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The influential singer-songwriter returns after many years with a powerful album that mixes spoken word, folk, and blues over roughed-up sonics.

There were few voices that articulated the anxious, fractured state of America in the 1970s and early 80s as well as the clear baritone of Gil Scott-Heron. As a spoken-word artist and poet, he could pinpoint the fissures in the American dream and exorcise them with a wit that blended righteous anger and arch sarcasm. As a singer, he could envelop those same uncomfortable confrontations in a rich, emotional tone that brought out the empathetic face of unrest. Yet except for a chorus cameo on Blackalicious' "First in Flight" and a memorable shout-out on LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge", he was rarely heard or cited in the early years of America's great post-traumatic decade, even if his pained depiction of "a nation that just can't stand much more" in "Winter in America" rang as true in 2002 as it did in 1975.

Instead, Scott-Heron spent much of the 00s in and out of prison on drug charges, adding onto a long hiatus that saw him turn away from the record industry in favor of live performance and writing. Between 1983 and 2009, he released only one studio album, 1994's Spirits, so issuing his first in 16 years could've been rife with potential for a pent-up analysis of everything that's happened in the process of race relations and American culture over the last couple decades. Yet I'm New Here sees an incisive political voice turning inwards, not protesting the doings of the greater world but crafting a frank confessional over the state of his own. He does this allusively, through cover songs and short soundbite interludes and original compositions that feel like sparse flashes of a deep, once-dormant creative impulse. Yet it still feels honest, like something said out of necessity instead of opportunity, and the result is an album that engages with the idea of loneliness in exceptional ways. - Pitchfork