Aaliyah’s sophomore release was a breakthrough for the simple yet hard-to-perfect reason that she was not only assured beyond her years as a singer — more concerned with emotional nuance than melismatic acrobatics — but capable of commanding any R&B subgenre that was thrown at her. Diane Warren ballads (“The One I Gave My Heart To”), Treach-hooked boom-bap/g-funk hybrids (“A Girl Like You”), trans-generational throwback nods to hitmaker-slash-auteur predecessors (Marvin on “Got to Give It Up”; the Isleys on “Choosey Lover (Old School/New School)”) — it’s your classic teenaged phase-shifting identity search, except it’s one that reveals how valid all those phases’ paths could be. The most promising path, of course, was the one with writer/producers Missy Elliott and Timbaland, who peak early with the title cut by giving her a distinctively eccentric take on club-steeped, trip-hop-adjacent production (that cricket loop!). Further single pulls like the neo-soul/trip-hop hybrid “Hot Like Fire,” the gelatinous funk of “If Your Girl Only Knew,” and the no-frills slow jam “4 Page Letter” don’t hint quite as clearly towards the staggering innovation of subsequent collabs like “Are You That Somebody” or “We Need a Resolution,” but they still sound like the album’s future-focused heart, and smartly foreground Aaliyah’s vocal depth in a way that makes them feel utterly complete — and those later classics predestined.