Stella Lefty - Long Way Home
When by far the catchiest part of your album is a melody from someone else’s song, you have a major problem.
The dominance that country and its adjacent genres have had over the musical zeitgeist in recent years has definitely had mixed results. A few genuinely passionate and talented songwriters unfortunately tend to get lost amongst people who do little more than exploit inherently successful formulas. And Stella Lefty, one of the biggest breakout stars in popular music in recent months, is arguably the apotheosis of this. Her debut album Long Way Home, released off the back of the success of her breakout single “Boston”, is a hollow, uninspired project that says absolutely nothing about who she is as an artist.
The opening track, “Lean In, Kiss Me" is probably the most charming thing the record has to offer; it’s nothing particularly special, but it’s warm enough to be fairly likeable and somewhat catchy. From there, though, the other 13 songs leave almost absolutely nothing with the listener to return to beyond one listen. The production is thin and sounds cheap throughout, doing the bare minimum to fit within standard country tropes and cliches for the music to sound vaguely pleasant and have potential for TikTok popularity. It’s not engineered all that well for that purpose, either — most of the songs are not catchy enough to even remember by the time you start listening to the next track.
The instrumentals are extremely uncreative and don’t have any interesting layering — and the songs aren’t exactly elevated by Stella Lefty herself, either. Lefty’s presence as a performer is basically non-existent, with vocals lacking personality, charisma or even conviction or strength — just breezy, soft vocals that make it sound like she’s operating on minimal effort. When one of these elements is lacking on an album, it usually has to be made up for by the other for the project to work — and with both being unimpressive at best here, it fails across the board. How generic it is ends up leading to some really secondary tracks — even putting aside the extremely prominent interpolation of “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan, which is the main basis of “Boston”. “I Know I Know”, for example, is extremely reminiscent of Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, from the style of the instrumental down to a lot of the song structure.
Another avenue in which Long Way Home fails is the writing. Stella Lefty somehow manages to be less interesting even than someone like Morgan Wallen — how blatantly unlikeable he comes off in his music is at least something that defines him. Lefty, meanwhile, doesn’t showcase a single trait of hers on this project. Literally anybody else could be singing these songs, and absolutely nothing about them would change from it. The topical matter is also extremely repetitive: the songs almost all involve relationships, alcohol, or both — the most standard topics possible within the modern traditions of the genre — and do absolutely nothing witty or interesting with them. The only lyrics that stick out are the eye-rollingly bad ones, such as “The minute we touch, it’s like damn, uh-huh” on the closer, “Why Wouldn’t We?”. The sole song that steps outside of the two main topics is “Feel Better”, which talks about mental health struggles in the most surface-level way possible (“When will I feel better?” is the central line of the chorus, and that’s about as deep as things go).
Time spent listening to Stella Lefty’s debut album is 38 minutes that would be better devoted to countless other much better projects. The music on it has little to no actual value in it, serving as nothing more than acceptable background noise. Lefty is barely an artist — she is an avatar, a successful product of the music industry, and will likely continue to release music just as soulless and formulaic as this for many years to come, adding her to the ever-growing list of such artists within popular music, and especially within pop country. If there’s a long way to anything for Stella Lefty, it’s to originality.
2.8/10
