Selena Gomez Shares A Little More on Rare
The pop star returns with a very listenable, if occasionally drab, dance-pop album

Great pop stars don’t just make catchy songs or good beats. A truly great pop star transforms personal upheaval into marketable bliss, and, if she does it right, her listeners will sense the stories in the songs aren’t straight bullshit.
Until this point, Selena Gomez had made a handful of great pop songs. The Wizards of Waverly Place star-turned-pop-megaforce started out the same way many of her Disney/Nickelodeon peers did: with albums that felt more like throwaway “Fight Song” fodder (“Who Says” had corny talent show act written all over it) for Peak Disney Channel Era adolescents than serious radio pop. There was a glimmer of real potential on one of her first major hits “A Year Without Rain,” a bit more on the 2011 Euro-funk banger “Love You Like A Love Song.” Then, at 2015’s tail end, she shared “Hands to Myself,” a sexy, contagious, certified pop-radio banger that proved the former Disney star was “all grown up,” as the celebrity media is so fond of saying. The song is admittedly delightful.
But even in those rare pleasant moments throughout Gomez’s early career, we were never any closer to learning about the woman inside the songs. Then, throughout the middle part of the last decade, Gomez cancelled tours, citing health issues. She later revealed a lupus diagnosis, for which she underwent a kidney transplant. In 2018, she checked into treatment for anxiety and depression. She unabashedly shared her experiences with the media and her fans, steadily gaining Instagram followers—165 million, as of this writing—in the process. Now, in 2020, she’s talking about other items of great personal meaning: her mental health (“I had low self-esteem…but I feel so empowered because I’ve gained so much knowledge about what was going on mentally,” she recently told WSJ magazine), and high-profile breakups with fellow music superstars Justin Bieber and The Weeknd. And, finally, to some degree, that vulnerability plays a role in her music, too.