On her debut album I Can’t Let Go, Suki Waterhouse felt stuck, like she was moving through molasses. “I felt like I was doomed to feel a certain way forever,” she said in an interview with DIY last month, and this gloom was reflected on the record’s woozy sound. On her sophomore album peculiarly titled Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, she scoffs at her old self and aims to shed off this Eeyore angle. After facing the scrutiny of tabloids, going viral on Tik Tok, starring in Daisy Jones & the Six, getting engaged and becoming a mother, she realizes she’s better off not giving a fuck than being someone who sits on the sidelines.
For Sparklemuffin, Waterhouse wanted to make an album that wasn’t hung up on anxieties or embarrassment, even mentioning that her character from Daisy Jones & the Six inspired her to not be so reticent. “Supersad” sums up this mission statement aptly in the album’s first minutes: A middle finger to depression, the song finds Waterhouse finally emerging from her bed rot singing, “Swear to god, I’m over being so damn scared” and practically eye-rolling at herself. Then she yells out, “I look so much better when I don’t care!” The sultry “OMG” simultaneously sounds like Arctic Monkeys’ “Arabella” and present day Wolf Alice. At faster tempos and against fuzzy blown out guitar strums, these songs are like an IV, shocking new life into her music. If her first album was like the type of swaying around you do when you’re too inhibited to really dance, Sparklemuffin’s best moments are when it lets its hair down and headbangs it out.
But then Waterhouse hears a voice again that says everyone is looking at her funny and tells her to rein it in. Despite littering interviews with assertions that she misses her youth in the aughts, when it was cool to be messy (“Everything’s become so clean,” she lamented to British Vogue), Waterhouse never strays too far from convention. “Model, Actress, Whatever” is a humorous premise concerned with the “inevitable fall” of the optimistic upstarter. She slams her detractors, pointing out that labels can only define someone by so much. But with most of the album sounding exactly the same, her heartfelt lyrics (“Other half of my story is with me forever”) get buried underneath blasé vocals that sound resigned to her fate. There’s even a song where she dissects this guardedness (See: “Nonchalant”). Most of Sparklemuffin feels close, but not quite ready to reach the euphoria of being truly secure in oneself.
Compared to her debut’s tight 10 tracks, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin mostly suffers at the hands of a bloated runtime. You can thank Beck for the album’s 18 tracks; according to Waterhouse, he told her to “be as prolific as possible…because that’s usually when you make the best stuff.” Even after Sub Pop urged her to pare down the tracklist, she dug her heels in, and a string at the end of the record goes unremembered, that is, before “Could’ve Been a Star,” whose titular line is sung a lot like the titular Pearl screaming “Please I’m a star!” in Ti West’s 2022 film.
At the sake of establishing herself as a committed artist, Suki Waterhouse ends up with an overstuffed sophomore album with plenty of bright and scrappy highlights but too many unadventurous tracks that overshadow them. Some of these tracks will suffice as curious needle drops in soapy teen dramas or at beach bonfires, but she shines best when she lets herself run wild, like on “Big Love” or “Gateway Drug,” which reaches for stadium nosebleeds, capitalizing on the “Happier Than Ever” effect. If only she could have maintained this energy for the rest of the album.
