Sheezus wept? Lily Allen’s new album Sheezus arrives on these shores on May 6 via Warner Bros., and the newly shared title track — and corresponding video, above — sees the ever-cheeky British singer going even more meta than the title might’ve suggested.
Here Allen calls out Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Lorde, so where the album bows to Yeezus (and all-female SPIN roundtalbe “Sheezus Talks”), this playfully swaggering cut brings to mind Kendrick Lamar’s rapper-naming 2013 “Control” verse. But right now it’s hard to see how it could inspire a conversation like the one around those Lamar bars. She told Rolling Stone the lyrical mention of “period” might turn out be her equivalent to Queen Bey’s sweatshirt-worthy “surfboard,” calling the word “really offensive to people.” But those “people” sound really medieval and not worthy of a provocative 2014 pop-song catchphrase; also, “surfboard” involves some wordplay — the Yoncé catch phrase isn’t just “sex” (As “Dr. Carter” might put it, vocab and metaphors need work, and she lacks respect for the game). The visuals show Allen in various hues, bringing to mind a Perry clip. Only, you know, not as entertaining as “Dark Horse.”
The singer previously agreed with a Twitter commenter that her new songs so far had been “rubbish,” and while this one is more audacious, there’s still an unfocused, day-late/dollar-short quality to it. We were on the record rooting for Allen’s pop comeback, but … well, even deities take a few mulligans sometimes, right?
