Meghan Trainor - Toy With Me
Meghan Trainor, the queen of cringe-core, is back with her seventh studio album, released via Epic Records. And who are we not to pay attention and give Toy With Me a listen.
First of all, I want to applaud Meghan Trainor for her resilience. No matter what, she is always here, always ready to come back and deliver more music-like material for shopping malls, clothing stores, and elevators. It’s also remarkable how consistent she is in her craft. Every album is consistently bad, but she’s so confident and comfortable within it that it earns some level of respect.
But seriously, the opening track “Get In Girl” is actually… okay. There’s nothing genius about it, but it’s your standard radio pop song — the kind not only Meghan Trainor releases, but plenty of other artists do and get praised for (or at least not roasted). The second track, “Still Don’t Care”, follows pretty much the exact same formula and is, again, listenable.
But as usual, Meghan Trainor floods the record with songs that sound identical — same beats, same mindless, soulless, slightly dumb lyricism — and there are sixteen of them here, which already sounds a bit like a horror movie. The moment you dive deeper than the first two tracks, all the defining features of Meghan Trainor as an artist fully reveal themselves: this unexplainable absence of any desire to do something even remotely deep or at least creative within her niche, if you can even call it a niche.
Throughout the entire listen, you can’t shake the feeling that the music sounds aggressively artificial. There’s just nothing there, and it could have been generated by AI. It sits in this bubblegum pop space that feels like it’s trying to become the most basic definition of the genre — except there’s no taste, no style, no substantial artistry behind it.
I think it’s fantastic that she’s enjoying herself, even if no one within the blast radius of the speakers playing this music is. All these attempts to flirt with modern slang, a song called “Delulu” — lord, save me. Even when she tries to tell a story or reflect on her life, it comes across as extremely shallow and cartoonishly exaggerated, with strange vocal choices and not exactly the most logical production decisions.
And I get it — I’m absolutely not the target audience for this album. Although, to be honest, I struggle to understand who is, when there are far more interesting and similar alternatives out there. Instead, we get Meghan Trainor trying to be some kind of very odd version of Sabrina Carpenter on this record.
It just feels fake. And that artificiality creates this subtle sense of discomfort — like it’s not all rainbows and flowers, but rather this uncanny, artificial positivity that’s honestly more unsettling than uplifting.
In the end, I have to renounce my fascination with Meghan Trainor for being such a proud ambassador of millennial cringe. Show them all, girl.
4.1/10
