Crystal Murray is a 20-year-old artist from Paris, born to an African American jazz musician and a Franco-Spanish mother who worked in the world music industry. Despite her age, she’s been in the public eye in Paris for a while, both as a deejay and as part of the fashion collective Gucci Gang. In 2020, she released her first EP, I Was Wrong. Now she’s back with her first full-length album, Twisted Bases.

Written in residency in Portugal in the summer of 2020, and then recorded in Paris with multi-instrumentalist Sacha Rudy, Twisted Bases is a major step forward for Murray. First of all, there is just a level of confidence to the whole project that makes it feel like Murray has been putting out music for decades, not just a couple of years. Mostly, though, what makes this project special is that so early on in her career, Murray is finding a way to synthesize a lot of styles and influences into a sound that is all her own and makes sense as you move from track to track. She claims influences such as Betty Davis (RIP), Macy Gray, John Coltrane, Kelis, and Sly and the Family Stone, which you can definitely hear coming through at different points in the album. However, the artist that I feel comes closest to what Murray is doing on Twisted Bases is Santigold, the way she effortlessly moves from R&B to disco-pop to rock to jazz and then back to hip hop and dancehall and electronic music, never losing herself or her voice in the process. Ultimately, Crystal Murray is just presenting herself as a complex young woman with varied musical interests, but the way she is able to excel in each avenue and tie everything together is something special. She can belt and shout and let the devil out on one track, then turn around and play with the eerie intimacy of auto-tune on another, rock the rhythm of some dancehall on yet another, and then sing a straight pop song with great tone and sweetness and make them all sound fantastic. Because of this, each time I listen to the album, I think, “This is my favorite track. No, wait, this is my favorite track!”

Twisted Bases is not the album I would have expected from someone as young as Crystal Murray. I was totally prepared to write something about how she has a lot of talent and potential, she just needs to find her voice and bring all of her influences together. I don’t need to write any of that, though, because Murray has already found her voice, given us a really complex and fun album, kicked the doors down, and given us all notice with Twisted Bases.