SOS Review

The writing has got better and funnier. Kill Bill states a murder fantasy with a shrug and a melody so pretty that the joke keeps landing years later. Ghost in the Machine, with Phoebe Bridgers, is a proper duet about numbness. Nobody Gets Me is the most exposed vocal she has recorded. Snooze became the durable hit and deserves it. Special closes the record on a genuinely bleak assessment of her own worth, which takes nerve to release.

What undercuts all of that is the shape. Twenty three tracks is a streaming strategy rather than a sequence, several songs stop rather than end, and the genre hopping means the album never establishes a room to sit in the way Ctrl did. Smoking on My Ex Pack is great and belongs on a different record. The result is a superb playlist and a scattered album, and the difference matters when the previous one was so completely whole.