The 5 essential tracks from Britney Spears' 'Glory'
2016 has been a year of music's biggest names planting their flags in their corners of pop. With their respective releases, Beyonce has defined herself as pop’s resilient queen, Rihanna as pop’s rulebreaker, Drake as pop’s wedding DJ and Kanye as pop’s provocateur.
Not Britney Spears, who's happy to let her reputation stand.
After her rocky journey from teen idol to tabloid trainwreck to reformed star, the Britney we know in 2016 is the same Britney we've heard on her previous handful of releases: steady-handed, sexy and completely uncontroversial. Since returning with 2007’s Blackout, full of stomping disco bangers that winked at future music trends, her latter-day albums have been proficient exercises in well-made pop. That hasn’t necessarily meant they’ve been memorable beyond their singles.
In a year where her peers are rewriting their narratives, Spears' consistency is a blessing and a curse. Glory (** and a half out of four stars), her ninth studio album, has no intentions of deviating from her safe zone. But the album makes enough tweaks to Spears’ formula of playing with different pop trends of the moment — while keeping her character consummately sexy — to be a worthwhile listen.
Wisely, after letting will.i.am handle her 2013 album Britney Jean, Spears hands Glory over to a range of producers, who free her sound from the thudding bass that weighed down some of her recent releases. The wordless EDM choruses still show up on Glory, but more often than not, Spears’ vocals occupy the empty space normally filled with generic club basslines, surrounded by nimble production that dabbles in R&B, reggae and tropical house.
Spears still falls back on old tricks that keep Glory from matching her best '00s output; her voice is undeniably processed, and her lyrics are still strings of interchangable come-ons. But refreshingly, Britney herself feels more present.
Ready to listen? Start with these four songs.
Make Me
After the forced-sounding girl-power anthem that was Pretty Girls, Spears’ return single with Iggy Azalea, Make Me was a welcome course-correction. At the album’s weaker moments, Spears’ vocals are processed to the point of metallic when they’re meant to crisply stand out front. Make Me wisely leans into the distortion, layering Spears’ vocals and sending them skyward. G-Eazy’s verse is the only guest feature on Glory, and after hearing how Ariana Grande elevated her similarly-poppy Dangerous Woman by inviting voices like Nicki Minaj and Future to join, we wish Spears would’ve similarly opened up her circle.
Private Show
Spears tries on R&B lite on Private Show, one of Glory’s most explicitly sexy tracks that, to Spears’ credit, could’ve gone terribly wrong. The chorus’ sung/rapped invitation to “Slide down my pole, watch me spin it and twerk it” might be cringeworthy if the song took itself too seriously. But producer Young Fyre, also behind album highlight What You Need, keeps the song from veering into parody by going retro with a doo-wop swing that would make Meghan Trainor jealous. Plus, it’s a reminder that Spears, when she’s not reaching the rafters with her breathy cooing, has a growling lower register that doesn’t get used enough.
What You Need
Glory's second detour into nostalgia, What You Need is all hand-clapping, horns-bursting soul, a song straight out of the Motown-throwback playbook of Spears’ fellow 00s’ icon Christina Aguilera. Spears never had the beefiest voice in pop music, and while we can’t help imagining Aguilera or Ariana Grande crushing the song’s vocal runs with their hefty belting, Spears does just fine — enough to giggle “That was fun!” at the end.
Better
Glory is a pop record released in 2016, so obviously, there's some tropical house. The album's experimentations with pulsing Kygo-esque production sound best on Better, its prerequisite chorus of distorted vocal blips elevated by its earworm melody. Pop music eventually needs to move on from its current island obsession, but cushioning his voice with glowing, vaguely dancehall-esque beats worked great for Justin Bieber on Purpose, and it's a natural fit with Britney here.
Liar
Unless her new album appears from thin air, Liar is the best Katy Perry song of 2016, complete with a soaring scream-sung chorus and a melody ripped straight from E.T. Spears — and before her, Madonna — helped define the pop-star persona of the girl-next-door gone bad, making straight-down-the-middle pop while courting controversy. And while Perry's style may be more distinctive these days than that of her predecessors, Liar is Spears' reminder that she was shocking music fans by kissing girls way before Katy was.
Glory is out Aug. 25 on RCA.