In the autumn of 2025, for reasons known only to god, I subjected myself to a deep dive into Robbie Williams’ discography, labouring like Jesus on the road to Golgotha through his entire back catalogue, from the post-Take That sub-Oasis cosplay of 1997’s unapologetically derivative, but nonetheless enjoyable, Life Thru a Lens, to the desperate middle-aged irrelevance of 2016’s The Heavy Entertainment Show. Actually, I always kind of liked Robert; at his best, he was an amusing, even occasionally insightful wordsmith, and on his first seven albums, he at least picked the right collaborators, in the form of beardy “classically trained” guitar bore Guy Chambers, washed up Duran Duran session bassist Stephen Duffy, and resplendent literary drag queens the Pet Shop Boys.
Overall, however, the experience of the Robbie Williams deep dive was deflating, due largely to the spectacular drop off in quality after 2006’s cataclysmic, but nonetheless compelling, Rudebox. After that came marriage, fatherhood, “sobriety” and, predictably, an artistic descent so dazzling that I still haven’t entirely come to terms with it, to be perfectly honest. The last few Robbie Williams albums are gash, post-Be Here Now Oasis-levels of hackery, and so it gives me no pleasure at all to relate to you, dear reader, that Britpop, Robbie’s “comeback album” and his thirteenth overall, marks a horrifying new low rather than an improbable return to form.
This is really, really, really boring. Apparently some spiv salvaged the dog-eared “musical eclecticism” checklist that served as the blueprint for Robbie’s previous post-imperial albums, because the contents of the selection box on offer here are grimly familiar; riotous pop-punk (“Rocket”), “soaring” mid-90s radio rock (“Spies”), ironic electro-rap (“Bite Your Tongue”), stompy 70s glam (“Cocky”), and so on and so forth. He probably thinks that “Human”, a synth-driven meditation on the dystopian implications of AI, sounds like his beloved Pet Shop Boys, when in fact, it sounds like The Beloved: and he probably thinks that “Morrissey” is a wryly homoerotic tribute-cum-diss track, when in fact, it’s as anodyne and uninsightful as anything else on this entirely forgettable record, but with the added indignity that it was reputedly brought into being by the dread hand of Gary Barlow, which automatically makes it ten times more contemptible.
But above all, and despite the apparent compulsive shifting of musical styles from one track to the next, Britpop somehow conjures the same gloopy, mid-tempo, utterly tuneless tone from the first minute to the last. Not one single song here made an impression on me after multiple listens – a nadir of narcolepsy-inducing abjectness not even plumbed by 2012’s somnolent Take the Crown, which at least featured the somewhat passable New Order ripoff “Be A Boy.”
There’s no need to comment on the lyrics; it’s just Robbie being a chronic-ironic rascal, but at the age of 51 rather than 21, which is significantly less endearing. During his imperial pomp, which was a lot shorter in retrospect than it seemed at the time, Robbie’s most interesting moments came when he juxtaposed bloated boyband narcissism alongside a jarring capacity for self-laceration (“such a saint but such a whore”). Britpop, however, offers little more than unrelentingly superficial and not especially titillating “cheek.” Perhaps someone at the record company made it clear to Robbie that he needs to cut out the darkness if he wants to command the attention of his fragile, screen-addicted, middle-aged listeners, who are close enough to death as it is without being confronted by the ghoulish form of their teenage crush, jumping out of their phones like some demented jack-in-a-box and forcing his latest tiresome “project” down their throats at wine o’clock.
Likelier still is that Robbie just doesn’t have much to say from his vantage point of affluent and sated domesticity, which would be all well and good except for the fact that, as he states on “All My Life” in an all-too-rare moment of self-awareness, he remains “addicted to the limelight.” And so a weary nation is rendered an unwilling enabler of this addiction through being subjected, yet again, to Robbie’s geriatric banalities, this time in the form of ironic rapping about how “I’m the reason you got high in the first place.” Madonna made an entertainingly unedifying spectacle out of this mutton-dressed-as-lamb routine during the twilight years of her career, but in Robbie’s case, it is merely coma-inducingly dull, and the only positive thing I can say about Britpop is that it broke the Beatles’ record for consecutive number 1 albums in the UK, thereby gloriously upsetting an entire retirement home’s worth of record collectors with YouTube channels. Nonetheless, that particular storm in a teacup only afforded me half an hour of amusement, whereas Britpop took 40 ungodly minutes off my life.
Rating: Zero stars
Standout track: Nothing