Louder, Please

Do they have wet n wild brand in the UK? In America, wet n wild is the absolute cheapest makeup you can get at the drugstore—the sticky glitter you buy for costume parties, or because you are 14. “Wet & Wild” is also one of the deliriously cheap thrills on British pop singer Rose Gray’s debut, Louder, Please, a record with infernally catchy dance-pop hooks and the nutritional value of cotton candy.

Louder, Please is billed as Gray’s debut, assuming you overlook 2021’s Dancing, Drinking, Talking, Thinking, a seven-track independent release that proposed her as a sort of jazzed-up Adele you could play on your way to the party without fear of getting irretrievably deep in your feelings. Not long after, Gray dropped the lounge-pop vocal stylings, turned up the beat, and transformed into a name-brand house diva pumping out glittery synth tracks with names like “Ecstasy,” “Synchronicity,” and “Sun Comes Up.” The Louder, Please credits are stacked with hitmakers with a flair for stylish, fast-living party bops; Gray’s collaborators have worked with Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Kim Petras, and more artists of a similar stripe.

Compared to Gray’s earlier singles, Louder, Please trends toward a slightly darker, seedier strain of club pop, flirting with 2020s electroclash revival. First-wave icon Uffie even picks up a writing credit on the charmingly Aqua-tic “Just Two.” Enter the party clichés: nose drugs, Bianca Jagger on a white horse, a YOLO anthem that goes, “We won’t save any lives tonight/What a time to be alive.” Imagine: What if Sabrina Carpenter were 30 percent more techno? What if OG QT walked out of cyro-storage and into a Chill Dance Hits playlist? What if Kylie Minogue but, you know, the Dare? Hey, what if we got out of here?

You need a certain mindset—possibly a certain blood alcohol content—to appreciate this properly. You can’t, for example, step out of a screening of the new Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and expect to acclimate to Gray’s sorbet vodka shooters while in a Nobel Prize-winning-songwriter state of mind. Doesn’t work! Louder, Please is chock full of pointless delights, such as this lyric you’ll remember even if you are only half-listening: “Party people live and party people love/Party people give and party people fuck.” Party people fuck? I’ll bet they do! (Sega Bodega produced that one.)

With BRAT-level intervention, it is absolutely not impossible to make brash club-pop bangers feel tense and vital, too. Gray’s music, though, is frictionless. Against the shivery beats of “Hackney Wick,” she narrates an evening excursion to what’s allegedly London’s coolest neighborhood (does this sound as funny to a Londoner as her line about adventuring to Brooklyn Heights sounds to a New Yorker?) and—that’s it. They glam up, they go to the club, it’s a great time. At the end she describes a drug trip that’s the club-kid version of talking about your dream.

That’s what marks Louder, Please as lightweight pop rather than genuinely memorable dance music: no sense of community. The main characters of Gray’s songs stand casually atop the world (“Tectonic”) or gyrate in the center of the crowd (“Wet & Wild,” “Party People”) with no regard for anything except the love interest of the moment, and you don’t need to think about whether “Met you on a dancefloor/What a metaphor” really qualifies as one. But there’s a vestige of Gray’s earlier, more varied style in the closing title track, an extended Imogen Heap study that, if not entirely successful, is at least willing to experiment. Isn’t that how a truly exciting night out ought to feel?