Al Ur Pal Project Drops Two new Singles

The history of Motown and the culture of music in the Motor City is one that is as great as it is extensive, and while he’s not trying to directly recycle any of the themes from this scene in his new singles “My Honey (His Drips)” and “My Honey (Her Drips),” songwriter Al Wordlaw of the Al Ur Pal Project is looking to continue the legacy of such an aesthetic through the power of new music. “My Honey,” no matter which version you’re listening to, has the bones of something out of the old school, but when it comes to making an impact with those listening to its groove, this is not a track restricted to the classics station.

There’s a great pressure against the vocal track in “My Honey (Her Drips)” that doesn’t exist for the “His” version of the song, but I like what it produces just the same. In distinguishing the compositions with a bit of production texture, we’re able to get a clear understanding of how versatile a player Wordlaw and his collaborators The Asidors are able to be without feeling like this is just a suggestive concept piece. In the end, this is the real deal and not a sample of a much grander work.

Conventional pop themes abound in “My Honey (His Drips),” but there’s nothing here to suggest that the track was developed exclusively for a radio audience. There isn’t any element of the music that feels forced, and even though he doesn’t have a cosmetically dominant role in either one of these recordings, Wordlaw still translates as someone who is really on top of the grooves as well as every word being conveyed from the frontend of the mix, which is more than can be said for a lot of similarly fronted projects currently trending in the underground today.

I really love the arrangement of both of these tracks, and because of their meticulousness, I can see a potential for remixes and re-recordings of “My Honey” that extend to acoustic music, club jams, and perhaps even more. The Al Ur Pal Project is one of the newer acts to come into my sphere in a while, but unlike the competition, there’s no tethering their sound to an existing movement within their scene – this is the work of Wordlaw and The Asidors alone, which is a testament to their creativity as well as their collective chemistry.

If this is on par with what we should be expecting from The Al Ur Pal Project as they ultimately find their footing in a competitive underground market, then I would not anticipate seeing them remain in that market for very long, as the mainstream is calling for more content like “My Honey” every day in 2022. This is a perfect medium between gentle, insular pop music and a more retro-minded R&B, and it comes to us without sounding like it’s already made the rounds across every artist, producer, and conceptualizer’s chalkboard before arriving at its final destination in this song.

Mindy McCall