Wynter Gordon

Dirty Talk arrived in 2010 through Big Beat and Atlantic. It introduced Gordon as a lead recording artist to many listeners who had encountered her through other people’s records, including Flo Rida’s Sugar. The solo release gives her singing a more concentrated place within the production.

With the Music I Die followed in 2011, appearing in different release configurations, including a six-track US EP. Til Death, Buy My Love and Still Getting Younger reveal different sides of the same period. The first can make the rhythmic entrance emphatic, while a more extended melodic line allows a less immediately declarative feeling into the music.

Gordon’s work with producers and remixers, including the Freemasons, supplies a broader dance-music context around those solo releases. Yet the club identity is one part of a much larger songwriting story. In 2016 she began releasing music as Diana Gordon, using her own name for a new chapter that included The Legend Of. Her first-person account of that transition describes a desire to take greater control over the direction of the work. The earlier Wynter Gordon recordings remain distinct statements rather than mistakes that need to disappear from the catalogue. They capture a particular relationship between a highly adaptable voice and the production language of the early 2010s. The interesting detail is often how a sung phrase negotiates that language: fitting precisely into the beat, stretching beyond it or supplying a little emotional uncertainty inside a record designed to communicate immediately.