Maude Latour is in love. It’s in every note, every word, every thread sewn into this album. This reflects the record itself: messy, erratic, raw, and most of all, euphoric. The highs are high, and the lows can be overlooked, because this is the honeymoon phase. A beginning. A debut.
I’ve been following Maude Latour since I came across “One More Weekend” in my bedroom in 2020. I’ve seen her live three times, I tell everyone I meet about her, and she’s stayed in the very short list of people I call my favorite artists. This all to say, I understand just how much of a long time coming this Sugar Water has been. Every summer on Instagram, she made it seem like a debut was finally happening… just for nothing to come of it. In the end, that proved to make the first time I saw the real release date an incredibly gratifying experience.
I’ve found, so far, that Latour has consistently gotten better with time. Each new project tends to outrank the last in my favorites. Her most recent release prior to this was an EP called Twin Flame, which was the soundtrack of my 2023 summer. It was a culmination of the years of music she’s put out: each song capped a different sound she’s experimented with over time, in final and best form. Even with no formal album announcement then, it felt like the ending of an era. I had a feeling I knew what was coming next.
The first single she released from this project was a high-school cheerleader-themed song called “Too Slow.” It was a very different sound for her: brash, bratty, and completely antithetical to the silky smooth sound of Twin Flame. I’ll be honest–when I first heard it, I wasn’t a huge fan. But as I warmed up to it over time, I realized what it was going to represent about this album: it was going to be about youth. The next song that came out was “Cursed Romantics,” a song that, as Maude describes it, is an ode to 2014 pop. This showed a new side of the record: it was going to be about euphoria in love. The third single, Comedown, was the most similar of the 3 to her older work. It’s a downtempo pop anthem about nostalgia and loss. That revealed a third subject: it was going to be about the things that change as we grow up. The final single, released only two weeks before the album, was “Whirlpool.” While I avoided hearing it until the whole record came out, in retrospect, it puts together the final, all-encompassing theme: it was going to be about all the feelings that Maude couldn’t understand in any other way than to turn them into songs.
I didn’t listen to Sugar Water the day it came out. I wanted to wait for a moment that felt fitting. It luckily came only a day later: walking alone through my neighborhood on a sunny day to an event some friends invited me to. The second I hit play, I knew it was the right time. "Officially Mine" is the ultimate summer hit. The band Glass Animals talks a lot about how they try to design their openers to be a table of contents for the album to follow, and I think about that a lot when listening to albums myself nowadays. But if I know one thing about Maude, it’s her background in academia. She went to Columbia University, not as a music major, but as a philosophy major. The ideas she studied there have heavily informed all of her music, including this record. Because of that, I like to think of “Officially Mine” as less of a table of contents and more of a thesis. A central philosophy for the album to keep coming back to.
The themes I’ve mentioned appear strongest in the best songs on the record. My favorites include the previously mentioned "Whirlpool," "Comedown," and "Officially Mine," as well as “Sugar Water,” “Summer of Love,” and album closer “Bloom.” On these, she shines bright as a popstar trying to capture her emotions in full, vivid-colored detail. She revels in her love, both new and old, comparing romance to a religion. She experiments with different ways to capture it musically, from catty club tracks to rich builds to acid-trip pure pop. When she does it right, you feel everything she feels, and it’s magical. One skill she excels in is creating memorable musical moments: the almost-too-quick-to-keep-up pre-chorus on “Summer of Love” or a scream building up until it finally breaks (much like a wave) in “Whirlpool,” for example. I’ve always believed that Maude Latour understands the pop structure better than anyone else, which is exemplified in Sugar Water's best songs. Catchy hooks, vivid imagery, and the kind of ecstasy that I believe can only be truly captured in pop.
There are definitely some weaker points on the album, though. A lot of them are smaller details that just seem to personally irk me: I’m also really not a fan of the reversed piano on “Cursed Romantics,” the bells on “Save Me” or the way she changes the pronunciation of the word “infinite” in the chorus of “Infinite Roses.” I’m willing to admit these may just be personal faults, but they’re hard to get past for me even though I really want to. However, there’s one even bigger problem across the whole album. One thing I’ve come to admire about Latour’s evolution is the way her production style has changed–Twin Flame was the peak of this. Everything sounded clean, smooth, carefully chosen. It was really beautiful. It also added a level of maturity to her music that I was excited about. That’s what makes it still my favorite project of hers, even after the release of this album. I can’t help but find Sugar Water's production to be kind of messy. There are so many moments that feel too busy or too rough in the wrong way. I love a good wall of synths, but they need to be used with care. There are so many points in this record where I feel blasted with sound in a way that seems unnecessary. At worst, it takes away from her vocals (which are as strong as ever) and instead forces the ear towards trying to sort out the chaos going on musically.
But all in all, I’m willing to forgive that. It’s a debut album, after all. Almost none are perfect. And as I listened to the second half on my walk home, drying in the sun post-water balloon fight and reflecting on how lucky I am to have the people around me that I do, the record still captured that feeling, messy or not. It’s much like the love she talks about so much on the album–perhaps a little rocky, but beautiful nonetheless. I think it does what a debut does best: shows great promise for what's to come. As a longtime fan, although it didn’t quite live up to my expectations, I’m not majorly disappointed. In fact, I’m actually excited. I’m so ready to see where she goes next. In the meantime, I’ll let Sugar Water be the soundtrack to my last days of pure sunlight. An excellent closer to a great summer of pop music.
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