Selena Gomez Can’t Find a Good Chorus

Selena Gomez is back. After a four-year hiatus, she dropped two new songs, “Lose You to Love Me” and “Look at Her Now,” the first two singles off her forthcoming third studio album. Since the release of her second album “Revival,” Gomez stayed on the radio primarily through collaborations with DJs like Kygo and Marshmello. One would expect her first independent singles in years to be songs that could only come from Gomez’s voice alone, but there is nothing unique about either of them.

In “Lose You to Love Me,” it’s clear that Gomez has worked hard to step out of her comfort zone. Her vocals have improved significantly from “Revival,” particularly her upper range, and the backing track is mostly comprised of piano, something not usually featured in her music.

While the verses may be in the vein of the break-up ballad she is going for, the choruses might as well be another DJ track. This track resembles a mellow version of “It Ain’t Me,” her 2016 collaboration with Kygo, with the same lines repeated over and over again and layered on top of each other. The chorus of “Lose You to Love Me” is seven words long (eight if “yeah” qualifies as a word). That’s not the chorus of a ballad; it’s barely even a sentence. Gomez, Julia Michaels, and Justin Tranter (the writing team behind both singles) simply mash the title in different fractional phrases, tape them back together, and call it a chorus. That process may end up creating a hook, but it has the side-effect of making all of Gomez’s songs sound the same, independent releases and collaborations alike.

“Look at Her Now” tries to be unique in its lyricism, with Gomez referring to herself in the third-person, but it’s a concept that’s been done to death already. While some of the lyrics may be biting (“It was her first real lover, his too ‘til he had another”) the song is generic and dragged down by its chorus. The semi-rhythmic “Mm-mm”s are not aggressive enough to make a dance beat nor lyrical enough to make them actually fun to listen to. They come across as childish, the lyrical embodiment of wagging her finger and telling-off her ex for being a bad boyfriend.

The conversation around these songs so far has primarily focused on the subject, purportedly her ex-boyfriend, Justin Bieber, whose 2015 album “Purpose” addresses the couple’s breakup. It’s great publicity, and it’s valid for Gomez to want to represent her side of the story. In “Lose You to Love Me,” she finds a particularly good line (“In two months, you replaced us”) by cutting the track and layering her vocals in harmony to draw attention to it. Drama entices the general public, and be it a genuine or calculated move, it achieves the desired effect.

But what these songs lack is any sense of style. There is nothing about either “Lose You to Love Me” or “Look at Her Now” that is identifiably Selena Gomez, but, to be fair, no one knows what something Selena Gomez sounds like. She has failed thus far to truly distinguish herself from any of her pop star peers. Both of these songs could have easily been another DJ collaboration single about a generic break-up, so what was the point in building up expectations for a solo Selena release?

Neither single is objectively bad, but they’re both entirely underwhelming and forgettable. Gomez isn’t stepping out of her comfort zone per se. She’s getting closer to the edge, but after a four-year wait, it’s not enough.