ALBUM REVIEWS
You can’t plan a hit as big as ‘(It Goes Like) Nanana’, but if anyone could, it’s Peggy Gou. The Korean-born, Berlin-based house producer has made all the right moves since the playful 2018 single ‘It Makes You Forget (Itgahane)’, which featured her singing for the first time. Her cool delivery and slick melodicism stood out. Soon, she had Vogue photoshoots, a massive social following and a hectic tour schedule. But last year’s chart success underlined her crossover appeal; not every dance track gets sung like a football chant at festivals.
Writing a hit put a pause on the album rollout. Fans have been drip-fed songs since 2021’s breezy self-motivation anthem, ‘I Go’. ‘I Hear You’ is a singles album, in that half the songs are singles. While that kills some of the first-listen buzz, it’s understandable. Gou spent time fine-tuning to align with her utopian vision of 90’s Eurodance, as nailed on ‘Nanana’. Some clear touchpoints are ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’, ‘Show Me Love’, and obviously, ‘9PM Till I Come’.
Like ‘Nanana’, ‘Back to One’ and ‘Lobster Telephone’ have impeccably-layered synth hooks and nods to ’90s classics. Both songs present Gou as a beacon of positivity and perseverance connecting us through dance, as stated in her cheeky Korean lyrics: “I know you don’t understand this / But it doesn’t matter / It’s all the same / We’re all the same.” It’s a simple message, but it’ll feel downright spiritual after two pints in the park.
When ‘I Hear You’ deviates from its dance-pop blueprint, it doesn’t always work. The throwback R&B on Lenny Kravitz collaboration ‘I Believe in Love Again’ is a diversion into drab balladry. Next is ‘All That’, a Spanglish pop-rap tune featuring Puerto Rican rapper Villano Antillano. It fairs better thanks to their clear chemistry. Still, two mid-tempo tracks early on stalls the record’s momentum. It’s odd pacing from a DJ.
The album picks up in its explorative second half, with intercontinental drum’n’bass (‘Seoulsi Peggygou’) and comforting piano house (‘Purple Horizon’). There are still cheesy references and canned snare fills, but also a welcome dose of surprise.
That’s the joy of Peggy Gou’s music – she balances class and kitsch equally. When it works, it’s like finding dance music for the first time. ‘I Hear You’ has a pureness that will give many that feeling. You know, that feeling? It goes like Nanana.
It is hard to overstate Megan Thee Stallion’s success: She is not just a rap star, but the kind of supercharged celebrity who appears in commercials and movies and hobnobs with pop stars, all while serving as the new flagbearer of Houston rap heritage. On MEGAN, her newest album, you can feel the pressure on her to keep all those plates spinning—to maintain momentum, to not fuck it up. After Tina Snow, the 2018 EP that cemented Megan as a rapper who’s as raunchy, funny, and charismatic as anyone, all of her full-length projects have, to varying degrees, felt like exercises in becoming everything to everyone. But it’s never been as distracting as it is on MEGAN, an uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.
Do you share Megan’s infatuation with anime? Then you will get a thrill out of “Otaku Hot Girl,” which samples a song from Jujutsu Kaisen and features an intro from one of the show’s voice actors. Bankroll Got It’s drum-heavy flip of the soundtrack is uninteresting—though it’s not like he’s working with an anime renowned for its music—and the character references are earnest but unbearably corny. The better song that leans into her fondness for Japanese culture is the multilingual “Mamushi,” which pulls off the theme without flattening her personality. Maybe instead you need new Megan to play at your Pilates class: She’s got you with the feel-good “Worthy,” a Lizzo-coded pop song. Those muscles are put to more effective use on “Spin,” where the silky Victoria Monét hook complements aggressively flirty Megan verses. The fluffy finger-snap beat sounds like it could have been on Love/Hate. (Come to think of it, Megan would have ripped “Shawty Is Da Shit.”)
Then there are the songs for those deeply invested in Megan’s beefs and squabbles. I can picture fans gathering in group chats, dissecting subliminals and clues like they’re in an Agatha Christie book club. After the last three months, I’m all feuded out, so I’m less interested in that game. Still, she lands a few good jokes on “Hiss,” where she calls out the misogynistic dudes in rap who can’t keep her name out of their mouths. (Drake has had a one-sided vendetta toward her for a while now; Megan hits back with some BBL Drizzy theories of her own.) “Rattle,” which has a fast, groovy beat that melodic South Florida rappers would eat up, leaves a sting. “’Cause the niggas don’t beef with the niggas/They scared of each other, but beat on the women,” she attacks; she could be talking about a dozen different rappers, which makes the song feel like a sharp indictment of hip-hop culture in general. As critical as that line is, she still has fun chanting, “Ain’t got no tea on me, this ho’ think she TMZ” while hitting a Harley Quinn cackle in the background.
Megan doesn’t fool around like that enough. Even tracks made to light up the club feel as if they’re satisfying expectations. On the would-be party anthem “Where Them Girls At,” Megan reworks the nostalgic Facebook-era twerk sound of Kansas City’s Kstylis. She doesn’t add anything new to his style; I can only imagine how TisaKorean, a Houston native who is always having a good-ass time tinkering with the past, would have sauced it up. Megan loosens up alongside Glorilla on “Accent,” capturing the tipsy bounce she’s always had in freestyles and features, like Latto’s “Sunday Service” remix. When she’s in that mode, she’s incredibly funny. “That ain’t my bae, he really more like my bidet,” she raps on “B.A.S.,” a Teena Marie-sampling club drill experiment that works because she’s all in. She’s even got a whole song (“Down Stairs DJ”) about masturbating before she falls asleep—not unexpected from Megan, but silly in a way her best music can be, going back to “Big Ole Freak.”
For all my reservations about MEGAN, I do understand the pressures, especially in rap, where hitmaking women have historically been discarded quickly. Foxy Brown got caught in label purgatory after 2001’s Broken Silence wasn’t as huge as Def Jam hoped; Trina had dirt thrown on her name when she did her own thing away from Trick Daddy. The stories are endless. The fears are real. If Lil Baby drops an album that makes zero cultural impact, he can go back to the drawing board. If Megan does? Who knows. She’s not trying to find out. This reality isn’t just depressing on a systemic level, but also because of the effect it has on an artist like Megan Thee Stallion. Even for one of the most celebrated Texas rappers of her generation, nurturing a fanbase takes priority over the music because it feels like a matter of time until the hip-hop industry finds an excuse to turn its back.
