Album Review
The singer-songwriter’s fourth album goes deep into his feelings without over-intellectualizing them, and finds a secret weapon in Clairo
Ryan Beatty is trying to find the right way to say “I love you” on “Secret Language,” the rustic, horn-backed lead single from his fourth album, Sweet Fortune. He admits early on, “I’m a bit of a mess ’cause I’m fragile and tired, wounded and weak, and my words are a useless defense.” And yet words are all he has.
Over the past few years, Beatty has quietly positioned himself as a virtuosic songwriter operating on the fringes of pop. The roots he put down on his 2018 debut, Boy in Jeans, showed a promise that continued on the more experimental Dreaming of David in 2020. But Calico, his breakthrough from 2023, was a treasure trove of chilling revelations and picturesque stories about loss and finality. His writing on Calico is uncomplicated without being overly plain, in a way that suggests a deep familiarity with emotional minefields.
It seems obvious — they’re his own feelings and his own experiences, so of course he would know which memories are most explosive, or which have wreaked the most havoc in his life. The point, though, is that on Calico, he’d already spent enough time excavating his past to write about it from a distance. It’s the biggest contrast from Sweet Fortune, a record that spends 10 tracks fighting to hold on to the present and love that might not last beyond the moment in which he finds it.
