“How I Feel,” the new single from Leni Black, is essentially built like a conventional pop song, but it’s missing one key component found in almost every one of the genre’s mainstream releases to hit the FM dial in the past three years – aesthetical arrogance. Black isn’t showboating with some rough-edged hybridity here, and I don’t get the feeling she wants a lot of recognition for being experimental in the way she’s marrying her words with the luster of the musicality behind them.

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There’s not a spot of self-righteousness for us to get past; she’s rejecting the drone of surreal pop and going old school with a hook-centric concept in this piece that affords her a chance to demonstrate her unfiltered abilities more than anything else. She could just as easily have incorporated a thick backend and a pointlessly heavy harmony in this setting, but she skewed minimalism with a blatant desire to give us feel-good harmonies, and for a critic like myself this makes hers one of the more intelligent offerings to have come up for review in the month of March thus far.

From the very moment, she steps up to the microphone forward, it’s more than a little obvious that Leni Black is putting everything she’s got into this lead vocal, starting with a soulfulness that alludes to the lyrics’ authenticity as nothing else could have. The percussion spots her some anxious rhythm in more than a couple of important spots between the starting line and the first chorus, and its brittle tone seems deliberately contrasting with her singing prowess.

The instrumental melodies are always left in a rather clandestine role as we move from one moment to the next in “How I Feel,” with it becoming clearer and clearer in each passing moment just how much of a singer’s showcase this single was intended to be. Time, love, and intimate knowledge of the emotion in the verses all went into making it as perfect as possible, and even if I hadn’t heard her work before this moment, I would still be encouraging Black to stick with this career after hearing what she can do in this song.

It doesn’t take a lot to transform from a critics’ favorite to a legitimate power player in this game when you’re working with the kind of skillset this artist is, and in “How I Feel,” Leni Black reveals herself to be a rising star many underestimated with the release of her first two singles last year. I think she needs to get on the live stage to continue honing her abilities and getting as sharp and focused in her attack as possible, but in the meantime, between now and the moment we’re allowed to return to concerts once more, this recording should stand as firm evidence indicating both Black’s legitimacy as a singer/songwriter and her potential as an indie act that isn’t solely dependent on riding the wake of larger trends in the industry when it comes to making a big impact.

John McCall