(Warner Bros)
UK audiences will know Bebe Rexha on the strength of her collaborations: with meat-headed country duo Florida Georgia Line, Dutch DJ Martin Garrix, rapper G-Eazy, and with Rita Ora, Charli XCX and Cardi B on Girls, a song about the joys of making out with women that drew condemnation from those who thought it trivialised queerness for a male gaze. These disparate hookups indicate an artist in desperate search of an identity, an impression the 28-year-old’s fiercely trite debut album confirms. But then, what self-respecting modern pop star needs anything so quaint as an identity when there are genre-specific Spotify playlists to grace? Expectations ticks every box on pop’s checklist in admirably perfunctory style: there are the songs about anxiety (I’m a Mess, Sad), the one that sounds like Migos (Mine), the one that features one of Migos (2 Souls on Fire), the Latin one (Shining Star), the tropical house one complete with “dolphin whine” (I Got You) and so on. The only remotely distinctive song is Ferrari, a song about how “living in the fast lane’s getting kinda lonely” that lands somewhere between Maren Morris’s (much better) My Church and Rag’n’Bone Man’s (much worse) Human.
As Ferrari proves, Rexha can belt in that strained, bluesy fashion that connotes authenticity – so it’s baffling trying to work out why her vocals are often lagged in Auto-Tune: she sounds like she’s drowning on Self Control and malfunctioning on the horrid Mine. The songwriting – about bad girls and good boys in miserable, moneyed relationships – is precisely as deep as you’d expect. Poptimism finds its hard ceiling.
Sing Like A Bird 