with total composure. Miguel’s peers have chosen their lanes—The Weeknd turning heartbreak into stadium spectacle, Frank Ocean retreating into vaporous myth—but Miguel still lives in the flux, searching for transcendence somewhere between the club, the chapel, and the void. If CAOS doesn’t break new ground, it doesn’t need to. It’s a meditation from an artist who’s learned that peace doesn’t come from stillness, but from dancing through the disorder with style.
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