Usher has dropped his first independent album, a break in his nearly decade-long album hiatus!
Usher’s ninth studio album, Coming Home, available on all streaming platforms, was released on Feb 9, 2024. It’s his first solo album since Hard II Love in almost eight years and his first studio album since A with producer Zaytoven in six years.
Coming Home is an album about break-ups. The majority of the songs mention being heartbroken and the process of moving on.
The album is nearly 67 minutes long and consists of 20 songs (plus one bonus song on the skims.com edition). 35 percent of the songs on the album are collabs, including “Coming Home” featuring Burna Boy, “Good Good” featuring Summer Walker and 21 Savage, “A-Town Girl” featuring Latto, “Cold-Blooded” featuring The-Dream, “Risk It All” featuring H.E.R, “Ruin” featuring Pheelz, and “Standing Next to You” featuring Jungkook. Both The-Dream and Pheelz are Nigerian.
Several singles were released before the album, including “Good Good,” released Aug. 4, 2023, “Standing Next to You (Remix),” released Nov. 30, 2023, “Risk It All,” released Dec. 6, 2023, and “Ruin,” released Feb. 2, 2024. All of those songs have music videos out on YouTube.
The first song of the album, “Coming Home,” has a Michael Jackson-like beat. It’s a song about love, lust, and missing his lover when he’s away for work. Usher mentions that he’s “lost in the world… the price [he] paid for all this fame.” He wants to “cuddle” and “take [her] to bed.” Burna Boy brings feelings of impatience into the song, with the lyric, “I been waitin’ and I can’t wait any longer.”
The third song of the album, “A-Town Girl,” has vocals and the beat from “Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel. He mentions Atlanta, Georgia, where he grew up, and which is seemingly the inspiration for the song title. He also mentions skating, which foreshadows his Super Bowl performance in which he and his backup dancers were skating. He describes the so-called A-Town Girl (seemingly his ex, as he says “her new ***** prolly a drug dealer”) as “ratchet and sadity.”
The fourth song of the album, “Cold Blooded,” is, in my opinion, the worst song of the album. It’s very repetitive, repeating the lyric “dollars, dollars, dollars” throughout the song. It’s a very aggressive song, with both the lyrics and the beat. Usher wishes that he and the woman had stayed a one-night stand. She “made [him] a changed man, [his] love was too good for [her]. The-Dream says “[He’s] hurt when [he] love[s]… [she] wanna see a ***** money ****** up, ***** you got [him] ****** up.”
The tenth song, “Ruin,” is the last song to be pre-released before the album and one of the four with music videos. The song has a Nigerian-sounding beat, presumably a nod to collaborator Pheelz’s ethnicity. The song is about not being able to move on after a bad breakup.
In verse one, Usher says “Babe, you broke me and took your time with it. Babe, you gave me all these memories I regret… you ruined me for everybody.” In the chorus, Usher states that he “wake[s] up in the mornin,’ a different girl be on [his] line.” In verse two, Pheeelz states that he’s “just tryna find peace every day.”
The music video displays the lyrics very symbolically. It shows multiple women presenting Usher’s different lovers. After each time a different woman is shown, a frame of his ex is shown, illustrating how he’s not yet over her. At the end of the video, he plays with his young daughter, showing how he cares and wants the best for her when it comes to a new love interest.
My personal second least favorite song is “Big,” the eleventh song of the album. The lyrics are a bit odd. Usher states in the chorus that “when [he] was a kid, [he] would go to McDonald’s. [He] would never order the small. [He] would get it big.” The rest of the song is right, talking about being rich and having sex. But as the chorus is repeated four times, it’s hard to ignore that out-of-place section of the song.
The last song of the album, “Standing Next to You,” is another song with a music video. Right behind “Good Good,” it is the second-best-performing song from the album on YouTube. All four of the music videos have millions of views, compared to the thousands of views the other 16 audios and visualizers have. However, the “Good Good” music video has racked up 55 million views in five months, while “Standing Next to You” has 27 million views in only two months.
Two days after Coming Home was released, Usher performed the Super Bowl LVIII halftime show, his first time headlining. He performed with The Black Eyed Peas at the Super Bowl XLV halftime show in 2011. His show marks the longest Super Bowl halftime show in history.
Alongside him were Alicia Keys on vocals and piano, will.i.am, Lil Jon, and Ludacris, rapping, and H.E.R. playing guitar. It also featured the marching band Sonic Boom of the South, from HBCU Jackson State University.
You can watch the halftime show at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hYbrdC_-s8.
In the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0X8sOdv3bg, Usher dives into the process of choreographing and creating the setlist of the performance, also sharing the personal health issues he had to work through.
Usher is going on tour in 2024, from May 4-Nov. 27, across the United States, with three dates in Canada.