Maren Morris - Girl

Pitchfork 63

On her second album, the country-pop singer remains a powerhouse talent who can sing the hell of out every middle-of-the-road style going.

The Guardian 40

(Columbia Nashville)
After a lauded debut album and a big dance hit, Morris seemed poised to go mainstream, but her follow-up to Hero is unconvincing

Any artist who makes their name subverting norms faces a challenge on album two: you can’t subvert the same norm twice, but step off the soapbox and you’ll be accused of growing toothless. Critics hailed Maren Morris’s 2016 debut, Hero, for her repudiation of country tropes, and for convincingly aligning Nashville craft with pop scale. But then she found commercial success with The Middle, a thrillingly weird post-EDM collaboration with producer Zedd that seemed to suggest country as her stopover on the way to the mainstream.