Iann Dior grew up writing poetry and worshiping Paramore, pirating pop-punk and popping on headphones to drown out the world with Panic! at the Disco. He stumbled into a studio after a breakup and posted a mournful mixtape on SoundCloud; soon after, he moved to Los Angeles, and within weeks, he’s said, the labels came calling. He connected with the hip-hop production collective Internet Money, known for their work with Juice WRLD and Trippie Redd, and pumped out a track a week, lacing songs about heartbreak and death with chugging chords and candy-coated hooks.
Some listeners thought Dior was a label prop, engineered to succeed in a porous streaming ecosystem; in 2019, his debut album arrived with the tongue-in-cheek title Industry Plant. As he grew more popular, scoring a feature on rapper 24kGoldn’s inescapable 2020 TikTok hit “Mood,” Dior fit easily into a burgeoning pop niche where angsty emo rap, frothy trap-pop, sunny Top 40 choruses, and punchy pop-punk riffs congeal alongside peers like Post Malone, blackbear, and Travis Barker’s recent crop of protégés. The result is perky, digestible music about dread and suffering. Dior’s new album, on to better things, grapples with the fallout of his newfound fame with mopey self-seriousness. At 22, he sounds weary. “I’m picking up where Juice WRLD left off,” he told NME. It’s an ambitious statement and a stark one; so much of the despair in his music feels descended from artists whose success stories became tragedies.
Sorrow is the default in these songs. Dior spends most of the album treading water as he rehashes familiar sentiments—fame is hollow, love is a trap, Instagram is annoying. The momentum comes from how nimbly he switches genres, swerving between sanded-down pop hooks, strutting basslines, and soupy synths. He tries on a tortured rockstar aesthetic, interpolating Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” for an unconvincing breakup ballad (“She not a surgeon, but she really took my heart out”). The stylistic plasticity is a testament to his stable of production talent (Internet Money’s Taz Taylor, Cashmere Cat, and Barker, who’s featured on three of 15 songs), but also the conventions of the artists Dior emulates. He’s said that he considers Machine Gun Kelly a mentor, and he tries his best to borrow Kelly’s slick hooks and disaffected rasp. The Barker-featuring “obvious” sounds like a Tickets to My Downfall B-side with lazier lyrics. (“Got me feeling wavy,” Dior sings, “Don’t fuck up the vibe tonight.”) “thought it was,” a two-minute pity party about the disappointments of fame, opens with a strumming guitar and Dior wailing about his life “in the hills”; it sounds like a diluted version of Kelly’s “I Think I’m Okay,” until Kelly himself shows up to growl about getting high.
The governing philosophy of the album seems to be if you can’t beat them, join them, or at least corral them into a feature. “V12” is the most effective song, a twinkling bauble of TikTok bait that drags Lil Uzi Vert along over thudding, blown-out drums. “Don’t forget who did this shit first,” Uzi lilts, echoing Dior’s chorus but also stating the obvious—this is a blatant copy of his squelchy production and crooning flow. Dior swipes at melancholy almost casually; it’s jarring, on a song like “let you,” to hear him toss out a line about not wanting to die young between spirited acoustic strums and trite lyrics about the breakup-to-makeup cycle. The narratives that drive Dior’s writing—the anxiety of ending a relationship, the depletion of depression—sink into an anesthetized blur. He’s less likely to sing about individual feelings than he is to slot the occasional diamond or pair of designer shades into the general morose template. These songs have the gravity and specificity of a crying emoji.
Dior stays vague and vacant throughout the album, invested in his feelings but short on interesting ideas. (Hollywood? Toxic! Heartbreak? Difficult!) “I’m a punk with a twisted brain,” he wails, and asks us to take him at his word. But there was a sense of fun in the pop-punk that Dior listened to as a kid and venerates now, a playfulness to all the skinny ties and side parts and melodrama. Dior seems so focused on convincing us he’s miserable that he doesn’t leave room for character or charm. “Fame doesn’t feel like I thought it would,” he sings. Fame seems to mean not feeling anything at all.
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