For Gaga, this is shockingly boring and basic. She takes zero risks on this entire project. Disappointing to say the least.
🌟 Stupid Love, Sour Candy, Babylon
No album captures what it feels like to be in your 20s and trying to figure out love quite like Ctrl. It’s insecure, self-aware, messy, and painfully honest in a way that still hits years later.
🌟 Supermodel, Love Galore, Doves in the Wind, Drew Barrymore, Prom, The Weekend, Go Gina, Garden (Say It Like Dat), Broken Clocks, Anything, Wavy (Interlude), Normal Girl, Pretty Little Birds, 20 Something
This is a fantastic album, but the replay value drops off fast outside of a handful of tracks. It’s impressive and well-crafted, just not something I find myself reaching for all the time.
🌟 Eusexua, Girl Feels Good, Perfect Stranger, Drums of Death, Room of Fools, Childlike Things, Striptease, Wanderlust
The back third doesn’t hit quite as hard as the first two, but overall this thing is insanely catchy and wildly influential. You can hear its DNA all over modern pop, even when it’s not at full strength.
🌟 Konichiwa Bitches, Cobrastyle, Handle Me, Bum Like You, With Every Heartbeat, Who’s That Girl, Crash and Burn Girl
Suggestion: “About You” hits absurdly hard on late-night drives.
🌟 Happiness, Looking for Somebody (To Love), Oh Caroline, Human Too, About You, I’m in Love With You
What’s Your Pleasure? is disco’s dark side: slinky, sexy, shadowy, and soaked in the kind of lived-in exhaustion that gives the genre real weight. This is disco with sweat on its forehead and a secret behind its smile, all choral swells, hypnotic loops, and that "I Feel Love"-style mechanical pulse that feels just a little dangerous. Jessie fully commits to the sultriness, the tension, the midnight midlife ache that powered Donna Summer, Grace Jones, and Chic. It’s ... read more
HAIM really does make some of the stickiest pop songs around. This album sounds like Destiny’s Child, Sheryl Crow, Michael Jackson, Stevie Nicks, and The Chicks all thrown into a blender and somehow coming out stupidly catchy. Every track is an earworm. It’s just pure, addictive fun.
🌟 Falling, Forever, The Wire, If I Could Change Your Mind (The Deluxe Remix Goes Crazy), Honey & I, Days Are Gone, Let Me Go
I’m somehow unbothered by how many clichés are on this album, because when Kacey sings them they actually feel sincere, like she really means every word. The whole thing plays like a soft sunbeam cutting through the middle of the country. It’s sweet without tipping into corny, and it lands exactly where it’s supposed to.
🌟 Slow Burn, Butterflies, Space Cowboy, Happy & Sad, Velvet Elvis, High Horse, Golden Hour, Rainbow
Heaux Tales, Mo' Tales is a perfect album. It feels like if Sabrina’s Short n’ Sweet had dropped four years earlier but with sharper storytelling, richer vocals, and classic R&B beats that hit like a warm slap. The hooks are ridiculous, the skits are iconic, and the number of times I laughed out loud is honestly embarrassing. Every story feels a little too real, a little too close to home, and every track just flat-out slaps. It’s messy, honest, hilarious, and kind of ... read more
The Age of Pleasure is pure rum, brass, and bliss, like drifting through the hottest, gayest summer of your life with a drink in hand. It’s looser and lighter than Janelle’s earlier work, but the vibes are so warm and sticky you barely care how simple it gets.
🌟 Float, Champagne Shit, Black Sugar Beach, Phenomenal, Haute, The Rush, Lipstick Lover, Water Slide, Know Better, Only Have Eyes 42, A Dry Red
AR is Addison Rae being a pop star the same way Paris Hilton was a pop star: accidentally, stupidly, and with a level of confidence that suggests no one has ever told her no. It’s not deep, it’s not artistic, and it’s definitely not serious, but the sheer camp of it all is weirdly irresistible.
🌟 Nothing On (But the Radio), 2 Die 4, I Got It Bad
When Gaga leans into campy, feral, theatrical chaos, this album goes absolutely insane in the best way. The problem is the filler, where she suddenly turns either weirdly serious or weirdly safe and the whole thing loses its bite. It’s messy, chaotic, uneven, and still fun as hell.
🌟 Disease, Abracadabra, Garden of Eden, Perfect Celebrity, Vanish Into You, Killah, Zombieboy, Don’t Call Tonight, Shadow of a Man
Oops!... she made another mid album. The hits still slap, but everything else is early-2000s filler that evaporates the second it ends. Cute, but nowhere near her best.
🌟 Oops!... I Did It Again, Stronger
Seven bops, five genuinely bad flops.
🌟 Teenage Dream, Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), California Gurls, Firework, The One That Got Away, E.T., Hummingbird Heartbeat
I forget who said it, but someone on Twitter once pointed out that the best disco thrives on tension, excess, and a little darkness. Future Nostalgia is a flawless party, just one where nobody ever spills a drink. It’s slick, polished, and insanely well-made, but also a bit too controlled, the definition of corporate disco.
🌟 Future Nostalgia, Don’t Start Now, Physical, Levitating, Pretty Please, Love Again, Break My Heart
It’s BRAT, bitch.
🌟 360, Club Classics, Sympathy Is A Knife, I Might Say Something Stupid, Talk Talk, Von Dutch, Everything Is Romantic, Rewind, So I, Girl, So Confusing, Apple, B2b, Mean Girls, I Think About It All The Time, 365
Diamonds & Dancefloors is the best party in pop purgatory, with Ava Max still trapped in the Khia asylum while Bebe Rexha and Zara Larsson pass around glow sticks. Nothing here is new or experimental, but that’s kind of the point. Every track is a pure sugar-rush banger, engineered to hit and move on before you can question it.
🌟 Million Dollar Baby, Sleepwalker, Ghost, Hold Up (Wait a Minute), Weapons, Diamonds & Dancefloors, In the Dark, Turn Off the Lights, One of Us, Cold ... read more
Two classics, a whole lot of filler.
🌟 …Baby One More Time, (You Drive Me) Crazy
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Recent Review Comments
On CHUNJuwu's review of Madonna - Madonna
"I don’t mean to be a hater, but saying Madonna brought disco to the mainstream is historically inaccurate. The mainstream disco era had largely ended by 1979, especially after the Disco Demolition backlash. This record came out in 1983, four years after that cultural shift. I also wouldn’t classify this as a disco album. Does it take inspiration from disco? Sure. But it’s much more a reflection of the rise of 80s synthpop and dance-pop."
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