Finally Over It

The final sortie of Summer Walker’s Over It trilogy plays with the self-assurance of a certain kind of baddie describing her healing era in a TikTok storytime; put a finger down if you released your breakthrough album when you were 23, then fell in love with the producer who was your primary creative collaborator, discovered while pregnant with your first child that he was a cheater and a “male chauvinist,” flipped that fresh heartbreak into a Grammy-nominated EP, let new love in, became a mother to twin boys, extricated yourself from yet another toxic relationship, survived a couple more entanglements and the attendant Shade Room scrutiny, and now, years later, after definitively earning your spot among contemporary R&B’s pantheon of mercurial lovergirls, you’re finally over it.

Maybe for the first time, the socially anxious, historically press-averse, and consequently impenetrable Walker has seized on a big-budget album rollout to wrest her narrative from the comment section. Per her own framing, Finally Over It, a double album of polished ’90s and early ’00s R&B orthodoxy, trumpets the dawn of some kind of happily ever after. Or at least an end to the private torment and public humiliation that, experience suggests, must follow vulnerability, she told Complex’s Speedy Morman this fall. Much like her endeavor to secure new emotional terrain, Walker uses Finally Over It to mount a breakaway from the “trap-soul” dictates of her Atlanta origins and the speaker-knocking distortion of early collaborators. Forming a nucleus with David “Dos Dias” Bishop as her primary cowriter and producer, Walker also invites in a corps of A-list writers and producers to help execute a style that is infinitely more legible. Her provocations are tamed, her rasp is sanded down, the limits of her range more strictly enforced. At times, though, Walker herself takes cover in plain sight.

No amount of emotional clarity can substitute for the barbed specificity and desperate rhythmic phrasing of Walker’s strongest writing, largely abandoned on Finally Over It in the name of self-restraint. Instead, she disappears, along with guests Anderson .Paak and Bryson Tiller, into a tedious stretch that brings to mind a certain subgenre of YouTube tutorial: How to Make a ’90s Slow Jam Type Beat in FL Studio. What Walker has not surrendered in the pursuit of growth is the near-pathological obsession, shared with her contemporaries across genres, with overtly referencing R&B hits of previous decades. “Baby” first samples and later interpolates Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby,” sullying the promise of an everlasting duet with a dispassionate performance from Chris Brown, who continues to patronize major-label releases with the enforced ubiquity of a mafia racket. “No,” a midtempo, boundary-setting anthem, begins with a sample of Beyoncé’s 2003 song “Yes” and then firmly rejects the gendered domesticity famously pledged on Destiny’s Child’s “Cater 2 U.”

Walker is at her most effective as a songwriter and memorable as a performer when she makes room for the pistol-toting, drunk-dialling heroine of Over It and Still Over It, the very character she seems to be forsaking on this album. Still, the journey isn’t without lessons learned. By disc two, it’s clear, for instance, that she fares better when her costars are women. “Robbed You,” a set-up fantasy featuring Atlanta compatriot Mariah the Scientist, is more esprit d’escalier regret than warning: “I should have robbed you/I should have popped you,” Walker sings, crafting a hook from imperfect anaphora. On “Go Girl,” she proffers a clipped self-appraisal that lands more like statement of fact than affirmation, finding natural rhythm with Latto’s boastful drawl; true beauty seeks to convince no one. Both handily outrap Doja Cat, who trails with the overworked affect of someone shooting for latter day-Eminem but landing closer to Qveen Herby. On the Kanye-referencing “How Sway” with Sailorr, Walker is at her funniest and most compelling: “You ask me if I’m flexible, I’ll do a split/I wanna get your name engraved in pink glitter right on my blick.” When Walker represses that streak, she inevitably shrinks. “Allegedly,” featuring Teddy Swims, is, at best, a bore—a belter whose just-familiar-enough genre fusion and generic flyover-country allusions suggest it may find favor with whomever chooses songs for contestants on The Voice.

In the months preceding the release of Finally Over It, Walker repeatedly selected flashes of aqua that inevitably hinted at Tiffany Blue and the luxury bridal associations of Tiffany & Co. She launched a promotional website whose landing page resembles a wedding invitation. Most recently, she turned up to The Jennifer Hudson Show in a wedding dress, turning the show’s familiar “tunnel walk” into a bridal march. If that weren’t literal enough, the album’s cover—photographed by Richie Talboy—doubles down on Walker’s matrimonial third act: The image is a reference to Anna Nicole Smith’s 1994 wedding picture, in which a stone-faced Smith clutches a bouquet of flowers in one hand and the sallow hand of octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall in the other. What is less clear is whether Walker intends the cover as a celebration of the transactional nature of love or a critique of its parallels in her chosen industry or a rejection of both. One hopes, as Walker lingers at the altar and at an apparent crossroads of her own, that she has considered what awaited history’s most recognizable and maligned sugar baby after she crossed the threshold.