Open the track and Federico Malaman's bass arrives like a friendly mugging. The man has played alongside George Benson, Wilson Pickett, and Al Jarreau, and he brings that pedigree to bear here without an ounce of showboating — it is a masterclass in purposeful groove, laying a foundation so deep and so warm you could live in it. Over the top of this, Christian Martinez's horn section — a unit forged in the furnaces of Ray Charles and Diana Ross sessions — cuts through with the kind of precision that makes brass instruments feel like weapons of joy. The production, handled by Audren's long-term partner Chris Rime, is impeccably calibrated: clean enough to feel contemporary, analogue enough to feel alive.
Audren herself has spoken about dancing as medicine, as defiance, as a form of smiling in the face of a world that seems determined to exhaust us all. That philosophy doesn't merely inform *We Want Funkey!* — it *is* the song. The track carries the unmistakable DNA of the pop-funk golden era: Prince's restless sexuality, Kool and the Gang's communal warmth, Lucy Pearl's silky urban ease. Yet it never feels like an exercise in nostalgia tourism. Rime's mixing places the whole thing firmly in the present tense, and Audren's vocal performance — playful, confident, deeply inhabited — belongs to no decade but her own.
What separates this from the many competent funk revivalists crowding streaming platforms is precisely that quality Audren describes as "rebel flavour." The song is not merely an invitation to dance; it is a mild manifesto. The weariness it addresses — the exhaustion of performing adulthood, of absorbing an unrelenting torrent of bad news — is entirely real, and the music's response is neither denial nor escapism. It is, rather, a reorientation: look at what remains good. Feel that bass. Move.
Mike Rajamahendra, whose work with Michael Bublé has made him a reliable architect of smooth, polished sound, contributes textures that give the track a luminous quality — a sense of late-afternoon sunlight breaking through. And Chris Rime's guitar weaves throughout with the understated confidence of someone who knows exactly when not to play.
Audren's journey to this point deserves acknowledgment, too. A career interrupted by Lyme disease, a diversion into bestselling authorship, a hard-won return to singing — none of that biography bleeds mournfully into *We Want Funkey!*, but it does lend the song a certain earned quality. This is not the work of someone who takes the ability to make music, or to feel joy, for granted.
The previous single *Smile, People Smile!* announced an artist reclaiming her voice with purpose. *We Want Funkey!* consolidates that return with greater confidence and considerably more swagger. With the album *Think Freedom* arriving in May 2026, Audren is clearly building towards something substantial — and if this single is any indication of the direction of travel, the destination will be well worth the wait.
For now, though, turn it up. Let Malaman's bass do what bass was invented to do. Audren is right: the world is bleak and gloomy enough without us failing to dance when the music demands it.