Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco: I Said I Loved You First review

The Guardian

21-03-2025

I Said I Love You First makes few bones about its raison d'etre. It comes with cover art that features the betrothed Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco snuggling in bed, the photograph apparently shot through a keyhole, as if its prospective audience is spying on an intimate moment. Should you not get the gist, there's an accompanying explanation about how it celebrates the pop star and pop uber-producer's 'love story', how it came together 'organically' thanks to the comfort between them, and 'authentically reflects their experiences'.
Whether that compels you or sends you running in the opposite direction screaming in horror is doubtless a matter of personal taste. It depends on how you feel about public displays of affection, particularly those designed to make the couple in question money, an idea that history suggests is fraught with risk. Over the years, a host of legendary pop names have chosen to commemorate their love together in song – Sonny and Cher, Kylie and Jason, Nas and Kelis, not to mention Katie Price and Peter Andre – only to watch their relationships crash and burn. Gomez and Blanco, who produced Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, Maroon 5's Moves Like Jagger and Rihanna's Diamonds among other 2010s classics, even gave Interview magazine the sort of Hello! magazine exclusive in which a Coronation Street star flashes their engagement ring.
Still, you can see why they might have done it. For one thing, the first flush of romance can make you lose your head, blind to the idea that your love might give anyone outside your bubble the ick. You could mock passing that kind of behaviour off as 'art that authentically reflects their experiences', but then look at John Lennon and Yoko Ono favouring the world with a photo of themselves in the buff. And we live in an era where pop fandom seems predicated on parsing every lyric for intimations about their idol's personal life – something Gomez, the most-followed woman on Instagram, knows well. It's indescribably reductive, but if fans are intent on viewing your music as a footnote to your private life, then why not give them what they want?
So the album roughly follows a narrative arc, from the wreckage of a failed previous relationship to the couple's present-day happiness. In fairness, the lyrics are nowhere near as runny as the accompanying blurb might suggest, but they do a lot of things that besotted couples are wont to do: smarming about how happy they are in front of single friends, being passive-aggressive when they run into their exes ('I know you're going to find somebody perfect') and offering TMI about their sex lives. It's 'ride it like a cowboy' this and 'I just wanna go all night' that. If their forthcoming marriage is blessed with children, you dread to think how it's going to go down when said kids hit their early teens.
Musically, it pulls in a lot of big names, Billie Eilish's brother and collaborator Finneas, Gracie Abrams, rapper GloRilla and Charli xcx among them, the latter contributing to a bit of trebly and distinctly post-Brat dance-pop called Bluest Flame. I Said I Love You First cycles through a selection of modish pop styles, from J Balvin-assisted Latin pop that leans into Gomez's Mexican heritage to a piano ballad performed in the slurry vocal style known as 'cursive singing' or 'indie girl voice' – supposed to indicate confessional intimacy, it can sound remarkably like you're singing with your bottom lip stuck out like a petulant four-year-old. There is a taut new wave/pop-punk-influenced track with a guitar that goes chugga-chugga (Call Me When You Break Up), a song closely resembling a Billie Eilish ballad (Don't Take It Personally) and a lot of stuff that sounds like Lana Del Rey, whose influence hangs particularly heavy over How Does It Feel to Be Forgotten? and You Said You Were Sorry.
It's all pretty well done, but it means that a project that's clearly very personal ultimately struggles to develop a clear identity of its own, an issue that has plagued Gomez as a pop star despite some great one-off hits; in recent years, her greatest successes have been as an actor in Only Murders in the Building and the ill-fated Emilia Pérez. Plus, the songs aren't hugely memorable. That seems baffling, given how successful Blanco is: whatever you made of Teenage Dream or Moves Like Jagger, they're incredibly catchy songs. You might assume he'd bring his A-game to an album where he shares billing with his fiancee, but killer tunes are surprisingly thin on the ground – the best might be the chanson-like melody of Ojos Tristes – which perhaps accounts for the relatively muted reception afforded the singles released thus far, despite an ongoing media blitz.
In all their media appearances together, Gomez and Blanco seem like a genuinely sweet couple: funny, self-deprecating, a lot more self-aware than the stuff about producing art that authentically reflects their appearances might suggest. It's tempting to say that you can have more fun – and, if you're interested in such things, get a better insight into their relationship – watching them eat chicken wings dipped in tongue-melting chilli sauce on YouTube series Hot Ones than listening to I Said I Love You First. It's certainly not as mawkish as you might fear – you don't want to bolt from it at high speed – but nor can you imagine spending too much time in its presence, however much you wish its authors well.