Sia: Reasonable Woman review – pop reduced to motivational poster
(Atlantic)
The Australian hitmaker reaches for moments of brilliance on her 10th studio album. But too often it plays like generic inspiration
There really is nobody else like Sia. Over two decades, the Adelaide-born pop juggernaut has graduated from acid jazz singer to downtempo sleeper star to semi-accidental hitmaker and chart-topping auteur for hire. She has written for almost every major star and superproducer – Beyoncé, Adele, Rihanna – and become, in her own right, one of only a handful of women over 40 to top the Billboard charts. At best, she is responsible for some of Australia’s most precise, muscular and globally successful songwriting; at worst, she has also delivered countless assembly-line emotional jock jams about resilience that are unmistakably hers but have all the gravitas of a lift-the-flap book.
Reasonable Woman, her 10th studio album, is her first release since 2021’s Music – both her widely derided musical film and the accompanying record that followed. It featured longtime Sia creative partner/avatar Maddie Ziegler (who is not autistic) as the titular character (who is) in a portrayal that was criticised as offensive, ableist “minstrelsy”. Last year, Sia publicly disclosed her own autism diagnosis, reframing Music as the work of an autistic person who did not yet understand herself as such and hoping it would be reassessed eventually. Over her career, she has spoken about alcoholism, addiction and relapse; her diagnoses of Graves’ disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, “bipolar hypomania” and chronic pain; and her complex relationships with success, fame and her public image.
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