Demi Lovato - Dancing With the Devil ... The Art of Starting Over review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The Guardian 0

Lovato delivers lacerating lyrics about the trauma she’s faced since childhood, but the music is less startling

Demi Lovato’s Dancing With the Devil … The Art of Starting Over is an album that is hard to view objectively. It arrives in the wake of a documentary series, also called Dancing With the Devil, and a subsequent broadsheet interview, both of which detailed the former Disney star’s descent into drug addiction in agonising detail. If you thought the recent Britney Spears documentary was a damning indictment of the way the music industry and media treats young female stars – and the consequences of doing so – then Lovato’s story significantly ups the ante.

Related: 'I have to keep smiling': how the female pop star documentary got real