Earlier this year, Mark Ronson lamented the state of modern pop in a Guardian interview, saying songs are currently produced to sound “as loud as possible coming out of an iPhone”. His new album duly feels like a pop album of old, centred around some truly excellent singles, and padded with filler.
It’s worth celebrating the two lead singles again: Nothing Breaks Like a Heart sets out the album’s stall, of “sad bangers” to cry to on the dancefloor: a masterfully produced chimera of Jolene and Fleetwood Mac’s Big Love. The title track, with a Scandi-disco shuffle and goose-down top line from Lykke Li, sees Ronson shift his mastery to the middle eight – it slows the song to a crawl before smoothly, magically picking the pace back up again, a flourish that rails against the constantly loud production he so despises. Its peak at No 30 in the UK singles chart suggests how difficult it is to bring such subtlety to the streaming era.
All of the album’s tracks have female vocalists, including Yebba, a soulful powerhouse who has the potential to finally succeed Amy Winehouse as Ronson’s chief muse. Her Don’t Leave Me Lonely is an impressive reggaeton-adjacent number, but she is inexplicably hobbled with two unfinished sketches that should have never been allowed to make it to the final tracklisting. Camila Cabello and King Princess give their respective songs very solid choruses, each backed by engaging Hall & Oates-style yacht pop, though perhaps lacking the pure instinct of the lead singles. Other songs hark back to Ronson’s R&B and hip-hop comfort zone: Why Hide is a pretty and slightly perfunctory piano-soul number, but much better is Truth, which pairs a funk breakbeat with an arena chorus by Alicia Keys and Anderson.Paak-esque flow by The Last Artful, Dodgr. Angel Olsen is the album’s curveball, on True Blue, ladling melodrama over a synthpop ballad with a beat nicked from Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.
Ronson’s Achilles heel is, as ever, making everything feel as if it’s been endlessly worked on: his obsessional qualities can cloud the magic of the best pop. But equally, that craft is what songs blaring from iPhones sometimes lack.
