I Said I Love You is the first collaborative album from singer-songwriter Selena Gomez and producer Benny Blanco. Both of these artists have been heavy staples in the pop music industry, as Benny has produced radio friendly hits for Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Maroon 5 just to name a few, while Selena has gone from being a child actress with Disney to a very successful singer, actress, and businesswoman outside of Disney Channel. Given that this album came out four days ago, let’s see if it’s any good.

    Starting from the first track on this album, I immediately grew very bored very quickly. “Younger and Hotter Than Me,” has this really minimalist piano centered production and doesn’t really feel like an attention grabbing track. After the intro, I was hoping for something more uptempo, rather we get a track that feels like a poor imitation of Lana Del Rey. Selena Gomez isn’t a terrible singer by any means, but her vocal delivery feels emotionless and monotonous. Following that we get an uptempo pop rock track in “Call Me When You Break Up,” featuring Gracie Abrams whose voice and delivery sounds incredibly similar to another artist, but I can’t figure out who off the top of my head. It’s just a meaningless girl support other girl track, which like thematically isn’t bad, the track is just executed poorly. After, we get a track that sounds like something off of The Marías’s Submarine, in “Ojos Tristes,” featuring none other than….The Marías. It’s actually my favorite track on the record as I really like María Zardoya’s contribution vocally and production wise. Selena puts in a strong vocal performance and I love the underwater sounding guitar solo in the outro. It’s very well written both in English and in Spanish, and I wish more of the tracks on this record were like this one. I also like “Don’t Wanna Cry,” mainly for the production and instrumentation rather than the lyrics and vocals from Selena. It’s a track lamenting the end of a toxic relationship, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s crafted in a way that’s particularly interesting or ground-breaking. “Sunset Blvd,” is the most unsexy sex song I’ve heard in a while. It makes me want to commit to a vow of abstinence and join the Buddhist monks it turned me off THAT much. Following that is another revolting sex song, “Cowboy,” which has a cool instrumental I guess, but it’s as subtle as a neon sign advertising topless girls in Las Vegas. I don’t know why GloRilla needed to do a spoken word outro at the end, as it just feels very out of place and uncomfortable. Speaking of out of place, we follow that up with a track that is clearly ripping off Charli xcx with the robotic vocal filter and heavy electropop production on, “Bluest Flame.” The jarring transitions on this thing are triggering my OCD. We went from a house track to an acoustic love ballad. There’s such a clear lack of identity on this thing, the themes of love and heartbreak are a constant, but the sound is all over the place. I swear this album feels like a 14 year old white girl made a playlist called “I’m self-diagnosed with depression and this is deep,” and just put all these random tracks together and called it a day. “I Can’t Get Enough,” featuring J Balvin and Tainy is a reggaeton track that feels mainly like it was made for the radio, and I liked the catchiness of the track, so it’s easily a highlight of the record. “Don’t Take It Personally,” is basically just a trauma dump track with extremely melodramatic production and lyrics, but it is also a catchy track so there’s a positive there. “Scared Of Loving You,” is an appropriate closer to the album, but thematically it doesn’t stick out in the closet of identical flannels that is this album. 

    I went into this thing hoping for the best, and I was very much disappointed to say the least. This album lacks a cohesive sonic identity and as a result it’s a very disjointed and unorganized listen. It’s not even all over the place in a good way like with The White Album or The Life of Pablo, the way everything is set is stressful and completely unenjoyable. As a result, it feels shallow, boring, and unoriginal, lacking in creativity completely. Really disappointing.

Overall Score: 3/10

Favorite Tracks: “Ojos Tristes,” “I Can’t Get Enough,” “Don’t Take It Personally,”

Least Favorite Tracks: “Cowboy,” “Sunset Blvd.,” “Younger and Hotter Than Me,” “Call Me When You Break Up,”

Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch6xdV_ZjdU

Genres: Pop/Bedroom Pop/Electropop/Alt Pop