The album starts off promising, but slowly transitions into being like every other girl band's album.
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When ‘Shout Out To My Ex’ is the opening track on the album, you immediately get the sense that this album will be filled with absolute belters; songs that will have you singing along from the get go right until the end. However, Glory Days doesn’t quite live up to the precedent that its opening track sets.
The opening track is, as I have said already, what I would call a ‘belter’. I can’t help but sing along to the whole thing, every single time I hear it on the radio. The rest of the album… not so much. Admittedly, the second track on the album, ‘Touch’ which has become a favourite among fans in the lead-up to the album release, is rather catchy. However, it verges on the boring, with it not having anything about it that necessarily sets it apart.
The same can be said for the rest of the album, to be honest. None of it is bad, it’s just all exceptionally average, and exactly what you’d expect from a girl band. Even the track they’ve done with Charlie Puth, ‘Oops’, sounds scarily similar to his duet with Meghan Trainor from earlier this year. It’s the same as everything they’ve produced so far, and everything that Fifth Harmony and other bands like them produce, and that’s disappointing, because I genuinely think that vocally, Little Mix are more talented than some of those other bands. I understand that this formula sells, but it would be nice to see a bit more variation in that.
When it comes to groups, if they have great harmonies, it’s relatively easy to win me over. The whole point of having multiple people singing together is giving them the opportunity to layer up their voices in a way that sends chills down your spine. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case for many of the tracks on the album, with the exception of ‘F.U’ (my personal favourite), and possibly very small extracts of other tracks. Although each of their voices is shown off separately, I really wish there was more of a sense that this is a group’s album, as it could very well be that of a solo female singer.
Where the album shows strengths is when it sounds a lot more like 90s R&B, and much like the formula Ariana Grande uses in her earlier tracks (such as ‘Baby I’). This sounds classic, but comes across in a fresh, contemporary way, and this can be seen on the latter tracks like ‘Private Show’ and ‘Freak’.
The album is no way bad, and I’m sure that it’ll do well among fans. However, it wasn’t quite on the level that I wanted it to be, and that upsets me, because I genuinely think Little Mix are a very talented bunch of ladies.
Glory Days is out now via Simco/Sony Music.
