Down to 4, Fifth Harmony produces its best work yet
Fifth Harmony is a girl group without a Beyoncé — in the best way possible.
Listening to girl groups and boy bands can feel almost like blood sport, with the assumption that one or more members will emerge from the pack, go solo and explode into a Bey or Justin Timberlake-level pop superstar.
Not so with Fifth Harmony, whose four members share vocal duties fair and square on the group’s self-titled third album (out Friday). And there’s plenty of big choruses and earworm melodies to go around on the new album, the strongest work of the group’s career.
While Fifth Harmony has always been more egalitarian than other girl groups that see one member stealing the spotlight, that doesn’t mean no one has tried. Camila Cabello, the group’s former fifth member — who always appeared hungriest for a solo career — departed in 2016.
The group has more than enough firepower with four members. Their vocals quickly become distinctive: Ally Brooke Hernandez’s brassiness, Normani Kordei’s muscle, Lauren Jauregui’s clear-as-glass timbre and Dinah Jane Hansen’s divasize belting.
The album, smartly contained to a short-and-sweet 10 tracks, homes in on the themes that have always been at the heart of Fifth Harmony’s songwriting: sisterhood, power and sex-positivity. This time, those themes came from the band members themselves; unlike their previous releases, they co-wrote much of the album and played a larger role in selecting their songs.
Perhaps that’s why this album is more cohesive than their previous releases, pinging back and forth between 2000s-era R&B ( Deliver, Sauced Up), standard-issue trop house ( Down) and Chainsmokers-lite EDM ( Angel), while not straying too far. Fifth Harmony’s best tracks have usually leaned R&B, like the new album’s bouncy standout Deliver, which features production by The Stereotypes, the team behind Bruno Mars’ That’s What I Like and 24K Magic. Other highlights include Lonely Night, a kiss-off anthem that’s stacked with hooks, and the swaggering He Like That, with a vaguely reggae beat and a Pumps and a Bump reference that’s bound to introduce the MC Hammer track to a new generation. Anticipating that fans would comb their lyrics for any allusions to Cabello, the band limited commentary on female friendships to album closer Bridges, with a “we build bridges, not walls” chorus that reads less as a diss of the former member and more as timely commentary on current events. And while their biggest hit, Work From Home, featured a guest verse from rapper Ty Dolla Sign, this album has just one featured artist: Gucci Mane on Down. Kordei told USA TODAY they wanted to keep the self-titled album focused on the group. “We didn’t want to just add features just to add features,” she said. “The fact that it is self-titled just means so much more.”