Leon Bridges - Gold-Diggers Sound (Deluxe) (2021) Hi-Res

The Texas singer delivers a smooth, risk-averse R&B album whose nostalgic trappings aim for timelessness.

​Gold-Diggers Sound, the title of Leon Bridges' new album, is also a tribute to the place it was recorded, a newly swanky hotel/bar/studio in East Hollywood called Gold-Diggers. It’s good branding for Bridges, who has always presented himself and his music as timeless, which is to say, of a better time, somewhere back in the sepia-toned 20th century. The sense of place suggested by a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard would seem to harken back to that time, and it sets the tone for Bridges’ Hollywood record, which is what this album seeks to be.

What does that mean, beyond the title? Vocal stylings that occasionally sound like those of Frank Ocean; lilting, drawn-out vowels; and an understated delivery that can bely the power of Bridges’ show-stopping voice. Mastering from Daddy Kev, co-founder of the Low End Theory and a Los Angeles musician’s musician par excellence. And features from the talented multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin and pianist Robert Glasper, both of whom helped out on To Pimp a Butterfly, that maximalist portrait of the city.

Gold-Diggers Sound is far from maximalist. In the tradition of Bridges’ work, it’s a smooth, risk-averse R&B record, pleasant to the ear and lacking in any songs that would shake up one’s impression of the Texan soul singer. But it’s an album made with extraordinary care, and while it sometimes flirts with tedium, Bridges’ voice and producers Ricky Reed and Nate Mercereau’s subtle instrumental choices keep many of its songs out of the valley of the bland.