Welcome to pillbugm.blog

Even if you haven’t been keeping tabs on the mainstream pop scene, it seemed pretty difficult to escape Canadian pop-singer Tate McRae last year, and probably this year too. At one point gaining more Spotify listeners than Taylor Swift and Beyonce thanks to hits like greedy and exes that were somewhat ungraciously forced upon me by the YouTube Shorts algorithm, Tate gained a lot more notoriety last year, amidst comparisons with Britney Spears due to her past in competitive dancing.

Eventually I decided to bite and listened to some of her hits as well as her debut album, THINK LATER, and I’m here to answer the question of whether it lives up to the somewhat manufactured hype.

The short answer is that it really does not. As a pop album, it is overly eager to please, generic, and – perhaps the worst crime of all for a pop album – boring. THINK LATER, like its singer, suffers from a severe lack of identity or personality.

The best pop albums are usually those that are able to act as a statement for the artist’s brand or represent a new sound to the general public – think Beyonce’s Lemonade or Gaga’s Born This Way. Failing that, a decent pop album should at least be able to be memorable or deliver some catchy tunes, like Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. THINK LATER attempts to do both, establishing Tate as a “serious” artist through underwritten ballads whilst also trying to generate palatable, uptempo TikTok hits (as evidenced by the all-lowercase titles). The result is that neither goals are achieved – a listener previously unfamiliar with Tate will leave with no greater impression than her being a bad-girl-that-also-kind-of-cares.

The album is genuinely a chore to sit through. I have no doubt that it should blend into the background well whilst you do your shopping at an H&M, but the marketing of the album suggested that it would be composed of pure bops that would at least be an ear-worm albeit with a strong commercial aftertaste. With the exception of Tate’s pre-established TikTok hits exes and greedy, which were still catchy albeit stale, I have no doubt that I will forget about this album in about a week’s time.

Best Track(s):-

Rating: DNR (Do Not Recommend)