Following the crossover success of last year’s “Say So,” one might expect Doja Cat to set up camp in a similar disco-adjacent milieu, and “Kiss Me More,” the first single from the 25-year-old rapper and singer’s third album, Planet Her, does just that. But the rest of the album leans heavily on more contemporary sounds, making it hard to differentiate it from any number of other recent R&B efforts. Despite some subtle shifts in tone from track to track—as on standouts “Options,” which pairs Bansuri-style flute with a wobbly bassline and skittering trap beat, and the reggaeton-lite “Naked”—the songs comprise a nebulous mass not unlike the swirling galaxy of the album’s David LaChapelle-lensed cover art.
Aside from the hip-swaying opening track, “Woman”—which serves as a quasi-manifesto on the power of feminine wiles, and which laments the media’s pitting of women against each other—Planet Her’s concept is just as difficult to pin down. Sex is a recurring theme, though the horny digressions on “Need to Know” seem mostly performative, a show of prowess on par with that of Doja Cat’s male hip-hop peers. And the Olivia Newton-John-quoting “Kiss Me More,” an ode to old-fashioned necking, is refreshingly chaste by today’s pop standards.
Doja Cat acknowledges the inevitable comparisons between herself and other female rappers, like Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, when she concedes, “Thank you, Nicki, I love you,” at the end of “Get Into It (Yuh),” but the moment feels less like a tribute and more like a nervous kissing of the ring. While those artists’ influence is obvious on tracks such as “Payday” and “Ain’t Shit,” Doja Cat’s ability to flip effortlessly between quick-tongued SoundCloud rapper and Grammy-approved chanteuse sets her apart. Vocally, she holds her own alongside Ariana Grande and a window-rattling beat on “I Don’t Do Drugs,” and her honeyed voice forms the flesh-and-blood center of “Need to Know” and the woozy “Love to Dream.”
With the liveliest songs bookending the album, though, the middle stretch of Planet Her gets swallowed in a celestial soup of midtempo R&B and trap trends like the pitched-down vocals on the narcotic “Been Like This.” “Payday” finds Doja Cat luxuriating in her newfound success—“I just can’t believe I got what I wanted all my life”—but while A-list guests Grande and the Weeknd prove her rising star power, she deserves material that’s actually out of this world.
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