Suki Waterhouse has released Loveland as her third album and her Island Records debut, and it arrives polished by outside hands even as it tries to feel personal. The record is wrapped in change, with Amy Allen, Joel Little and Aaron Dessner among the collaborators, but the sharpest thing it leaves behind is the sense that Waterhouse is still being pulled toward a clearer voice rather than arriving with one fully formed.
That is why Loveland is being searched now. It lands as Waterhouse’s latest step after a career that has already moved from her breakout single Moves to a Sub Pop debut in I Can’t Let Go, then toward guitar-based Americana after Daisy Jones & The Six. In that run, the review hears Think Twice and My Fun as part of the Americana turn, while Morals brings in Mick Fleetwood on drums, which gives the album a broader frame than a simple pop reset.
The collaborators matter because they come with heavy mainstream gravity. Allen, Joel Little and Dessner are linked to Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift and Harry Styles, and that places Loveland inside the same professional ecosystem that has powered some of the most visible pop records of the moment. Waterhouse is clearly being positioned one step further into that world, with a sound that reaches for polished pop even when it drifts back toward guitar-led Americana.
But the record never quite settles into a single identity. The review is blunt that her music has often been inoffensive and not particularly inventive, and that Waterhouse is stylistically swayable because she still lacks a strong artistic perspective. The single When I Get Drunk (I Want You Boy) repackages her old sensibilities in a smooth-jazz disguise, while Teardrops recalls Lana Del Rey’s style rather than pushing past it. Even the album’s own title, loveland, sounds like a place she is still trying to locate rather than a world she has fully built.
Before Loveland, Waterhouse had already shown flashes that could cut through the haze, especially on Devil I Know from I Can’t Let Go. That is what leaves the central question open today: not whether she can work with major names, but whether she can make a third album that sounds less like a sequence of smart pairings and more like the stamp of Suki Waterhouse herself.
