Benson Boone - American Heart

Why?

Why??!

I wish I was here for someone else, but here I am, reviewing Benson Boone’s sophomore album. Unfortunately, we are not here to talk about backflips, cringe marketing, and questionable branding. Music. What about it?

Benson Boone: young, white, shirtless, armed with sweet, safe little songs. What could he possibly offer? Frankly, I approached American Heart with a surprisingly open mind. My exposure to Boone had been minimal — I’d only involuntarily heard “Mystical Magical” and hadn’t even sat through his previous hit single from this album, “Sorry I'm Here For Someone Else,” in full. So, technically, there was a chance for American Heart to surprise me. And it did. Just not in the way you want an album to surprise you.

Boone is an odd phenomenon: everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. He sells out arenas; people pay real money to hear his songs live. And yet, every single time I find myself among people who seriously engage with music, I struggle to hear anything positive about him. Somehow, though, he has managed to become one of the unfortunate visual emblems of 2025 pop culture: a clean-cut white guy singing the most painfully generic, risk-free songs imaginable — carefully designed to appeal to everyone by saying absolutely nothing. By being absolutely nothing.

In theory, American Heart is his "sophomore challenge" after Fireworks & Rollerblades — which, let’s not forget, only dropped a year ago and was quickly assembled around the viral success of “Beautiful Things.” That song earned him a healthy serving of online hate — much of it, frankly, deserved when it comes to the music itself, though I won’t indulge in personal attacks. The debut had a few passable moments, but ultimately, it left us with Boone screaming “Beautiful Things” at the top of his lungs while trying to masquerade as some kind of dynamic showman. The real problem is that even now, two albums in, we still don’t know who the hell Benson Boone actually is as an artist, or what he stands for creatively — if anything.

American Heart feels like a highly polished American TV ad designed for the most unadventurous casual listener. Musically, however, it’s a soulless exercise in algorithmic blandness: mushy, unimaginative, painfully unoriginal, and so desperately safe it feels almost insulting. The songs flow into each other like the repetitive sounds of an arcade machine on autopilot. Over the top of these uninspired backdrops, Boone wails chorus after chorus with bizarrely awkward lyrics that grow increasingly laughable the more they attempt to sound “personal.”

And just so I’m not accused of exaggerating, here’s a selection of actual lyrics from American Heart:

“Moonbeam ice cream, taking off your blue jeans, dancing at the movies”
”Oh, two eyes like revolver machines, baby, aim your lethal weapons at me”
”Break a sweat, bob your head, 'til you snap your neck”
”You got a million different pairs of underwear spread out on my couch 'cause you left 'em there”
”Flip phones, Listerine, tired eyes and drinking coffee / Cars, trains, T-shirt stains, even places I ain't ever been / Red scarfs, peaches, stadiums, and bleachers, small towns, side roads, New York, at a big show”

At its core, American Heart is an entire album about absolutely nothing. It’s empty. There’s no spark, no soul, no creative intention behind it — a product assembled just to fill space, to occupy radio playlists, to simply exist. It’s depressingly emblematic of how certain corners of the music industry operate in 2025: investing in pure void rather than taking any risk on artists with actual artistic ambition.

Even the album’s creative team says it all. One of its key producers is Jason Evigan — the mastermind behind some of the most flavorless, radio-engineered songs of the last few years. This is the same man who recently helped craft the monumentally soulless debut solo album from Måneskin’s Damiano David, a record so vacuous that its only memorable parts are the ones blatantly recycled from others. American Heart is built from the same template: a processed puree of recycled 2010s pop elements, overproduced to oblivion, underwritten lyrically, conceptually aimless, and entirely devoid of any discernible identity.

The team surrounding Boone doesn’t even seem to know what they’re trying to mold him into — a parody of more cohesive male artists? A teenage heartthrob? A showman? A TikToker? And while Boone undeniably has some natural talent — a decent voice, a willingness to hustle — it’s being utterly squandered and grotesquely exaggerated into a cartoonish spectacle that’s alienating to anyone who approaches music with even the slightest critical ear.

If I had to describe American Heart in one image: imagine you’ve got food poisoning. The only thing your stomach can tolerate is a plain, dry cracker. You won’t vomit from it, but you’ll derive absolutely no pleasure or satisfaction either. American Heart is that dry cracker. Empty, forgettable, mildly offensive in its banality. A complete waste of time for the label, the artist, the listener, and everyone involved.

But hey — maybe a backflip will cheer you up?

3.0/10