Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion (Japanese Deluxe Edition) (2015)

Carly Rae Jepsen's third album E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless as any pop album you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors. It is flooded with winning moments, even if it lacks the personality of great pop records.

Carly Rae Jepsen's ambition for her new album E•MO•TION could not be clearer. "We had the biggest single in the world last time and didn't have the biggest album," her manager Scooter Braun told the New York Times in July, referring to her 2011 breakout hit, "Call Me Maybe". "This time we wanted to stop worrying about singles and focus on having a critically acclaimed album." It's an ambitious campaign, but the Shellback-produced opener "Run Away With Me" announces it with clarion synths that sound like battle-call horns: Carly Rae is at the gates with an army, hellbent on returning home with your love.

In many ways, she succeeds: E•MO•TION is as solid and spotless a pop album as you're likely to hear this year, the result of several years working alongside a storied list of contributors. More than 200 tracks were workshopped in sessions with some of the pop world's most prestigious hired hands, including hitmakers Max Martin and Jack Antonoff, neither of whom made the final cut. In the end, just 12 made the album, with six more filling out the deluxe edition.

The hand-picked collaborators that do appear on E•MO•TION include Sia, Devonté Hynes, and Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, all of whom contribute excellent work (Hynes, on the twinkling Prince-inspired ballad "All That", and Batmanglij, on the weird, warbling "Warm Blood"). The synth and drum programming, handled by Ariel Rechtshaid, may be his best, building off the sound he developed for Haim's Days Are Gone. I can think of a few fans and gearheads who would pay good money to have Rechtshaid break down the sounds on this album, as he's done in the past.

But whatever lessons we learn from *E•MO•TION—for example, *that this palette of '80s synth sounds and Madonna hat-tips will probably endure for eternity—we don't learn much about Jepsen. The best pop stars distill attitudes and emotions into gestures so perfect they can take on a life of their own. This is why pop icons inspire endless memes: Rihanna for when we give no fucks, Beyoncé for when we're feeling imperial. We have Drake for performative vulnerability, Taylor for performative generosity. Jepsen, on the other hand, hasn't captured the Internet's imagination in the same way. Her best performance is still as a shy, boy-crazy brunette, a role she reprises on the "driving the speed limit on the zeitgeist" first single "I Really Like You". Her efforts on E•MO•TION to break new ground around this reductive portrait are fitful and unconvincing. (She told the Guardian she "spent an entire week vaping" to sound "gritty" on the song "Your Type", yet she sounds no different on that track than on any of the others.) Ultimately, you can listen to Carly Rae Jepsen for days and still have no idea who she is.

This may seem like a surface-level concern, but it's an important one, because E•MO•TION is all surface. It's unfair to deeply scrutinize lyrics on a pop record—the goal is to write smart, but skew broad—but E•MO•TION fails to tell us who Jepsen is or wants to be. The economy of her writing is impressive, especially on songs like the shadowy "Warm Blood" or the booming closer "When I Needed You". "LA Hallucinations", her collaboration with members from little-known indie rock bands Zolas and Data Romance, stitches a bubblegum vocal to a no-frills electronic production. (It is also the rare pop song to include the word "BuzzFeed.") But the album mostly feels like the conclusion of a team determined to create an unassailable pop product.

That's why it falls short of its ultimate goal of setting the world on fire; for all its ironclad hooks and studio precision, Jepsen's third album, like her second, lacks the personality of the most memorable pop records. There's an unshakeable vagueness to her—her last album was simply called Kiss, and this one bears the generic title E•MO•TION, with inexplicable punctuation. It may be flooded with winning moments—the bridge on "Gimmie Love"! the build to the last chorus on "All That"!—but E•MO•TION as a whole sounds like a slab of blank space. If only Jepsen had written her name.