Clear your calendars and get down to your nearest dancefloor. Demi Lovato is back with her ninth studio album, It’s Not That Deep, and it’s a dance-pop confection that more than delivers on her promise to get you “sweating on the dance floor under the lights”.
Yep, that means hanging up the air guitars and getting used to a higher BPM, because the former Disney channel star’s punky haircuts and rock ballads have been replaced by flowing locks and dance-pop bangers.
Call it the Brat effect — the girls, the gays and the theys (Lovato, a non-binary bisexual, identifies somewhere in all three camps) want to get you back in the club. But this isn’t a pop princess simply jumping on the bandwagon of using autotune to sing about being sad while partying. Her magnificent vocal range and ability to dig deep into the trauma (and she’s had more than her fair share) of being young and famous is something she’s made all her own.
It’s Not That Deep really is just that good. Lovato switches effortlessly between earworms that will have you bopping in your seat to heartrending tracks that raise the hair on the back of your neck. Lovato, as her many documentaries have covered, was living that 365 party girl life long before lyrics about bumpin’ that were a glint in the apple of Charli’s eye. Now sober and newly married, she gives us raw songs that sound like they come from the perspective of a better healed place.
Admittedly, many of the songs do recall the work of other artists. But it’s all in a knowing way, like Lovato is making life easy for the DJs who will surely be remixing her songs. The production is very slick, too. As you’d expect from Zhone, who produced Troye Sivan’s Rush, Charli’s Talk Talk, and multiple Kesha tracks.
Singles such as Fast — the love child of Troye and Charli’s 1999 by way of Cascada’s Every Time We Touch — are fun and campy. Frequency has more than a little of Britney’s Work, Bitch! about it. If you love Brooke Candy’s Yoga but can’t play so many swears in public, Kiss (“I kiss for fun/ It’s fun to kiss”) is the perfect solution.
Lovato also mines her own pain and burnout with Sorry To Myself. She’s spent a lot of time apologising for past misdeeds in her previous work, but here she’s matured enough to own them and forgive herself. “I was my favourite hater / But I’m tired / Now I’m flirting with hope,” she acknowledges over a beat before soaring into a pure pop chorus that recalls peak Little Mix. Lovato doesn’t need autotune, but she knows it adds that little bit of sauce a good dance song needs.
The final track, Ghost, is quite literally haunting. It’s a love song with razor blades, making a pact with the object of her affection that they’ll attach themselves to her in a ghostly way. “If I am the first one to go/ You know I’d never leave you alone,” she sings, unleashing her vocal range to flawlessly hit her whistle register. “I want to be haunted for life.” It’s about ghosting, too, but from the perspective of someone who has actually cheated death and lived to tell the tale.
It’s Not That Deep is, obviously, a knowing lie. Lovato has always been unafraid to plumb the depths. But now she’s happy to poke fun at the memes and rave the bad feelings away — until the next album, of course.
It’s Not That Deep is out now via Island Records/Universal Music Group
