What's Your Pleasure?

What’s Your Pleasure? is Ware’s welcome return to her roots. At her best, she executes the album’s electrifying, lavish take on dance-pop better than many of her modern peers, but she isn’t able to maintain uniform excellence across all 12 tracks. Still, Ware displays her affection for disco, funk, and dance music with the utmost reverence.

It is a beautiful, enigmatic, joyous, sultry, utterly fabulous and insanely-inventive album that delivers above and beyond its expectations, quite a feat for a record conceived by one of the best British artists around at the moment.

While ‘What’s Your Pleasure’ doesn’t quite hit the heady heights of classic disco its soft-focus imagery might suggest, it’s both a more exciting - and natural - fit for the singer than we’ve heard in some time.

Ware has never sounded more loose and confident — the icy diva that presided over much of Devotion is gone. Despite the flirtatious, non-specific lyrics — Ware said she wanted to make an album for people to have sex to — there's a better sense of her personality and humour this time around.

The result is surely one of the best pop albums of 2020, and is possibly Ware’s finest to date. A sensual delight, What’s Your Pleasure? is the ultimate in post-disco gratification.

An intoxicating cocktail of seductive beats, exhilarating choruses and sleek production, ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’ is pure escapism.

It has less of the soul-searching of Ware’s previous album Glasshouse, yet zooms in on a lighter facet of her personality, and is threaded with a camp sense of humor that reflects disco’s frivolity as well as the cheekiness that is all over Ware’s Table Manners podcast but has been largely missing from her recorded music. ... It is a joy to hear Ware sounding so relaxed.

As much as Devotion remains Ware's Magnum Opus. What's Your Pleasure is a clear statement of intent, with a lot of quality.

Unencumbered by the weight of expectation or reinvention, Ware reclaimed her love for making music. In the process, she created one of the year's best records, the rapturous What's Your Pleasure?

While she could let her hair down a little more, this record finds plenty of sweet spots between melancholy and euphoria. [Summer 2020, p.107]

Across the whole album, Ware’s voice fills each moment with incredibly lustful longing. It feels timeless more in its emotionality and drama than even in the sound itself, which stays firmly strapped to a bygone era. Her nostalgia feels like a proper tribute, mostly because it digs so deep to the core.

Moody and inviting. [Jun 2020, p.71]

What’s Your Pleasure? is an album that, just a few months ago, might have felt like a nostalgia trip or a guilty pleasure, but now feels like manna for the soul.

The superb What’s Your Pleasure? makes a case to reimagine so-called comfort zones as potential lanes of expertise: free pop’s women from the pointless commercial burden to reinvent, let them hone their craft, and you get assured marvels like this.

What’s Your Pleasure? reveals the magic that happens when an artist feels truly free.

On What’s Your Pleasure? though Ware sounds simply like a serious star, on an album where she finally has the confidence to commit to her most theatrical tendencies and cut loose at the same time. The effect is liberating in the way disco always intended.

Heady and rooted in lustful disco, this album proves that the singer is a cornerstone of contemporary pop.