Selena Gomez review, Rare: Moments of ecstasy and pathos never quite live up to the singer’s gold standards

For a while, it seemed as though Selena Gomez might have given up on the whole “releasing albums” thing. Why would she need to, when she could just keep churning out walloping great singles? In the five years since 2015’s Revival, the 27-year-old has released no end of smart, strutting songs: the Talking Heads-sampling “Bad Liar”, the glitchy kiss-off “It Ain’t Me”, and the EDM ballad “Back to You” to name a few.

Gomez could have kept going in this vein, ad infinitum – never far from the charts but with no record in sight. But she hasn’t. Not only has she put together a new album, Rare, but she’s opted out of including any of those miscellaneous hits on it.

That is the blessing and the curse of Rare. It is an accomplished, coherent record, with moments of ecstasy and others of pathos – but its filler tracks pale in comparison to Gomez’s gold standards. The ghost of “It Ain’t Me” in particular looms large, a watered-down version of that song’s melodic lick cropping up in both “Kinda Crazy” and “Vulnerable” – though the latter is more subdued, its lyrics aptly exposing.

Gomez hasn’t had an easy ride of it these past few years – which perhaps explains why she’s stalled on releasing an album. Alongside a lupus diagnosis that necessitated a kidney transplant (the surgery for which went wrong when an artery burst), her mental health suffered, too. “My highs were really high,” she told the Wall Street Journal recently, “and my lows would take me out for weeks at a time.”

There are moments on Rare, all 13 tracks of which were co-written by Gomez, that seem to hint at those mental extremes. “This is just what the doctor ordered/ Put a gold star on my disorder...” she sings on the syncopated standout “Fun”. “You get me higher than the medication.” Elsewhere, though, Gomez resorts to good old-fashioned boy troubles.

“People can go from people you know to people you don’t,” she sings on “People You Know”, the plosives becoming their own percussion. “Lose You To Love Me” offers a less cynical kind of empowerment than some stars have dabbled with of late. Over reined-in keyboards and plucked violins, she sings, “You got off on the hurtin’ when it wasn’t yours/ We’d always go into it blindly/ I needed to lose you to find me.”

The title track, meanwhile, has the slinky minimalism that has become Gomez’s forte, its backing vocals and instrumentals muffled as if the whole thing has been dunked underwater.

There is a lot to like about Rare. But it never quite gets out from beneath the shadow of half a decade of behemothic bangers.