Skaiwater: Femme Fatale, twelve tracks and a theory of attraction

Femme Fatale landed on August 31. It is Skaiwater's second album of 2026, six months after February's wonderful, and it fits twelve tracks into twenty-nine minutes. Twelve in twenty-nine is a claim about attention. The record would rather leave early than fill space.

Skaiwater is Tyler Ryan Lee Jordan Brooks, from Nottingham, born August 31, 2000, so this landed on their twenty-sixth birthday. Their father introduced them to production around the age of eight and taught them to record at sixteen; by nineteen they were serious about it. TikTok was the first break, with "#miles" and a remix of it featuring Lil Uzi Vert. From there: Happy Hour (2021), rave (2022), #gigi (2024), #mia (2025), the pinkPrint EPs in 2025, a feature on I-dle's "Mono" in January, then wonderful in February. They are non-binary, of Jamaican and Sierra Leonean descent, and have lived in Los Angeles since April 2023. That last part matters when a record starts talking about feminine forces as a law of nature.

The album arrived through GoodTalk with one guest, Sophie Gray on "Sophia". The announcement says it was inspired by Young Thug. Skaiwater's own explanation is odder and better: attraction, in their telling, is what creation started with, and lust, seduction and mystique are the same force with a face on it. That is where the title comes from.

Twelve tracks, and the Young Thug reference is the useful clue to how they move. Vocals get bent into melody and syllables stretch until they hold a note. Raps resolve into a hook before the bar is out. Underneath, the production keeps switching: distorted low end in one stretch, softer melodic passages in the next, a Caribbean lilt turning up in the singing. The voice stays the loudest thing in the mix, and the arrangement is built around the space it leaves.

"Vampires, Zombies" opens on two kinds of undead and sets the temperature fast. Then comes the run of names: "Delilah", "Ella", "Nana", "Angel", "Sophia". Five women in six tracks, which is where the concept turns into architecture. The two longest cuts land back to back at the centre, "Angel" and "Sophia", and the second carries the album's only guest, Sophie Gray, in the one place the record lets a song stretch out.

After that it tightens again: "Baitface", "Radar, Radar", "Foreigner", then "Jump" closes at 1:48 with nothing spare on it. "Radar, Radar" repeats its own name like a signal checking for a reply, and "Weverse", at 1:42, is the shortest thing here, closer to a hook than a song.

This is for the people who came in through Lil Uzi Vert or Lil Nas X and stayed, for anyone who wants the hooks without the setup, and for a listener with a twenty-nine minute walk to fill. Play it in one go, in the dark, on good headphones. If you want a record that spends nine minutes building a world, this is not that record.

The cost sits in the middle run of names. "Ella" and "Nana" pass through without landing, and at two minutes each there is no third minute to rescue a hook that did not take. The thesis is strongest where the writing is thinnest, which is a strange problem to have. A record this short cannot carry a soft patch, and it has one.

It still earns the repeat. Two albums in a year, one of them a surprise, and neither sounds like an obligation. This is a 3.5: a good record from someone who knows exactly how long an idea is worth. Twenty-nine minutes go by before you have decided what you think, and that is the reason to hit play again.

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