The artist Audrey Wollen, best known as the creator of Sad Girl Theory, has long argued for the radical potential of feminine sorrow. Rather than weakness to be purged, Wollen sees a sturdy foundation for collective action. “Feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is really hard, one of the hardest things there is,” Wollen said, in a 2015 interview. “Our sadness is actually a very appropriate and informed reaction.”

Something of Wollen’s principles surface in Late Night Feelings, a collection of 13 songs produced by Mark Ronson and performed and co-written by a suite of female vocalists. Ronson has described these tunes as “sad bangers;” contributor Camila Cabello called them “emo bops sung by girls about love and heartbreak.” And while the prevailing mood is, indeed, sadness, the record makes for a finely shaded portrayal of that feeling. In a pop landscape at present awash in sad girls, Late Night Feelings lands several notches below the profundity of Lorde’s feral manifesto and several notches above Bebe Rexha’s disjointed smash of yesteryear, “I’m A Mess.” Never nihilistic, never narcissistic, the women of Late Night Feelings understand sadness as a vital conduit for solidarity and self-expression.

It’s not a knock on Ronson to say that the project succeeds, in large part, because of how little it sounds like his work. His distinctive production hallmarks—the neo-soul of Amy Winehouse, the sticky bounce of “Uptown Funk”—are largely absent, save for brief, restrained doses. The women on this record are diverse in terms of race and orientation, their target audiences, and their places in the music industry. For the most part, Ronson seems content to remain seated at the boards, allowing the unique strengths of each vocalist to inform the music.

A long stretch of the album is commanded by YEBBA, who proves conclusively, across three tracks, that she has the range, darling. Her daring vocals leap from near-Joanna Newsom falsetto to sultry, guttural contralto. Her delivery defies convention, particularly on “When U Went Away,” where she makes a glorious, expressive meal of a lyric as simple as “I’m gonna be alright.” Another highlight is “Why Hide,” an understated ballad from tremendous talent Diana Gordon. Gordon, a Beyoncé co-writer whose 2011 debut album as Wynter Gordon flew under the public radar, has been waiting and working for a breakthrough for a number of years. May this track be her first step toward ubiquity.

Lykke Li, no stranger to Sad Girl Theory, gives game performances on the title track and the penultimate “2AM,” lending nuanced perspective to narratives of unrequited love and emotional manipulation. She calls the uncaring cad of her affection to account, demanding better from him, never understating or excusing the damage he causes. Her anger, her sadness, even her tendency to fall for uncaring cads—all of these are stated plainly, and none of them lay the blame at her own feet. A similar ethic courses through Angel Olsen’s “True Blue”: heartbreak as reasonable, justified reaction to cruelty. In her delivery, Olsen’s voice becomes a damning, pointing finger: “I ran to you, and you know why.”

Not every song on Late Night Feelings can rival these peaks, but even at its lower points, the album is refreshingly candid. “Find U Again,” performed and co-written by Cabello, is wildly endearing for the sheer, unapologetic 22-year-old-ness of its perspective. “This crush is kind of crushing me,” she sings, and follows the line with: “I do therapy at least twice a week.” The lyric is no less effective for its clumsiness, an honest expression of anguish that resists the urge to slap a pretty, poetic bow on weeping on the sofa in a psychotherapist’s office. Even “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,” a Miley Cyrus contribution that aims to recapture the magic of her “Jolene” cover, is a cut above her middling recent history. Though much of the song dips into pop cliché unmoored from context, a brief reference to a “burning house” with “nothing left” is a jarring reminder of Cyrus’s real, aching vulnerability: her house really did burn down in the Woolsey Fire; she really did lose her home.

Cyrus recently starred in an episode of “Black Mirror,” playing a pop star clad in cotton-candy colors who retreated, miserable, to her grand piano in the early hours of the morning to pen acoustic numbers about being, despite all her rage, still just a rat in a cage. The episode was laughably out of touch in its portrayal of the plight of the modern pop star, in large part because pop does, increasingly, take the sadness of girls seriously. It’s hard to imagine pap like “On a Roll” taking root in an era where Beyoncé makes history by narrating her honest feelings of worthlessness in the aftermath of infidelity, or Billie Eilish dominates the charts by vomiting tarantulas. Late Night Feelings is not the first recent record to treat the sadness of women as a healthy response to all manner of hurt. It is, however, a worthy entry in this still-developing pop pantheon, authentic and honest in its rendering of many shades of feminine sorrow.

Buy: Rough Trade

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