Perrie - Perrie

The debut solo album from former Little Mix member Perrie Edwards — now simply going by Perrie — arrives under the banner of Sony Music UK.

To start on a positive note, Perrie opens and closes in a genuinely pleasant way, which is often one of the most crucial things a pop record can get right. Tracks like “Forget About Us” and “If He Wanted To He Would” make for an easy, enjoyable entry into the album, while “You Go Your Way” and “Goodbye My Friend” close it beautifully. Unfortunately, what happens in between is where the conversation really begins.

Here’s my main punchline. While preparing this review, I asked five friends of mine — people who like music but don’t actively follow the industry — to listen to two random songs from this album and guess who the artist was. The only hint I gave was that she’s a British singer. Here are the results:

2 - Rita Ora
1 - The girl who sings Jet2holidays song
1 - Charli xcx (we aren't friends anymore)
1 - No idea

That little experiment says a lot. This album plays like a graduation project of a high-schooler in British pop. The problem is that nothing here truly distinguishes the artist behind it. And that’s surprising, because Perrie is someone with one of the strongest voices in the industry, a graduate of a hugely successful pop group, with all the connections and potential that come with that. For some reason — maybe by artistic choice — she decided her solo path would be the safest, most basic form of Britpop.

If I had to sum up this album in one sentence, I’d say it’s so precisely generic that it skillfully avoids falling into the pit of truly bad, embarrassing pop, but clings firmly to the line of the most basic, harmless kind.

Perrie doesn’t dive deep into personal storytelling here, vaguely touches on her surroundings and emotions, and delivers what feels like a straight-A student’s version of a pop album: polished, neat, and completely safe. The decision to do 16 tracks is questionable, too. Nearly 50 minutes of runtime start to drag around track eleven, when the album starts to feel too long and too much like a background car radio playlist.

It feels like an album released because it was simply time to put something out, rather than one made by an artist who has truly figured out who she is outside of Little Mix. Perrie doesn’t offer anything particularly fresh or essential — and, most importantly, she doesn’t present herself in a meaningful way.

You come into the album already knowing who she is, and you leave it with that picture unchanged. And that’s not a good sign for a debut.

5.9/10