MØ’s debut album, 2014’s No Mythologies to Follow, was all about savoring adolescence, a quest the Danish electro-pop singer born Karen Marie Ørsted captured in glittery production and wailing vocals. So what do you do at age 30 when you’ve made a career out of singing about being young, so much so that your Instagram handle is “momomoyouth”? Four years later—the unit of time typically used to measure a stint in high school or college—Forever Neverland is about the way adulthood yanks us out of former selves, and the way we thrash and fight against it. The title, it goes without saying, is an homage to Peter Pan.
Electro-pop is currently going through a poetry phase: Think of the Lorde lines that could pass for Anne Sexton or the incisive imagery in a Let’s Eat Grandma song. Even Halsey, a closer match to MØ in style, can sound like a Rupi Kaur poem set to a trap beat. MØ’s songs strive for a similarly literary feel—“Purple like summer rain,” she sings at the album’s outset, venturing into literally purple prose—and sometimes she succeeds. She’s at her best when her songs paint simple, concrete images: flipping through the radio in search of “old shit,” calling her mom on her drive out of Hollywood, searching for a party to crash or a bed to share or an excuse to get high. But elsewhere, the songs try too hard to earn their metaphors.
In between full–length projects, MØ contributed to the Major Lazer/Justin Bieber amalgam “Cold Water” and Major Lazer and DJ Snake’s inescapable “Lean On,” two of the most-streamed songs in recent pop. Her tracklist here reads like a who’s who of frat-party EDM: Diplo once again makes his mark, as does the former Flume appendage What So Not. They know how to build earworms, but MØ and her team also take risks to expand her reach. She attempts something adjacent to rap on “If It’s Over,” and it works; she experiments with country-era Taylor Swift twang on “Blur.” We see MØ cast through a prism, splitting into different colors. She’s done with California. She’s heartbroken. Most of the album dissolves into tingly club tracks with more texture than the average dancefloor hit.
The production is more complex than in her previous work, which may be the result of a blurry blend of producers. While her last album was almost entirely produced by the frenetic club hitmaker Ronni Vindahl, of No Wav. fame, Forever Neverland bears the thumbprints of roughly a dozen different producers. It shows. Sometimes the production screeches like Shygirl; sometimes it sounds like a less-than-palatable burst of trap kazoos. Each track seems specifically constructed to get stuck in your head, leaving you humming its tune for a week after, but it’s mostly an empty resonance. These are conspicuously competent club songs that strain for self-importance.
Even if you deleted MØ from her own music—cut out the lyrics, threw out her vocals—the tracks would border on overwhelming. Each track is its own kind of cacophony. There are moments of real shimmer here, particularly in the Charli XCX-featuring “If It’s Over.” But too much of the album is oversaturated and exhausting. Instead of cementing her place in “eternal youth,” as she shouts in the last track, Forever Neverland seems more like the lurch towards adulthood itself—going from a bang to a whimper as you haul your tired body back from the club.
