Hi everyone, Bigthony Sadtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of the new Tiffany Day album, HALO.

Here we have the new and sophomore album from Miss Tiffany Day, a Canadian-born pop singer and songwriter who is having a breakout moment behind the release of this new album here. It's being heralded as one of the best pop and electronic electronic albums of the year, and actually managed to even land at number 25 on Billboard's Top Dance Music Albums chart. I could see the excitement behind this record because it's very in vogue with a lot of trending sounds and pop and electronic music this year, especially on the electro side, given recent releases from underscores and Slayyyter.

But, just because this buzz for Tiff is new, that doesn't mean she herself is new, as she has been dropping singles since the late 2010s. Going back even further than that, you could say Tiffany was sort of a music YouTuber, uploading various covers of popular songs with some pretty impressive vocal performances, I'll say. (Also, you know, new and original tunes paired with music videos that seemed pretty clearly self-funded, though there was clearly a split in traffic between the content that was entirely original or inspired by the work of others.)

But this new album cycle from Miss Day is really starting to change that, and I went into this album wondering if that was due to some kind of long-awaited artistic stroke of genius, or a right place/right time sort of thing. Because digging into Tiffany's back catalog of content, I can't say I came across anything that was terrible, tacky, or offensively bad, from her early singles to her I'm Alive EP. But there was kind of a lack of identity across all this stuff, with Tiff glomming onto one micro-pop trend after another in search of something that either felt right or worked. Even the sound and marketing between this and her debut album, LOVER TOFU FRUIT, is so night-and-day it's a little shocking. Instantly shifting from this warm, bright, youthful, almost like top-40 type of vibe, to something now that's comparably a lot more DIY-coded, edgy, mysterious, and alternative. Some nonchalant Y2K vibes as well, of course.

While yes, it is true, a pop artist reinventing themselves for a new cycle is nothing new — it's not a crime, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it — the week this project really started to garner some buzz, some pretty embarrassing information came out: a back-and-forth between Tiffany and a much more obscure singer, fawn burke, who posted an entire Twitter thread's worth of allegations about how Tiffany ripped off her whole aesthetic through photos, music videos, and the music itself. And while a lot of these accusations are kind of bogus — I'm sorry, you did not invent the idea of laying in the snow and getting a photo taken of you — there is a point being made here... It's just not the point Burke thinks it is.

It's not that Tiffany's vibe is derivative of any one single artist, but that the music and its surrounding aesthetics are so plain and unoriginal, they don't really feel specific to her in any way. Because there's also the matter of Burke's former producer, Niles Forester, who has an awful lot of production and writer credits on this album. And as Burke showed on the internet, Forester clearly rehashed and reused beats that were originally intended for, or recorded on by Burke, for this project. Another thing that, in concept, is fine. There are collaborations that don't work out all the time, and producers routinely reuse and rehash instrumentals that maybe there was an initial idea for at one time but ends up working better in a different context, reworked a different way, or with a different collaborator.

Still, I do think it is a little cynical of Forester to simply plug another artist into some of these tracks to achieve mostly the same result in terms of the way it sounds, the vibe of it overall. It's almost like a willing participant was more important than a fresh or novel idea. This is not to totally discount Tiffany having, at least from what I can hear, more vocal chops to offer, and it's not to discount her efforts overall, either, because she has been grinding at this music thing for years and only just now seems to be popping off. I don't think the problem is, "Tiffany is evil and stealing these ideas from any one artist who should have a spot in the music landscape of today instead." It's that the ideas this album presents are so commonplace that you could make a compelling case that these ideas are being taken or borrowed from somewhere else, because they're just that dime a dozen.

It's not just the marketing, or the aesthetics and vibes surrounding the music; it's the music too. Because for the most part, Tiffany and Forester only seem to be operating with a very boiler-plate version of this buzzing, bright, 2020s indie girl EDM, whose opening track seems packed with lyrics that are an open admission of her lack of identity:

"Do you actually believe I'm someone you could look up to?/ 'Cause I never really saw it in me / I don't believe that you could see it in me either, I think I'm a copy / And see, I'm terrified that I don't really know myself well / I get too influenced and in over my head, I can't tell."

While the vulnerability and tension-building chords on this track are admirable, as is the quick segue into the following "DOIT4ME," which does have a solid beat to boot, but the songwriting feels like if Hannah Montana were rebranded to go from this girl who would put on a wig and suddenly be living this double-life where she's fronting a rock band, to a different girl who put on sunglasses and suddenly she's a world-famous DJ or something.

The Radio Disney vibes only intensify on "SAME LA," too, a song that is frankly hard to describe given just how unremarkable it is, from its basic melodies to breathy lead vocals and boring relationship dynamics described within the confines of the LA social scene. It reminds me of hearing Owl City for the first time after listening to The Postal Service for years.

Deeper into the record, too, we see Tiffany writing about the insecurity of comparing herself to other women. And on "COPYCAT," she describes pretty thoroughly feeling the temptation to jack the style of someone who she sees as much cooler than her. I'm sorry, but sometimes it's hard to ignore the fact that this woman is so consumed by her lack of original thought that it becomes her muse. (And I can already read the cope people are gonna type on social media about me saying that.)

In a way, I feel like I just went through a similar situation with the recent Slayyyter record, which I described as more of a moodboard than an album because its aesthetics and sounds and production I think held up a lot stronger than the songwriting itself. But despite the criticisms I have of that album, I could still see the vision and see potential in what Slayyyter was hammering out on that album. Plus, in interviews, it's very clear that Slayyyter is a student of the musical world she is operating in.

Meanwhile, HALO, by comparison, has a much shallower sense of itself, to the point where it's not even a mapped-out array of vibes or influences. It fits more like an ensemble pulled off the Urban Outfitters clearance rack, with no real vision, persona, or especially edge. It's just borrowing from the most obvious characteristics of this current wave of electropop, and anything truly quirky or alternative about it gets sanded down until until all that's left are just some buzzing square-wave synths and the occasional jittery edit.

It gets blander as it continues, like on "TELL ME WHAT I DID," which is just like a random sad trap song... for some reason? The writing isn't exactly wowing me either. While yes, you could say the thoughts and emotions that go into Tiffany's songs are true to her, the only real, memorable, or consistent characteristics of her pen game is how she writes about crushes, relationships that don't quite work out, or again, insecurities.

And while those are not bad topics to pull from when writing songs. She describes these feelings with the depth that you would if you were just experiencing them for the first time in your life...and Tiffany is 26. I would imagine at this point that she would have maybe a bit more to say about these topics, or more revelations about them. But very little are offered in the midst of this tracklist, where "NO LUCK," a track where she writes pretty deeply about her health struggles, is easily the most thoughtful in terms of what she was writing about and how she writes about it.

I think the most positive note I can give this record at the end of the day is that if you are diehard for this current trend in electropop, this album is very easy to listen to and very easy to digest. It really breezes by. Tiff's vocals are palatable, even if, at least some of the time, she's punching underneath her weight vocally. And the production isn't bad, either; I promise at least a few of these tracks will make you move.

But beyond that, I don't really see this as anything else other than 'just another face in the crowd' type of album, one that's fine while it's on, but there's really no shortage right now of EDM-leaning pop records that offer way better production, hooks, lyrics, and sonics. This is why I'm feeling a strong 4 to a light 5 on this one.

Anthony Fantano. Tiffany Day. Forever.