Conceived and first composed on her laptop at home, with some vocals recorded in her bathroom, Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two is lo-fi and highly sophisticated—exquisitely analog and experimentally techy. It begins with a radio signal tuning in, and it asks its listener to participate in their own process of attunement, to listen to familiar sounds anew, and open ourselves to an alternate Amerykah. An organism at once cohesive and discordant, it flows, jams, grooves, bounces. It transforms. Kameryn Alexa Carter explores how the album reaches toward the past and dreams up new...