NEW ALBUM: ANITTA | VERSIONS OF ME

Few musicians hustle as effectively as 29-year-old singer-songwriter Anitta, a superstar in her native Brazil for nearly a decade. She’s said that she made her last album, 2019’s "Kisses," a tremendously entertaining set sung in Portuguese, Spanish and English, as a musical calling card to attract attention from international record labels. It worked: she’s now signed to Warner in the US and continuing her global charm with her new album "Versions of Me," a searingly ambitious album executive produced by OneRepublic‘s Ryan Tedder that features collaborations with Cardi B, Khalid and Saweetie. In the sonically-diverse "Versions Of Me," she included a little bit of everything: reggaeton, R&B, Brazilian funk, and electro-pop, delivering a well-executed pop album that we’ve been missing these days. Like "Kisses," it’s a trilingual affair, but Anitta sings a lot more frequently in English. "Que Rabão," which features late Brazilian icon Mr. Catro, is the album’s only Portuguese song. She got candid on the title track, an electro-pop that sounds like a modern update of Madonna’s mid-’80s sound. The album’s opening track, "Evolver," is a brilliant reggaetón bop that has become her highest-charting song on the Billboard Hot 100. There’s more rock-solid reggaetón where that came from, especially the sultry Khalid collab "Ur Baby" and harder-edged "Gata," but Anitta also pulls off Panic! At The Disco-inspired powerpop (‘Boys Don’t Cry), dreamy alt-R&B (‘Love Me, Love Me’) and a Saweetie-assisted blend of EDM and Brazilian funk (‘Faking Love’). Given its gleeful genre-hopping and features, it would be a stretch to call ‘Versions of Me’ cohesive or streamlined, but it’s held together by Anitta’s ambition and charisma. She knows exactly what she wants – and on this evidence, she will get it.