“Villain”
Lily Rose
Written by Mackenzie Carpenter, Kyle Clark, and Lily Rose
Poor production choices are the real villain here.
Lily Rose has a better voice than most of her peers on the radio, but you would never know it, thanks to the way today’s overuse of autotune reduces everyone to the lowest common denominator.
She’s got a good country song to work with, which explores more deeply a core idea that Alan Jackson flirted with on “So You Don’t Have to Love Me Anymore”: Make me the bad guy, because it doesn’t matter anyway. We’re still broken up.
But we get that processed, Wonder Bread spin on programmed R&B instead of a decent arrangement created with live acoustic instrumentation. Rose sounds like she’s singing to a SoundCloud backing track that charges three bucks to remove the watermark.
The talent is (probably) there, but Rose needs a way better producer to properly showcase it.
Grade: C
In terms of females breaking out via Tik Tok, Lily Rose is okay she has a decent voice and I do think with a better production that voice can be shown more but like you said the production is really bad.
I do hope artists like Rose, Priscilla Block who got record deals thanks to going viral on TikTok do stay around because I do think there is a talent there that I hope stays for a while and also means more women in country music.
The problem I have with any artist whose producers feel the need to put Autotune on is that, if they need it this much, then their voice isn’t exactly there to begin with. I would like to think that this isn’t true with Lily, but then let’s hear something from her without it, because she really doesn’t sound at all remarkable here (IMHO).
Yep, the production definitely kills this one for me. It just comes off as yet another pop/R&B song being labeled as country. And can we please lose the snaps and claps already? Or at least leave them in pop and keep them out of country.