Since the release of his debut album, Freudian, Daniel Caesar has remained relatively quiet. Back in October of 2018, he released the single “Who Hurt You” featuring T-Pain which confirmed his improving sound and longevity within the music industry. The very same month, he was also featured very prominently on The Free Nationals single; “Beauty and Essex.” While these tracks were good indicators of Caesar’s growth as a singer and as a songwriter there were no leads as to when a new project from the Canadian singer would release.

Then, with no prior warning, on June 24th, 2019 Caesar announced on Twitter a special show in Los Angeles limited to the first 200 guests that arrived. In the days following, Caesar would then announce the title along with the release date of his new project. Attached was a cryptic video of a man in what appears to be a space suit walking in the desert with an audio excerpt of an interview with physician J. Robert Oppenheimer discussing the very first nuclear device. This same audio snippet appears at the beginning of the opening track of CASE STUDY 01 simply titled, “ENTROPY.”

The album itself marks a much more mature and calculated interpretation of existentialist and sexual themes. Daniel Caesar still uses jazz-infused hip-hop to carry his stellar vocals but he experiments a little more on this album with some lo-fi influenced elements and singer-songwriter guitar leads. Caesar also uses several scientific terms in order to set the thematic basis for numerous tracks on this record. For instance, one track is titled “SUPERPOSITION” which is a scientific principle where when two waves interact they have the chance to combine to make each other bigger, cancel each other out, or most commonly both. He uses this concept in the song as a way of explaining his own reason for living and by extent life itself. One could say the central idea of this record is that Caesar is using his life and experiences as a case study for these scientific phenomena and his songs are simply the conclusions of his analysis.

Daniel Caesar’s exponential development as a musician reverberates heavily throughout this record and cements Caesar as one of the most significant players in the RnB music scene. CASE STUDY 01 is available on Apple Music, Spotify, and most other music platforms.