Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. Music reviewer, extraordinaire.

There was a somewhat big and widely discussed pop record that I just didn't really decide to do a review on as of late. That would be the new Camilla Camila Cabello, C,XOXO material, but also even some of the text and branding around her whole BRAT album cycle. I will admit, I myself in the lead up to the record was pretty excited and interested to see just how far the Camilla hyperpop rabbit hole went down once the entire album was out, especially considering how much of a train wreck some of the teasers from this record were.

While I did see and recognize some of those hyperpop, I'll say, similarities myself, they were not being executed very well, especially on the big lead single to the record, "I Luv It", which I think by the end of the year will truly stand as one of the worst singles to come out of any mainstream album cycle for 2024. Yeah, that's how bad it is. I'm getting phlem up in my throat over it. Like that zany, goofy-ass beat that to my ears is nearly impossible to take seriously because it's just trying way too hard to be experimental, though I do think that Gucci Mane sample is novel. That annoying hook, God.

"I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it."

I absolutely trash and embarrassing Playboi Cardi feature that I don't even really think we need to go over at this point. But yeah, track was pretty awful, and subsequent singles from the record also saw Camilla doing some weird hyperpop adjacent stuff, too, especially with a lot of the autotune and the vocal manipulations and all that. And because of all of that, again, I feel like a lot of fans and both haters alike are presumed going into the album that the majority of it was pretty much going to be like this. But I was actually shocked to find that the rot underneath the floor words on this album was worse than even that. Because an entire record of Camilla trying to essentially hop on a mostly dead experimental pop trend at this point would actually be worth talking about to some degree. But the deeper cuts on the record actually don't even meet that very low expectation.

You have absolutely cringe and forgettable interludes packing out a tracklist that is already short as is because the record is just around 30 minutes in length. Definitely Camilla's most scant and undercooked offering yet lengthwise. There are other terrible and underutilized features throughout the project, too. The Lil Nas X appearance is far from one of his best. You also bring on BLP Kosher to tell some story about how your music made him cry. It just comes across as really weird. JT and Yung Miami, presumably because of everything crazy going on in their personal lives, are credited separately, not as City Girls, even though they mention City Girls in the rapping. Yung Miami's appearance on that track is horrible and annoying on the ears.

Camilla also provides provides real estate for not one but two massive Drake appearances on this record, too, one of which he's completely soloing on his own, which I know this was probably planned out months in advance. These tracks are most likely old. It's just funny that this all coincided in a way to where she would be releasing these songs after Drake took one of the biggest Ls in hip hop history for a second time. I mean, if there was any point in your career where a Drake feature was not really going to boost your numbers all that much, it's currently right now.

On top of that, the other solo cuts on the record, a lot of the time, are either not stylistically playing to Camilla's strengths, or they are very strict back, boring, drab, bland ballads that don't really offer the lush, colorful, fun, sometimes Latin-tinged instrumentation that made numerous tracks on all of her previous records work well. It took a couple of years for this album to come together, and it's still not really that long or thorough of an exploration of whatever the heck she was trying to do.

It's a mess. It's lopsided. It's inconsistent. It is such a nothing burger. It also makes me reflect on this greater trend that I'm seeing outside of this record where it just seems like a lot of very popular, very viral, very mainstream artists are not putting all that much effort into the quality of their albums, most likely because there's not really a whole lot of incentive to do so. I think that's pretty much where a record like this comes from. I think that's where a record like the new Ice Spice comes from. I think that's where also the new attempt at a summer jam Imagine Dragons album comes from.

Your appeal and success as an artist is no longer fully dependent on whether or not the album you come together with is actually quality or replayable or memorable in any form or fashion. It's really more about 'Can we create a silly, viral, ridiculous, discussable moment that is polarizing in some way on the internet?' Or like in the case of Imagine Dragons, 'Can we do something that is so bland and background and playlistable that we squeeze out a track or two that are just very plain, agreeable summer jams, while the rest of this very short album we barely put any effort into just gets flushed down the drain? Because whatever, if we make any money on this thing, it's going to be not through people buying it, but streaming it.'

So long story short, really, the main reason I didn't cover this record or go into it is that it doesn't really feel like there's a lot to talk about. More and more and more, I'm seeing the release of these albums that, to my ears, just barely qualify as albums. Clearly, a lot of forethought wasn't put into how they come together as a whole.

And look, I'm not coming on here and trying to warn all of you or scare all of you about records going away completely or dying or whatever. I still hear a lot of albums that actually sound like albums put out every year. In fact, maybe more now than ever with the fact that more people are releasing music today than at any other point in human history. But at least as far as the mainstream is concerned, I am noticing this trend where it's becoming increasingly clear to label execs, to artists, to producers, and to PR people as well that a good quality album that you've really labored over doesn't necessarily have to be your key to success.

It can be. But if you're not an album type artist or an artist who typically succeeds on that front, it may not even be to your benefit to worry that much about accomplishing the goal of creating a truly great album and just instead release a bunch of random-ass tracks that you just throw together, compilation style, and just call it an album.

Those are my thoughts or lack thereof on that. Let me know yours down in the comments.

Anthony Fantano, Camila Cabello, forever.