by
Gwen Stefani
- Record Label: Interscope
- Release Date: Mar 18, 2016
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- Critic score
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Mar 16, 2016She wears her girlishness on her own terms, and here it feels truer--and sounds stronger--than it has in years.
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Mar 17, 2016Divorcing the music from its maker and inspirations can pose varying degrees of difficulty. But listeners who can imprint themselves on these songs will find much to enjoy in Stefani’s Truth.
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Mar 16, 2016If these Top 40 fixtures make the album feel in keeping with current radio pop, they don't crowd Stefani with unnecessary bells and whistles. Her singing--and, more important, what her singing is saying--is always front and center, which gives the music an intimate quality even at its most polished.
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Mar 17, 2016It’s easy to chastise aging pop stars for chasing trends or trying to recapture past glories, but those efforts here are thrown into sharp relief by the maturity of the album’s first half.
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Q MagazineApr 8, 2016The over-sauced, finger-wagging Naughty might take the joyful retribution to far in the panto direction but I Will Survive update Me Without You and joyful dancefloor rebirth Rare prove that Stefani has lost none of her pop spirit. [Jun 2016, p.117]
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Apr 4, 2016Although it's a bright and buoyant effort--with recognisable touches of ska and reggae--her new album lacks the left-field flourishes that make her special.
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Mar 21, 2016A little more courage would not have gone amiss.
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Mar 18, 2016Over the album’s 12 tracks, Stefani doesn’t mope once--in fact, a lot of the time she sounds like she doesn’t give a s**t. ‘Where Would I Be’ and ‘Send Me A Picture’ say it with Disney dancehall, while ‘Me Without You’ is the closest she comes to balladry, singing “I don’t need you/not a little bit” over polished trip-hop.
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Mar 18, 2016The album has a rushed feel--a likable but low-personality version of her familiar bubble-pop solo mode, alternating between miffed breakup plaints (the Amy Winehouse tribute "Naughty") and gushy new-boyfriend songs.
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Mar 17, 2016When she gets heavy with either beats or ballads, This Is What The Truth Feels Like slows to a crawl. Cut away these excesses--these moments of emotional bloodletting or thirsty appeals to the top of the charts--and This Is What The Truth Feels Like manages to be as fleet, giddy and charming as Gwen Stefani ever is.
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Mar 21, 2016Stefani’s focus on the good times alternates with songs where she expresses cartoonish anger by awkwardly rapping and shouting non-sequiturs (“Naughty,” “Red Flag”), and neither mode plays to her strengths as a songwriter and signature vocalist. Her best songs are the ones in which she is audibly upset.
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Mar 23, 2016This Is What the Truth Feels Like is half-baked in places and perhaps a little too safe in others, but it’s really, properly genuine, and if she doesn’t leave it a decade next time, Stefani might still be able to make a great pop record. It’s in there, somewhere.
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Mar 17, 2016The pop-rock of the album’s first half is relaxed, breezy, intimate, and dull; the twitching beatscapes of its back end are tense, fiery, theatrical, and void.
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Mar 18, 2016This Is What the Truth Feels Like lacks a cohesive style, instead focusing on narrative.
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Mar 24, 2016Only reggae-lite skank Where Would I Be hints at Stefani’s once playful personality. But the truth is that this feels like little more than careerist chart fodder.
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Mar 21, 2016There’s nothing even remotely inventive here.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 148 out of 188
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Mixed: 18 out of 188
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Negative: 22 out of 188
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Mar 18, 2016
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Mar 18, 2016
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Mar 19, 2016