A fine mixture of glitter and asbestos.
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that a decade of releases from A.G Cook’s alum and close collaborators has changed the landscape of pop. It’s a bit more that they bulldozed that landscape and threw a generous layer of glitter over what remained. Many onlookers sat and cried from despair and confusion, while others cheered as they started to eat all of these new, shiny ashes. Yum.
And yet, as we approach the end of 2023, we also approach the supposed deadline for the monolith of P.C Music, with every new release from them feeling a little more solemn in spite of themselves. Hannah Diamond has been there from the start, front-running the collective’s house-style of bubblegum-flavoured splendour, pulled at the seams by just enough noise and glitchiness to never fully obfuscate an anxious undertone. While hyperpop contemporaries 100 gecs and GFOTY are far more deconstructivist in their appreciation of pop through fragmented, compellingly abrasive production, Hannah leans far more towards breaking through sheer maximalism, with characteristic clean synths and hard auto-tuned vocals.
The synthetic and over-idealised sound is very much the point throughout Perfect Picture, made clear when matched with lyrics speaking to unattainable expectancies constructed as a result of everyone’s usual suspect, the Social Media Age™. The title-track opener and Poster Girl concern themselves with these expectancies relating to appearance, while the track Affirmations places the scope over faux-positive confidence inspiration, telling us “I am building my own world. I am a business woman and my own CEO”. It’s all fairly on the nose, but Hannah’s innocent and unassuming vocals keeps it working, believable.
One absolute highlight of the whole album is No FX, which runs with a very simple, and again on the nose elevator-pitch gimmick of: repeat the chorus line “you love me with no effects on” and turn the big dial labelled “vocal effects” up each time a little more and more while the crowd cheers you on. It works great in addition to the thematic ground already trodden in the album, it’s also kind of a fuck you to presumed criticisms of over-processing vocals, it also knows exactly where to leave enough space and silence between those ever-shiny synths to slap you about just right.
Not all the slapping slaps about just right throughout the album’s runtime sadly, and it feels exceptionally one-note and unvaried at more than a couple moments. It could be conceivable that some tracks might be able to work isolated from the album, but in amongst the mix of constant maximum pop (always and forever) tracks such as Flashback, Divisible By Two and Impossible just breeze on by without feeling as if too much happened to justify themselves on this tracklist (Impossible does feature a fun drum-fill into the chorus which can have a thumbs up I guess). Staring At The Ceiling, the first single released for the album, gets to stand out through its use of a great little dark melody backing the piece, evolving with further more daring and dirty synths and complementing the vocals immaculately.
It’s these moments where the production is allowed within the partnership to go a bit more wild where Hannah really sounds her best on this album, though these are sadly few and far between. Hyperpop often feels like a constant year-to-year arms-race of how much more potent and more jarring sounds can be brought into the mix while keeping wholly listenable, and Hannah has made a record which would feel incredibly potent 3-4 years ago. Everything feels like it’s technically working as intended through and through, but what was intended seems to have been too safe and over-refined.
This album gets a 5.5 out of 10 today. All the best and good luck getting that glitter out your hair, Keir.