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The pressure she claims to be feeling doesn’t show on an album that delivers melancholy anthems and Chic-y disco while revitalising the cliches of self-care and empowermentAs Lizzo points out on the opening track of Special, she has “been home since 2020”. Judging by the lyrics of her fourth album, much of the intervening time has been spent coping with heartbreak, although a considerable amount clearly went into puzzling over how to follow Cuz I Love You, an album that drastically shifted Lizzo’s career. It turned the lauded leftfield hip-hop artist into an inescapable part of the mainstream pop landscape, spawning one TikTok-boosted hit after another. The twin challenges of coping with sudden success and deciding what to do next evidently hung heavy. There’s a lot of stuff on Special about healing – for Lizzo this involves “twerking and making smoothies” – while, by her account, she wrote 170 songs before whittling them down to these 12.The results are impressively varied. The world hardly wants for 21st-century disco pastiches, but About Damn Time is a spectacularly good example – buoyed by a Nile Rodgers-esque guitar line, it sounds like the greatest Chic track Chic never recorded – perhaps because Lizzo seems to implicitly understand the genre. “I associate disco with resilience,” she said recently, which isn’t the kind of interpretation you often hear from a contemporary artist making busy with lush orchestrations and four-to-the-floor drums. Album closer Coldplay borrows a snatch of the titular band’s Yellow. In theory that sounds like one of those thumpingly obvious samples designed to play on the childhood memories of a millennial audience, which the singles charts have been clogged with recently but it’s used it in a really creative way. Chris Martin’s vocal is sped up, then floated over piano chords darker and jazzier than the original’s major key anthemics, lending it a more ambiguous, melancholy tone. It helps that the song that follows is great, a beautiful but delicate and downbeat end to the album. Continue reading...