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On her second album, Memoir of a Sparklemuffin, Suki Waterhouse pokes fun at the lofty labels of her profession. Or rather professions. “Call me a model, an actress, whatever,” she knowingly shrugs over acoustic arpeggios that trickle from her guitar like rain through a hole in the roof. Lately, though, amid starring in the hit musical drama series Daisy Jones & the Six, Waterhouse has been leaning into the “whatever” category with music and yielding fruitful results; she has 10.1 million monthly Spotify listeners and last month opened for Taylor Swift at Wembley.
Album opener “Gateway Drug” casts the 32-year-old as a femme fatale, her voice a siren call floating across an empty dance floor of spacious chords. “I’ll show you places that only exist in your dreams,” she coos, giving way to big, crunchy guitars that continue into second track “Supersad” where they dovetail with propulsive drums that call back to Nineties chick flicks. “To Get You” more closely resembles the heavy-lidded romance of her early mega-hits like “Good Looking” with its blue-sky strums and gentle bassline, likewise the floaty torpor of “Lullaby”.
Hearts flutter on “Big Love”, which skids in around the halfway mark on the squeal of an electric guitar that leaves tyre marks on the asphalt. “Big love/ It’s all I want,” repeats the singer, who gave birth to her first child with boyfriend Robert Pattinson in March. Waterhouse’s love life has been a matter of so-called public interest for over a decade now – and as such, the breezy singalong of “Lawsuit”, which sees her revelling in the imminent karma of an unnamed subject, will send internet sleuths into a Wikipedia rabbit hole trying to decipher whose getting served. “I could write a book about the ways you took advantage/ You think it’s bad, but it’s about to get worse,” Waterhouse warns, her falsetto vocals concealing a glimmer of threat.
Sparklemuffin is too long; an album of 18 tracks is bound to get baggy in parts as this one surely does. It can, at times, feel like you’re on an interminable carousel circling round and round again, but there are moments of pause. Every time you’re about to fall off the ride, a song will crop up grabbing your attention once more.
