Given her general omnipresence, it’s surprising to learn that You & I is only the third Rita Ora album in 11 years. Music for the Kosovo-born singer has increasingly felt like a rare side hustle in between judging TV talent shows, working as a UNICEF ambassador and launching a tequila brand. Not to mention “putting on a leggy display”, “showcasing her jaw-dropping figure” or “flashing her toned abs and legs in a crop top and hot pants as she grabs an iced coffee”. Just some of the past week’s leery headlines on one newspaper website.
An interview this year described her as “polymathic in entertainment”, as though she was Leonardo da Vinci – though to be fair, he never managed to perform both at the canonisation of Mother Teresa and in the Pokémon: Detective Pikachu movie.
Now, she’s ready to hit the dancefloor again. You & I opens with Don’t Think Twice, the kind of whooshing, string-heavy Europop that has served Clean Bandit so well in recent years. Her clearest attempt at adding to her collection of four number one singles is Praising You, an update of the 1999 number one Praise You, made with Fatboy Slim’s blessing. It keeps the key line and vague gospel feel but ends up sounding far more generic than the older song.
Ora has billed this album as showing more of the real her than the previous two. Behind the scenes, she’s had a complicated journey through music, usually having songs provided to her by an army of commercial writers. Each of her albums has been released on a different record label. Here she has a co-writer credit on all 12 songs for the first time. “I’m in a different seat on the bus now,” she has said.
However, there’s very little here that doesn’t feel like it could have been delivered by a dozen other interchangeable chart acts. There are obligatory Eighties throwbacks in the power ballad title track and on That Girl, a reworking of Eddie Murphy’s 1985 classic Party All the Time that plays on her night owl lifestyle. Anyone hoping for the details about last year’s marriage to the film director Taika Waititi won’t find anything too personal. Notting Hill has a sense of longing for her teen years in west London, but otherwise this all-purpose pop is lacking the personality that so fascinates the gossip sites.
