Almost three years ago, I reviewed Zara Larsson’s previous album. Do you know how much of it I remembered before starting to work on this review? “Venus”? Well, not much. Unfortunately but Zara Larsson despite several promising singles in the past, she eventually became a painfully transparent artist. So what if we’re dealing with a pop production that makes you feel how much money was put into it? Please try to tell me who Zara Larsson is after listening to this album. I hear silence and don’t see raised hands.
On “Venus” we can find absolutely everything that has been happening in popular radio music lately, but I have no doubt that in a few years no one will say “oh, that sounds like Zara Larsson” about another song. However, when you listen to this album, you will easily refer to his works Dua Lipa (“You Love Who You Love” or “Escape”), The Weeknd (“Can’t Tame Her”) or Pink (“End of Time”). I haven’t heard such re-creation for a long time.
If only they were strong shots. Unfortunately, a significant part of the album consists of a number of songs whose existence you forget while listening to them. IN “On My Love” is responsible for the music David Guetta, but whenever I try to remember what happened there while listening to the rest of the album, I have to go back. I wanted to write that “Ammunition” is an exception, but writing these words, at most I remember that it was a moment that made me rock. Melody? Music? Just the chorus? Absolutely nothing stays for long. Even the text layer, which is an eternal complaint about love, as revealing as the invention of the radio in 2024.
The perfect reproduction is half the trouble compared to the sound of Zara’s vocals. Larsson’s voice has been sterilized of any human elements. The excessive use of autotune or melody is downright disgusting. It sounds as if the engineers of this album did not trust the creator at all in terms of her vocals, they enhanced it with computers at all costs, which ultimately resulted in a distinct artificiality in the sound of her voice. It even makes a ballad “The Healing” it cannot convey the emotions that it ultimately should with all its potential.
This is unfortunately the case with “Venus”. I have the impression that if artificial intelligence tools were able to create professional-sounding music – which will undoubtedly happen at some point – “Venus” could be their creation. All you would need to do is create a prompt that would describe the most generic pop album produced by production masters from Sweden. This digital Venus is its result.
Zara Larsson, “Venus”, Sony Music Entertainment
3/10