By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Natalie Imbruglia has been famous long enough to know what a bad audition feels like. 'I remember feeling icky,' she tells the BBC of one particularly rough tryout — a small, candid admission from a woman who's spent three decades in an industry that rarely rewards candor from its women once they've passed a certain age.
That candor is the throughline of her new album, her first since 2021, which the BBC reports deals directly with the mental health fallout of perimenopause. It's a subject pop music has mostly left alone, treated as unglamorous, undanceable, unmarketable — the sort of thing an industry built on youth would rather not put on a single cover.
Imbruglia's choice to build a record around it instead is worth noting for what it isn't: a wellness platitude or a marketing angle bolted onto old material. By her own account, this is lived experience turned into songcraft, the same instinct that made 'Torn' land almost thirty years ago — take something raw and give it a hook.
We don't have the album itself in front of us yet, nor a track-by-track case for its quality; the BBC's report is an interview, not a review, and the record's actual sound remains to be heard and judged on its own terms. What's clear already is the subject matter, and the nerve it took to choose it.
Pop has always trafficked in first heartbreak, first love, first everything. An artist willing to sing plainly about a second act — hormonal, disorienting, unglamorous — is doing something the genre still doesn't do enough.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I finished it so you'd know. Ask me again once the record's actually out.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."