One of the albums that was on a tiny shortlist for Album Of The Week last week was Unbreakable, the first new Janet Jackson album in eight years. Jackson picked a good moment to come back. Unbreakable is, by her standards, a sweet and personal record, and it reunites her with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the production team who worked with her constantly at her peak. And while the record never goes out of its way to sound contemporary -- Jackson is, after all, sadly pretty much the only person hitting Missy Elliott up for a guest verse in 2015 -- it's striking how of-the-moment Jackson sounds. At her '80s and '90s peak, Jackson found massive popularity, but she was never exactly a critical favorite. Today, though, the things that critics held against Jackson -- her whispery delivery, her sometimes-flirty and sometimes-brazen sexuality, the way the clatter of her state-of-the-art beats would overwhelm her voice -- have made her sound mighty prescient. Many of the best and most critically acclaimed R&B or R&B-adjacent singers working today have taken their cues from Jackson; you can hear echoes of her style in Tinashe or FKA twigs or even the Weeknd. And Kelela, the DC-born and LA-based singer who somehow turns oblique dance music into a diaristic personal soundtrack, may be the purest Jackson acolyte we have, though there's also plenty of Aaliyah and Prince and Aphex Twin and a million other things in her sound. Kelela's whole style is everything futuristic about Jackson's pushed even further into the horizon, like Jackson if she was actually living in that spaceship from the "Scream" video. And with her new Hallucinogen EP, Kelela proves that there's still so much humanity in her warped robo-soul, another thing Jackson was able to convey before the rest of us even knew what that was.