Midnights Review

The concept is good and the execution is careful to a fault. Antonoff's production is uniformly hushed, all soft synth pads and muted drum machines, and across thirteen tracks that consistency turns into flatness. Anti Hero is the centrepiece and it is a genuinely clever song about self loathing undermined by one line that everybody quotes for the wrong reasons. Maroon and You're on Your Own, Kid are the real highlights, the latter containing the single best verse she has written since folklore.

Midnight Rain has an interesting vocal treatment. Question...? and Vigilante Shit are the weakest things here by some distance, the second one particularly thin. What is missing is dynamics. Nothing gets loud, nothing breaks, and an album about three in the morning could stand to feel more unhinged than this one does. Extremely successful, well written in stretches, and it plays like an artist executing rather than discovering.