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Sep 22, 2023The album is loaded with singles, but it’s a real album, with most of the other songs branching out her sound and showing off her killer flow. With 17 tracks spanning almost an hour, it sags in a couple of spots, but “Scarlet” sets a new bar on multiple levels, and not just for female rappers.
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Sep 25, 2023Doja Cat is just what the world needs today. A sharp knife to cut through the blizzard of sounds and styles out there. But at the same time a fiery party, something you can witness from the solar system. With the blazing soundtrack to accompany it.
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Sep 22, 2023It combines all of Doja’s past lives with some more heavy-hitting punchlines. It feels like a stark departure from her previous commercial efforts, while still showcasing some clear hits like “Paint The Town Red”, “Gun”, “Go Off”
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Sep 22, 2023At various points across the album, Doja Cat channels her predecessors. There’s a gorgeous D’Angelo croon to “Often” and on the punchy “Demons”, she emulates Kendrick Lamar’s silky, dangerous tones. Notably, though, there are zero features on this record. Scarlet holds up all on its own.
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Sep 25, 2023Cheeky, idiosyncratic and sometimes great.
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Sep 22, 2023The chilled, languorous template delivers on value, but offers little else and you can’t help but feel like these are unnecessary filler tracks. At its core, ‘Scarlet’ is an interesting exploration into the world of ego trips, the trappings of fame, escapism and novelty, a welcome deviation with a heightened sense of maturity and finesse.
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Sep 22, 2023It all adds up to an overlong, slightly repetitive but ultimately compelling album of two halves.
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Sep 22, 2023The desire to offload and flaunt her current relationship at length means Scarlet loses the snappy brevity that was Planet Her’s calling-card. After a while, you feel that points that have already been made are being reiterated, and a long album is made to seem longer still by its weird structure, a glut of slower and more abstract tracks taking up most of its second half.
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Sep 25, 2023Scarlet should be a madhouse but instead it’s like a trip to the rap clinic waiting room.
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Sep 25, 2023Doja’s patently irreverent musings on these topics are diverting and humorous, but they’re not served by being presented in such self-serious stylistic trappings. As a result, the album winds up being an uneven grab bag of tracks that aspire to high-brow West Coast rap and down-the-middle pop—the work of a talented MC in search of the right tonal balance.