On “Sad B!tch”, the eye-rolling second single for UNHEALTHY, she clips her voice and spits, “Fucked up, getting rich, cha-ching!” Her delivery suggests an image of a scrunched-up face that’s electrified with unbridled confidence, as if high in adrenaline. Anne-Marie has this certain style of writing: sincere, austere, unbothered, energetic, something that can rouse either surface-level sympathy or confusion for a minute or two. On UNHEALTHY, her to-the-point verses read like journal entries of a furious, shameless and muddled person. Consider “Grudge”, where she sings in a teen-angst manner, “You can tell me all your problems, I won’t give a shit.” There’s no delicacy in her words – just pure, fleeting emotion.
However, once we grasp the context within the album, we’ll realise that she displays this quality on purpose. The central topic here is a rotten relationship with an egoistic person, and she unfolds it with the sentimentality of a hopeless romantic who’s stricken by it. On the guitar ballad “Kills Me to Love You”, she likens her love to that of Romeo and Juliet. “If it kills me to love you, I’ll die for that,” she confesses. “The world’s up in flames while we slow dance.” The country-at-heart title track with Shania Twain, which follows it, leaves obvious clues about her state: “My father says I should run away, but he don’t know that I just don’t know how,” she croons, her voice stretched like a caged bird hopelessly flying against the metal bars.
At the most unhinged moments, where she gives in to any intrusive thought that falls upon her, the producers – mainly Evan Blair and Billen Ted, who are experienced in dance music – volume up the electric guitar, synthetic piano, and heavy bass stems to aggravate her craze. Songs aligning with this pattern go haywire, sounding as raucous as her train of thought. “Haunt You” dons a veil of pop rock slash lite screamo, presupposing her ex-lover’s unbreakable attachment with her. “Grudge” features mischievous piano drills as she throws the “suck my dick” slang. Frankly, these are nothing new – aiming for the most marketable constituents of aggressive pop – but they work with the themes well enough to make us forget how dull they sound.
That isn’t always the case, though. “Cuckoo”, arguably the most appalling song on the record, is the invincible summit of the unabashed persona. Tinted with children’s choir and anticlimactic electro-pop beats, it’s as if Anne-Marie regresses to her teenage years and writes from the perspective of a mulish, immature girl. “I get a little OTT with the OCD,” she claims, her mind possibly on auto-pilot when she came up with this line. “Psycho” brings in the “ratata” of Taylor Swift’s “I Did Something Bad” to elevate nothing but its unlistenability. “Hittin’ on Bianca, are you dumb?” she remarks, playing the role of a relationship sciolist, whose overflowing self-assurance somehow gashes her own words.
But then there’s “You & I”, the penultimate track, which showcases her vocal power with minute post-effects alongside Khalid’s breathless tenor. “I can see the dark clouds over the both of us / But I know how to make you smile,” she sings after following many unhealthy impulses. What makes it great is the exhibited act of mutual understanding. Even if it’s cliche (google the title and count how many songs there are with that name), her sincerity never glows as lustrously. After all, Anne-Marie’s true control of the narrative is via honest intercommunication; UNHEALTHY realises it a little too late, perhaps impeded by the poor decisions that appear to be hers. Little did she know that they were mere distractions employed by the malicious people who shamelessly exploit her wealth and fame.
