The former Little Mix singer’s long-awaited debut is a farrago of incomprehensible lyrics and queasy tropes that undermines her self-help journey
When Jesy Nelson announced that she was leaving Little Mix last December to protect her mental health, it felt like a genuine sea change for pop. Despite fans’ understandable disappointment at her departure, her decision to take care of herself, and to speak up about the extreme pressures of life in a successful girl band – tortured by comparisons with her thinner bandmates and online abuse, including a characteristically cruel comment from Katie Hopkins that Nelson said led her to overdose – were met with wholehearted compassion and admiration. The potential for real freedom seemed to lie ahead.
Almost a year on, that feeling has dissipated as Nelson’s solo career – a long-teased concept finally realised today with the much-delayed release of her debut single – has succumbed to a dispiriting lack of imagination. It’s a full house of cliches. She is, as she has said in many interviews, finally making the
music she wanted to make, inspired by R&B and rap, after a decade doing pop. Each new glossy cover story gracelessly twists the knife a little deeper with her former bandmates – they apparently haven’t spoken – to keep the headlines buoyant. Nelson, who won a National Television award for her 2019 documentary Odd One Out, about her mental health struggles, insists in every new interview that she is happier than ever now she is a solo artist. The latest, for Glamour
UK, finds her saying she no longer needs diets and lip fillers to be happy. In the images, her midriff is toned, her lips unnaturally plump.