But Let Her Burn is so, so dry. Largely produced and written with MØ collaborator Stint and Micah Jasper, who worked on Slayyyter’s Troubled Paradise, Let Her Burn is bereft of the subversive and chaotic DIY energy that made hyperpop a destabilizing force. Black mostly sings in a breathy, affected deadpan that suggests heavy, anonymizing digital pitch-correction. It skirts the edges of being robotic and mostly ends up uncanny.
In 2011, Black fell victim to one of the earliest, and most intensely brain-numbing, cycles of internet discourse. First, of course, there was “Friday,” which was intensely mocked; then, there was the consideration that, perhaps, it was unfair to mock her; then, much later, came Black’s stint as an anti-bullying advocate. All the while, there were additional singles and TV appearances and splashy video cameos where you couldn’t tell if she was in on, or the butt of, the joke. She is a case study for the way that the internet exploits the young, innocent, and unself-aware. One could argue that, by releasing Let Her Burn—which carries the same clean, calculated “darkness” of classic I’m bad now 2000s pop records like Miley Cyrus’ Can’t Be Tamed—Black is reclaiming her image, seeking to exist in public on her own terms. Compared to, say, the TLC reality show hamster wheel or the Cameo ecosystem, hyperpop seems like a slightly less exploitative way for a D-list celeb to get another shot in the public eye. But far from an entryway into fertile new creative territory, Let Her Burn comes across as a means to a rebrand. It’s undeniable that Black has been through a lot, which makes it all the more bizarre that Let Her Burn, intellectually, musically, and spiritually, contains so little.
There are flashes of a slightly more interesting album. On “Destroy Me,” Black airs insecurities—“Don’t wanna be a loser/I wonder if I dye my hair/Will they think that I’m cooler?”—with an unadorned frankness that makes you wonder, a little, about who she is beyond a singer who had a minor YouTube hit with “Friday” and then, a little while later, a minor Billboard hit with follow-up “Saturday.” “Sick to My Stomach,” one of a couple of more traditional, ’80s-inflected songs on the album, will satiate anyone holding out for The Loneliest Time Side B, as will “Look at You”—although “Everybody’s got that somebody that fucks you up” is the kind of clunker not even Carly Rae Jepsen would touch.
Black, at least, seems to have a shred of self-awareness about the whole thing. On Let Her Burn’s final track, “Performer,” she sings about struggling to open up: “Every time I try to be more vulnerable/It’s like I hit a wall/Can’t go any further.” It is ostensibly not meant to be taken literally, but after an album on which she struggles to convincingly muster the anarchic spark of hyperpop or the wounded pathos of a classic breakup record, it might as well be true.