Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco Made a Loveless Love Album

Selena Gomez approaches pop with patience. Navigating an itinerary of performances, appearances, and expectations is not something she takes lightly after a lupus diagnosis and 2016 health scare that led to a kidney transplant. I Said I Love You First, her new album with fiancé Benny Blanco, arrives five years after Gomez’s previous full-length, 2020’s Rare. She’s been expanding her portfolio since then, revealing a foodie and actor who shines in a serious drama but also a low-stakes comedy. Returning to her teen television alma mater Wizards Beyond Waverly Place, in 2024, Gomez seemed at peace with a past she ached to escape in the harrowing 2022 documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me. The new album doesn’t want to be as steeped in health and relationship trauma. But Love You First’s quest for freedom is often undercut by pastiche and pulled punches.

Selena first met Benny Blanco more than a decade ago. Looking at once like the 1966 Bob Dylan and an EDM tent tripper, Blanco seems like the unlikely pop-star fiancé, and the album’s rollout has focused on highlighting the duo’s romance. Their creative chemistry is just as well-documented. Blanco worked on Revival’s massive “Kill Em with Kindness” and “Same Old Love,” and songwriters and producers in his orbit make up a healthy portion of Love You First’s team of collaborators. Justin Tranter, Blake Slatkin, Cashmere Cat, and Finneas assisted here, as Gomez rips through spiky and gloomy new wave, downcast disco, and bare-bones balladry you might recognize from Billie Eilish, Gracie Abrams, and Gwen Stefani tracks.

Yet Love You First often sounds like it’s dishing about couples’ drama it doesn’t care to commit to. “Younger and Hotter Than Me” sings achingly of competition with endlessly youthful replacements, and “Call Me When You Break Up” waxes about the fun to be had after a boyfriend gets dumped. But Gomez will have you know that neither song focuses on a love interest; you have to announce this when people pore over lyrics for references to your exes, Justin Bieber and the Weeknd. The former cut touches on a shifting relationship with fame after 30, and the latter is a pitch to a friend to spend more time together. The artist’s interest in distance between her protagonists and her history jibes with the overarching framing of the Album About Our Love, but it grows tougher to buy the colder the quips get. “You Said You Were Sorry,” a song about dreaming of an apology from someone who did you dirty, and “How Does It Feel to Be Forgotten” — “Talkin’ like we’re friends, honey, what were you thinkin’? / He loves me, I love him” — are selling “Fuck you, I’m happy now” airs the singer refuses to own with any specificity. This engagement party of a studio album and rollout would hate to be overshadowed by the ex-boyfriend beeves from last cycle, and that makes the Calamity Jane routine hit like a shooter hiding their hand.

The patchwork persona Love You First presents instead is still somewhat concerned with audience perceptions and mainstream trends. It breaks with its predecessors to slip into established sound and personality profiles, showcasing pliability often avoiding a commanding presence. Gomez salutes the placid softness of Spanish singer Jeanette with a cover of “El Muchacho de los Ojos Tristes,” then exemplifies the exact MOR/post-disco pocket Kacey Musgraves’s Deeper Well refused to with “Don’t Wanna Cry.” After following Charli XCX up the pitch-corrected runs of “Bluest Flame,” she disappears into Ultraviolence-core with “Forgotten.” Three trips to Lana Del Rey’s well of affected, deadened distance and filmic relationship strife — “How Does It Feel To Be Forgotten,” the aesthetically identical “You Said You Were Sorry,” and trap-folk sex jam “Cowboy” — feel like an irate fan of the “Brooklyn Baby” singer taking it upon themselves to craft her next album the way Mario Judah beat Playboi Carti to a Whole Lotta Red. While “Cowboy” and its Wild West foreplay simulation serves the intimacy the album concept insinuates, if you’re gonna play Lana, you must commit to the bit.

It’s difficult to heap too much blame for the dulling composure haunting Love You First on the personnel; they’ve proven themselves capable of delivering buoyant hooks and cutting-edge weirdness. Benny Blanco is a malleable producer who could make whatever you wanted. He’s circled the block as a hitmaker in three decades, workshopping Ke$ha and Katy Perry hits as an early Dr. Luke collaborator and later coming into his own as Swiss-knife utility player capable of both the flatulent crassness of Lil Dicky’s “My D!ck Sucks” and the wedding-playlist slickness of Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger.” Elsewhere, the album collects people who co-wrote and/or co-produced Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!,” Ariana Grande’s “Be My Baby,” Cardi B’s “Thru Your Phone,” FKA Twigs’s “Sad Day,” SZA’s “What Do I Do,” and Sam Smith and Kim Petras’s “Unholy” for the most laconic sounds on offer. It’s like Gomez is coaxing out this stormy quietude, softening other players’ instincts. Noisenik beatmakers Dylan Brady – a gec! – and Cashmere Cat are barely noticeable in this album’s muted touch. And it’s frustrating that Love You First, with the hundred ideas that were available, dragged everyone into the same media-trained grace and adult-contemporary fixations as other pop stars settling down in or on the way to their 30s.

The variety here is further hamstrung by a vocal approach dominated by a directness that can ping as simplicity. The back half of the album is so weighted by a wan, maudlin delivery that it lands less like a next major play for a pop star and more in the company of musical curios from working actors, including the sturdy Scarlett Johansson album with Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio, and the cracking roots-rock jams Mandy Moore dropped during This Is Us. Gomez is purposefully playing against past strengths; the most insistent snare on the entire album is situated in the J Balvin and Tainy collab “I Can’t Get Enough.” You notice a restraint as Gracie Abrams dances around the “Break-Up” chords with a lilt, gently outpacing her duet partner. It’s a shock; one thing the dreadful Emilia Pérez songwriters grasped is that Gomez intrigues when prodded away from hushed repeated notes that populate too many of the new album’s performances and into unexplored corners of her voice. Love You First steeps itself in the trappings of the intimate wedding album, advancing on breakthroughs previous albums had that people loved this singer as much for the bustling pop tracks and soaring vocal runs as for her darkly reflective moments. But by the late-album interlude “Do You Want to Be Perfect,” we’ve cycled through so many disparate if familiar vibes that it’s not clear what kind of artist Gomez wants to be. Fascinating and successful music has been made from this vantage point. This double-billed couples album is more interested in throwing you off the lovers’ trail than letting you in. As on the cover art, you can peek in on their world, but the pair is tensed up, deeply aware that you’re looking.