Little Mix - Confetti

The Guardian 80

(RCA/Columbia)
The former X Factor winners break pop’s rules in style on their first album since quitting Simon Cowell’s label

Nine years after they won The X Factor, Little Mix starting their own TV talent show might seem as if they’re simply replenishing the machine that bred them. Really they’re rewiring it, promoting the contestant welfare they never got and, on their first album since quitting Simon Cowell’s label, dissecting expectations of pop’s women. Not a Pop Song eye-rolls at the contradiction of being “real” and “tragic”, while its crescendo-fattened chorus defiantly stakes their claim to pop. They metabolise crap relationships into wickedly meta anthems. “He would lie, he would cheat, over syncopated beats,” Perrie Edwards sings over Sweet Melody’s gothic dancehall. The knowingness is earned.

Confetti is more potent than 2018’s spread-betting LM5. Sending up flirtatiousness on Holiday and playing the faux-innocent spying ex on A Mess, their well-honed vocal charm leaps out. (Only Gloves Up feels anonymous, like a bombastic Sia offcut.) And it mixes their weirdness – they’re UK garage divas on the gritty, regal Happiness – with blue-chip rigour: If You Want My Love confidently echoes the Britney/Christina era. It takes a band this well versed in the rules to break them so cleverly.