After my first listen to last year’s, Forever Neverland (Columbia), the latest full-length from Danish singer-songwriter MØ I realized that I had stumbled into a bizarre experiment. When I listened to the electro-pop album on Spotify, I hardly noticed the typically disruptive between-song ads (no, I don’t have a Spotify subscription—what of it?). I read this result a couple of different ways, neither wholly negative or positive. Ultimately, though the record is being spun as a sort of art-pop tour de force in line with the work of luminaries such as Grimes, it’s mostly just a bunch of middle-of-the-road club bangers. While there’s occasionally fascinating rhythms and interesting vocal flows (on “Nostalgia” the Danish singer-songwriter delivers some lines like a slam poet), those elements are trumped by sweeping, echo-laden choruses and that lame cascading synth waterfall you’ve heard 1,000 times before. Though you can feel her commit to each and every breakdown, you wouldn’t even notice collabs with Diplo (“Sun in Our Eyes”) and Charli XCX (“If It’s Over”) if you hadn’t consulted the liner notes, and the result is that Forever Neverland feels a little overworked—which might explain the four-plus-year stretch since her debut full-length, Bikini Daze. All that said, if one of the record’s five singles dropped at the club while you were out on the dance floor it wouldn’t make you stop moving. v
