Comeback with album

Nelly Furtado: When grandma feels like going to the disco

After seven years on the artistic sidelines, Nelly Furtado wants to play in the pop business again.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Universal Music (2))

Seven years after her last album, 2000s pop star Nelly Furtado returns to the limelight with "7". The 45-year-old young mother tries to squeeze all the pop success formulas of the last five years onto one album and inevitably suffers compositional shipwreck in her attempt to be all-encompassing.

With the wave of great (female) pop stars, it can be easy to get lost when one of them retires for a long time. This was the case with Canadian Nelly Furtado, one of the most influential voices of the 2000s, who went into musical retirement for various reasons even before the coronavirus pandemic broke out. In 2023, the now 45-year-old singer with Portuguese roots was diagnosed with ADHD, and since then she has collected around 400-500 song sketches and ideas, from which 14 complete songs were ultimately selected for the new album, which is not very creatively titled "7". "7" is the artist's simple explanation, partly because it is the seventh studio album and partly because seven long years have passed since the last album "The Ride", which no longer attracted so much attention.

The fat years are over
Furtado's career once began so promisingly. With "I'm Like A Bird" in 2000, as a young talent aged just 21, she succeeded in creating an anthem that still crawls through the ear canals of listeners today as a successful catchy tune. The trip-hop-inspired debut album "Whoa, Nelly!" became a kick-start, and three years later she didn't rely on the established formula for success, but was bold. "Folklore" contained southern European folk quotes before the top work "Loose" catapulted her into pop heaven in 2006 with songs such as "Maneater", "Promiscuous", "Say It Right" and "All Good Things (Come To An End)". Produced by Timbaland and featuring many R&B and hip-hop quotes, the album became a top seller and secured Furtado lavish headliner tours for years to come.

Creatively, Furtado's story was not yet finished, but commercially it was. Staying true to her previous path, she changed from album to album. "Mi Plan", released in 2009, was in Spanish, the half-baked pop production "The Spirit Indestructible" was a rather unsuccessful attempt at the "Loose" success concept and the last album to date, "The Ride", flirted unabashedly with indie and alternative moods - many years before Taylor Swift did so with "Folklore" and "Evermore". Furtado's return to the limelight has been a long time coming. She performed at the Coachella Festival in California this spring and, alongside Ed Sheeran, was the highlight of the EM 2024 concerts at Munich's Theresienwiese.

Mama goes back to the disco
After a long absence, "7" is a mixture of "The Spirit Indestructible" and the great hope of still playing a role in today's mainstream pop segment in her mid-forties. The two pre-released singles "Corazón" (with Bomba Estéreo) and "Love Bites" (with Swedish singer Tove Lo and DJ SG Lewis) already set the tone for Nelly's rather frantic attempts to capture all moods in her pop-Methuselah age. On the one hand, the heart-warmingly tender Latin butt-wiggling number with a ballad touch, on the other a dancefloor party banger without a really catchy hookline and with an overabundance of quotes from already well-known and established artists. An important source of inspiration was her now grown-up eldest daughter, Furtado has said in several interviews, who introduced her to the many DJ remix versions of her own hits, which awakened the party spirit in Nelly herself.

The regained addiction to partying is ambivalent; after all, in Furtado's heyday, unrestrained nights of partying sometimes led to physical collapse. Today, nightlife at least seems to be taking a healthier course, and she also has two small children at home who have not yet attracted media attention and, by her own admission, had to wade through a deep hole of heartbreak. Between songs such as "Better For Worse", "Crown" and "Save Your Breath" lie a multitude of failed attempts to evoke her own glam-pop past and tap into the zeitgeist of a younger generation. In terms of craftsmanship, the songs are beyond reproach and the production sounds flawless, but in addition to an arc of suspense, there is also a lack of compositional authenticity.

Between boomer and alpha
The curiously named last track on the album, "Untitled", is one of the very rare moments when you can let yourself fall carefree into Furtado's world of sound without having to worry that a musical pop boomer is desperate to party with the alpha generation. "7" is by no means a flop, but has some solid songs in the best moments, but at times you get the feeling that the musical and thematic versatility is far too forced in its attempt to scrape together all the trends and recipes for success of the modern mainstream market and spit them out in a 14-song swarm. Better to go back to Charlie XCX's "Brat" then.