★★★☆☆
The third album from Anne-Marie, Unhealthy, follows her trend to date of relatable lyricism – but its pop potency sometimes gets lost amid the chaos.Over the past decade, Anne-Marie has become one of Britain’s brightest pop stars. In the decade since she dropped her earliest demo in 2013 (which Ed Sheeran then shared on his Twitter) and bagged a job as a touring vocalist for drum n’ bass dons Rudimental in 2014, her own-brand of personality-fuelled pop has racked up billions of streams. As a mark of her success, she recently picked up a BRIT Billion Award, has bagged some big-name collaborations (including 2016’s UK number one ‘Rockabye’ with Clean Bandit and Sean Paul) and taken on a high-profile telly job as a coach on The Voice UK. Eschewing glossy, boilerplate tunes, she’s loaded her songs with relatability and humour. Her first two records – 2018’s Speak Your Mind and 2021’s Therapy – won over fans and hit the UK top three, albeit with mixed critical reception. Anne-Marie’s third album, Unhealthy, follows this trend: her brutal honesty and tongue-in-cheek lyrics are evident throughout. Begun in early 2022, it sees Anne-Marie dig into two recent romantic relationships, one that had ended and one that was beginning.
Inspired by the narrative element of records like The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come For Free, Anne-Marie set out to include a cohesive thread sewn into the LP’s infrastructure. It’s a story, she’s explained, about “being with the wrong person, then eventually meeting the right one,” From fracturing romance and breakups to panic-inducing new love and finally being able to relax with somebody else, no emotion is off-limits.
Take ‘Sad Bitch’, an alt-pop earworm that sees Anne-Marie assert, “I just wanna be with my friends / Fucked up getting rich,” over rubbery piano riffs and sparse production, later adding: “Baby it’s so last year / Being a sad bitch.”
On ‘Grudge’, meanwhile, she teases: “My therapist said keep calm and don’t react / And the Bible says love thy enemy and all that / And my friends all say that karma’s gon’ get me back / And I shouldn’t hold a grudge,” before quipping with a grin you practically can hear: “But I wanna.”
The weight of Anne-Marie’s lyricism can often be lost among jarring instrumentals and simplifications. Take ‘Cuckoo’, on which Anne-Marie reflects honestly that “I go a little OTT with the OCD / All my exes say that I’m crazy / I’mma check your phone while you’re half asleep”. But later, she adds: “So before you get in too deep / There’s a couple things you should know about me / I’m cuckoo.” The track comes with jangling tropical-house flecked instrumentals intercut with cuckoo clock sound effects, the weight of the lyrics lost among them.
Photo: Justin Sammer
