The Disney-star-to-pop-star pipeline is still in full swing a good 30 years after Britney, Christina and Justin shot from the Mickey Mouse Club to astronomical real-world fame. Leading the pack of gen Z’s contenders is legitimate generational icon Olivia Rodrigo; trailing, but on-the-rise, is the ribald, outrageously fun Sabrina Carpenter. This cohort’s black sheep is Dove Cameron, a self-styled goth-pop singer who had a UK Top 10 hit last year with Boyfriend, which made up for its derivative post-Billie Eilish sound with an arch, villainously bisexual lyrical conceit. “I could steal you from him,” she sang with a panto-baddie snarl, before slipping into faux-coquetry: “Plus, all my clothes would fit.”
Boyfriend features on Cameron’s debut album, Alchemical: Volume 1, and it’s the most memorable song in this otherwise limp collection, which retains the song’s deviant affectation but lacks its distinct point of view. Cameron’s Disney villain cackles on Lethal Woman are fun but get lost in the kind of Gesaffelstein-lite production that soundtracks Selling Sunset, and her similes (“She walks like a saint, floats like an angel / Sharp like a knife under the table”) scan more confusing than masochistically horny. Breakfast’s hook cribs so shamelessly from Lana Del Rey’s Diet Mountain Dew that it’s a surprise Del Rey wasn’t given a courtesy credit. These songs are blunt and anonymous, which means that the set’s two ballads, theoretically included to provide moments of insight and contrast, just end up feeling like padding. God’s Game has a neat conceptual twist – Cameron’s producers seem to have asked: what if we made a Jersey club Bond theme? – but it’s hardly enough to save Alchemical from being a failed experiment.
