Chloe Moriondo Suckerpunch Review: A Wallop That Doesn’t Fully Connect

True to its title, Chloe Moriondo’s Suckerpunch packs a wallop. A complete stylistic switch-up for the Detroit singer-songwriter, the album embraces a splashy hyperpop production palette in lieu of the more intimate, guitar-based instrumentation of last year’s Blood Bunny. Much like 100 gec’s Laura Les, Moriondo douses her vocals here in high-pitched Auto-Tune until they’re distorted beyond recognition, a process that produces brittle audio textures akin to dropping them in a deep fryer. Add to the mix that most of these maximalist tracks, in one way or another, have at least a semblance of eye-winking self-awareness, and you get a project that’s, as Moriondo herself has described, “a slap in the fucking face.”

But while this has assuredly certified Moriondo’s artistic adventurousness, most of the material on Suckerpunch fails to connect on an emotional level. The album as a whole constitutes a total blindside of sorts, on a song-by-song basis, but it rarely lands many decisive blows. The stabbing synths of “Trophy” evokes the electro-pop of the early 2010s, specifically Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy,” but the reference serves little utility beyond indulging in irreverent but shallow nostalgia.

Likewise, “Fruity” shoehorns in a slew of labored fruit-related descriptors: “Says I’m sweeter than a cherry and she likes it/Stay up late and watch the strawberry sunset” goes the saccharine opening line. And two different tracks about the trappings of fame, “Popstar” and “Celebrity,” make surface-level observations that are as nondescript as their titles suggest.

Too often, the album’s songwriting seems to be in service of odd aural components that overburden its 13 succinct tracks. The gaudy “Hotel for Clowns” merely flaunts its eccentricities instead of incorporating them organically into the song’s mix; the deranged laugh of a circus jester is dropped on top of a series of reverb-soaked bass drops, decidedly killing the mood. The chorus of “Hell Hounds,” which features a volley of unharmonious barking dogs, feels like yet another cursory detail added to a song that doesn’t have much else going on. And a sped-up interpolation of Aqua’s late-’90s novelty hit “Barbie Girl” on the gothic “Dress Up,” a song about being taken advantage of and treated like a plaything by older men, feels more like a distraction than an incisive commentary on the evolution of the subject matter.

The closest Moriondo comes to connecting a solid jab on Suckerpunch is on the aptly titled “Knockout,” where the track’s disparate genre influences—a looping pop-punk guitar riff and a skittering 808 that make up the majority of the song’s composition—intermingle coherently. “Know you wouldn’t last one round with me/Uppercut, right hook, lose your teeth,” she vaunts, right before stretching out letters “K” and then, naturally, “O.” The song’s relatively plain structure and spare arrangement provide the necessary breathing room for its sticky hook. Unfortunately, the rest of Suckerpunch doesn’t possess that same type of breezy simplicity.