Award-winning movie roles and Nigerian remixes have recently kept actress and singer Selena Gomez busy. But Gomez still found the time to create I Said I Love You First with her new fiancé Benny Blanco, which is the couple’s first joint album. Through the 14-track project, the duo explores their current love and past experiences, defamiliarizing love stories into ones about personal situations and embracing Latin influences.
However, there’s always at least one element to these songs that keeps them from reaching their full potential. Whether it be on “How Does It Feel To Be Forgotten” with its grating vocals, “You Said You Were Sorry,” which is just audible molasses or “Cowboy,” which tries its hardest to be a sensual staple in the tracklist, the album has its fair share of uninspired tracks that drag the listening experience down.
“Cowboy” has such a slow, unappealing pace with bare-bones production that it amounts to nothing close to the Lana inspiration it’s drawing from and is a chore to listen to. The general concept of a stripped-back, sexually confident anthem, though, is enthralling, but the final product falls short. The random GloRilla interlude outro makes the song even more laughably unsalvageable.
“Don’t Wanna Cry” is a throwback disco number that lacks ambition and specialness — that is, until the end when it blasts into a synth-disco dancefloor. Additionally, “Sunset Blvd” is unobjectionable, especially given her restricted vocals and buried-in-the-mix synths that would’ve worked if they weren’t as dull.
“Bluest Flame” features pop sensation Charli xcx with her background vocals on the cut. Past its angelic string intro, the track diverges into classic hyperpop production with bubblegum synths and dance instrumentation.
“I just feel like Charli has this way of having a hypnotic, crazy, cool feeling and that’s what I feel like this song was — it’s like a fever dream,” Gomez said in a Spotify interview. The song even concludes like a Charli track would: gritty and slightly distorted, but with added racy panting and Charli’s muffled “party girl” background chants to seal the deal. With Charli lending her background vocals and 100 gecs singer and producer Dylan Brady contributing his talent, this song is arguably going to be one of the biggest stamps of approval in music for this decade.
Another notable song, “Younger And Hotter Than Me,” features a piano ballad that details the very thin rope she treads when it comes to beautiful-now-obsessive devotion and insecurity. Gomez said in a Spotify interview that the track is more of an interpretation of her journey rather than a relationship.
The Gracie Abrams-assisted “Call Me When You Break Up” is a decent, sweet-sounding pop-rock tune that dances around themes of security, safety and solace. Gomez and Abrams offer support to a friend after a breakup, wanting to uplift and revive that spark in them. However, this falls into the same shortcomings of the duds on the album: too short, too unadventurous and too “just alright.”
Although it’s not much for innovation or pushing genres, I Said I Love You First plays it safe — ironic for an album from lovers.
2 days away from social media out of 5
