In Pieces (2023), a review

Lord, have mercy.

Debuts are incredibly hard to pull off, particularly in pop. You need to create something that, bare minimum, sets the tone for your career. Something you can reference and use to contextualise the next lifetime of artistic choices. For some, it’s a way of establishing a persona, for others, an immediate opportunity to pull a costume change.

Doubly hard when you’re an already established presence.

‘In Pieces’ is, contextually, an album that deserves praise for even making it out the door. Following the hit ‘Have Mercy’, Chlöe Bailey’s 2022 was filled with a series of false starts, poorly received snippets, and an increasing sense of disinterest and downright hostility from her fan base. It wasn’t just that the music wasn’t hitting for people. Everything about her seemed to spark debate, including her ability to sit on a plane set while Jack Harlow performed at the VMAs.

The jokes about her being corny had actually started earlier, with many poking fun at a video of her sucking on a lollipop. But the playful jabs became outright bullying. To top it all off, she and her sister had spent the pandemic as the shining lights of new music and Beyonce’s protégés. They are talent through and through, but had separated to pursue different pathways of their careers. Fans of Chloe x Halle bemoaned that they needed each other, and as the vitriol towards Chlöe increased, so did the sense that she’d left the nest too early. It was not the atmosphere to drop a highly anticipated album in, especially with expectations both so high and so low.

But against these odds, the album (after a rework by the pop star) has been released. Plenty of her peers might just have not dropped anything. A timider pop star might have just sulked away, or pursued projects outside of music. It’s not like anyway is really making money off it anymore.

Was it worth it?

Opening with a short, harmony heavy intro before flowing into the lead single ‘Pray It Away’, Chlöe Bailey immediately attempts to set the tone. It’s the type of fare that you might call raw…a little more personal. The horns add a unique flavour to the instrumentation, and the strings are beautiful, but it’s here that we get introduced to the album’s central subject: infidelity.

This album is about cheating. The pain of being cheated on, the fear of it happening, the banality, and the thrill. That may sound like the theme is consistent, but I want to emphasise that subject and theme are different. There’s no consistency in emotion, viewpoint, or any particular details that offer a guiding premise here. This is not the story of one bout of cheating, it’s a series of probably unrelated events.

There’s a sense of inertia that hits about halfway through the album. Once we get past the truly fantastic ‘Body Do’, you’re left with a track list that hits many of the same beats. In all the cheating, she wants to emphasise her independence. She doesn’t care, is not worried, makes it look easy, and she’s going to cheat back. But when she isn’t apathetic or uninterested, she’s deeply broken and upset. It bounces between the two modes, causing the listener whiplash.

The album’s central issue is Chlöe’s particular struggles with lyricism. While the hooks are mostly fine, her biggest handicap remains a lack of specificity, and often personality. The best songwriters have a finesse that allows the most generic scenario to feel unique to that moment. It cannot be all vocals; you need the ability to communicate via poetry. Maybe that was more of Halle’s role when they worked together, or maybe having someone to bounce ideas off of is why her stuff with her sister is so much better written.

Unfortunately, this is clearly a skill still in need of honing for her as a solo artist. There’s no one song that stands out as particularly egregious in this regard, they’re just all a little basic and overwritten. She seems to have more fun in the writing of faster songs, but even the tempo of ‘Told Ya’ doesn’t really force her hand towards anything more than a generic mode of bravado. Strangely, the most compelling track on here is the 57 second interlude ‘Heart On My Sleeve’. Maybe it’s a bias towards something that lacks the flab present many competing tracks due to its length, but this is just as evocative as anything else on the album. It helps that it’s especially well-produced, and her upper register sounds fantastic.

That brings us to the production. Chlöe is clearly a gifted producer, and her work is all over these tracks. The best of it is full of personality, like the frenetic ‘Body Do’, or the smooth groove on ‘I Don’t Mind’. They balance beats with an oft-astounding vocal arrangements, particular when you pay attention to what’s happening in the background. ‘Worried’ has the best of this for me. This doesn’t always work however, and here we should note the title track. A pretty straightforward piano ballad, it suffers from over-eager vocal fiddling, and might have actually benefitted from keeping it simple. The harmonies are lovely, but they sit strangely against what otherwise is a very sparse song.

‘In Pieces’ is a well-produced album. She sounds lovely. The lyrics are a bit dully written, but no more so than a lot of pop work in the past decade. So, why does it feel so empty once the album closes out?

Well, for starters, it’s short. 37 minutes all up, with the intro and two interludes. But this sense of breeziness should prevent burnout for the listener, so the problem probably isn’t that. It also isn’t the features. Missy Elliot adds some much-needed personality and additional fire to ‘Told Ya’, while Future’s verse on ‘Cheatback’ continues his streak of having weirdly strong chemistry against pop stars. Of course, there is Chris Brown offering very little, but I think it’s kinder to Chlöe if we ignore that for now.

What I’m feeling is a heavy sense of ambition that’s weighing down the project. Chlöe is coming up in a generation of pop stars who want their albums to be events – hence the cover art and several interludes. It’s clear she’s a student of Beyonce, not just in her personal relationship with the pop icon, but the way she’s attempted what is essentially a concept album. That weird lack of cohesion in theme feels like an attempt as writing the decisive record on infidelity. The trouble is that the overall execution – or subject matter – isn’t worth all this bombast. On an individual level, these songs are all produced very well. They’re all written in a competent way. But as an album, it just doesn’t gel.

Chlöe has received a variety of backlash, but one of the consistent criticisms is that she seems to make music that feels older than she is. They’re not wrong. I don’t know her life, and I don’t care to troll blogs and TMZ to see if she’s gone through a major public break up. Maybe she is in a relationship that has become a mess of adultery and betrayal. You wouldn’t know it from the lyrics on this album, which could have been sung by literally anyone else and would hold the same amount of meaning.

There’s a lot of care here, but not a lot of thought. Returning to the elephant in the room, Chris Brown is brought on to bring an edge to what is the worst song on the album with or without him. Even without the context of his history, it’s bland. His nasal yelp of a voice is at its least impactful. It’s also oddly situated on the album. ‘How Does It Feel’ a mid-tempo breakup anthem that isn’t worth the trouble. Particularly since it comes in the middle of an album that’s sequenced like it’s on shuffle.

Maybe ‘In Pieces’ is an album that could have come together with a little more time and trust put into Chlöe from the jump. We know she can do better than this, her work with her sister has proven it. But it definitely could have been worse. Snippets of the first version of her album suggest something with even less character than this, and the decision to at least try and tie this together is admirable. It’s just not enough to make the album particularly cohesive or even compelling. A series of moments, some great and some not, that fall flat when listened to top to bottom.  

We can find a silver lining. Debuts are hard, but once they’re out, you realistically can only move forward. This won’t be a smash, and likely won’t spawn any major hits. It will, however, lay a foundation from which a maturing Chlöe can build a career. Very few people come out the gates with anything worth returning to on merit alone, they exist mostly to get the firsts out of the way. First single, first ballad, first cover, first album.

We’re over the hump, and this is a talent that can only improve. It's a 6/10. Maybe not worth listening to on repeat, but you’ll find something you like on there.