Orion Sun: Hold Space For Me
On her debut LP Hold Space For Me, rising Philadelphia artist Orion Sun provides a raw, intimate perspective on the realities of falling in love and coming of age. While listening to her velvety vocals over dreamy, tranquil beats, it can feel at times as though you are floating through her intricately-woven melodies. There are clearly strong influences of jazz, hip-hop, and R&B on the production of the album, and the project as a whole remains incapable of being defined by a single genre.
Orion Sun is at her best on tracks like “Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t Leave Me)” and “Smooth”, in which her soothing layered vocals blend with echoing rhythms and production to produce a sound that feels romantic while evoking a sense of longing. On “Holy Water”, her poetic verses give insight to the conflict that she feels between enjoying the present and anxiously planning for the future. She sings, “Abundant, your love got me floatin’/ Upstream, you and me onto bigger things/ Planning the future with our eyes closed/ Wonder where time go, feel like black hole.” While the project as a whole has a tranquil tone, her lyrics reveal an internal struggle within the artist. For example, on the first track of the album, “Lightning”, Orion Sun explores the anxieties she has surrounding growing up through the use of a metaphor in which lightning destroys her childhood home. She says, “Lightning/ Struck the house that we used to live in/ It ain’t a home no more/ Just a property building with new tenants.” After losing her home, the artist is disoriented and desperate for comfort, so she focuses on falling in love to slow the passage of time.
Complementing her gorgeous vocals is the 24-year-old’s rap on the album, which she does to shift the pace and mood of the project. On “El Camino”, she takes on a lighter-hearted tone while lyrics such as, “Money make you go from College Dropout to Yandhi/ Passenger, one nine ’87 El Camino/ Spontaneous vacation down in Puerto Rico” reflect upon the various social and economic changes in her life that have come as a result of her newfound success. This song also provides a stark contrast to the narrative that she constructs later on the track “Coffee for Dinner”, as she recalls a winter during which she stayed with her lover when she felt as though she had no other option.
As a result of the deeply personal, authentic exploration of the successes and pitfalls of her past relationships against the backdrop of growing up as a woman of color, this album is by far Orion Sun’s best and most fully realized project to date. Though Hold Space For Me, was just recently released, we can’t wait for her next drop.