Erykah Badu is phoning it in, but that’s the point of her latest mixtape, plus new songs from David Bowie and The Corrs.

Ms Badu’s new mixtape is dedicated to our obsession with a single piece of technology — the telephone

ERYKAH BADU/ BUT YOU CAINT USE MY PHONE

Let’s face it, songs about telephone calls are hardly a novelty — back in the early ’80s we had Blondie’s Debbie Harry imploring her lover to “call me!” while Stevie Wonder was just calling to say “I love you”. However, with smartphones having become an intrinsic part of our modern existence, the subject matter is more relevant today than ever. Two of this year’s biggest hits, Drake’s Hotline Bling and Adele’s Hello, revolve around phone drama, and now we have American neo-soul diva Erykah Badu, who not only has jumped on the bandwagon, but also kicked it up a notch with her 11-track mixtape, the fantastically-named But You Caint Use My Phone.

The mixtape marks Badu’s new material since her fifth studio album, 2010’s New Amerykah Part Two, and is the second mixtape following a compilation she put together earlier this year called Feel Better, World! The first taste of But You Caint arrived in October in the form of a cover — a splendid rework of Drake’s Hotline Bling. Here titled Cel U Lar Device, the song is built on the original beat, which is sampled from Timmy Thomas’ Why Can’t We Live Together. It features a new verse where she plays the role of an automated phone service, giving callers sassy dialing options: “You’ve reached the Erykah Badu hotline/If you’re calling for Erykah, press 1/If you’re calling to say peace, and don’t really fit into any of those descriptions/Text me, because I don’t really answer voicemail.”

The remainder of the mixtape strictly adheres to the telephone concept — from opener Caint Use My Phone (Suite) that uses all sorts of phone sound effects and 36-second interlude Hi on which she repeatedly croons “hello, hello, hey, hello hello” to the straightup hip hop number Phone Down and the André 3000-assisted closer Hello. On the latter, the Outkast member lays down a slick lyrical flow about having “awesome thoughts of tossin’ this softer palate” while Badu revisits the “hello” line on Hi, then breaks out singing “Hello, it’s me, baby/I thought about us for a long, long time”.

While it can feel repetitive and self-indulgent at times, But You Caint Use My Phone is a thematically-cohesive, largely playful body of work from one of the finest neo-soul artists of our time. Bear in mind that this is not meant to be a proper album but a mixtape, so in that sense, it warrants a melange of ideas that manifest themselves through all these different interludes, sketches and musical motifs.

What this mixtape also subtly portrays is how much our lives are inextricably tied to our phones — a reminder for us, then, to perhaps look up from the glowing screen and see what’s going on around us in real life once in a while.