Kelsea Ballerini - PATTERNS

"At the end of the day I’m a girl, I’m afraid," Kelsea Ballerini sings three quarters of the way through PATTERNS, but it turns out being afraid doesn't always have to be such a bad thing. Like falling in love, it reminds us we're alive.

Anyone hoping for the moony ruminations and late-night navel gazing of Rolling Up the Welcome Mat might be disappointed to find Ballerini in a cheerfully upbeat, self-reflective mood on her 2024 project. Even in its more subdued moments, the whole album feels like it's throwing up a giant "WHATEVER!" to her breakups as she embraces all the fun and fear that comes with fucking up and falling in love all over again.

The themes of the last album still run through PATTERNS, but what makes the new record so thoroughly enjoyable is just how lightly she holds her post-break up anxieties now that she's a safe distance from it. If it felt like she was sitting in the dark on Rolling Up the Welcome Mat, nervously watching a fuse burn between her fingers, on PATTERNS it feels like she's standing back and watching the fireworks explode all over the sky. If nothing else, she seems to have discovered the secret to making a quarter life existential crisis seem like it can actually be a whole lot of fun.

"I get overwhelmed / I live in my mental when I feel like it’s all going down, down, down," she sings on the perkily nihilistic, glitchy pop country anthem 'Nothing Really Matters,' but she never lets herself get weighed down by the confession. Country music was built on heartbreak and bitterness. Love only really gets interesting when someone falls out of it; and we all secretly hope it's a long way down. Usually, there's nothing more eye-rollingly dull than an artist who’s recently fallen in love singing about it, but Ballerini somehow sidesteps the boring bits of the slideshow by adding a little cheeky end-of-the-world twitchiness to her tales of newfound romance. It's like someone showing you photos of them and their boyfriend on holiday and cheerfully saying, "By the way, we're both going to die one day" after each one.

Yet that's the truth about falling in love: it's really fucking scary, too. Feeling that much for someone is terrifying, especially when you've only just stopped feeling that much for someone else because it all went to shit when you did.

"I’m better on my own, WAIT! Don’t go / It’s all I’ve ever known, WAIT! Don’t go," she sings on one of the album highlights, 'WAIT!,' as she leans fully into the fears she has for her new relationship, flip flopping between her excitement and her disquietude. "If the meteor hit, babe, would you get in your car and drive to me to cry with me?” she pleads on 'How Much Do You Love Me'. "If I went insane and didn’t know my name, would you stay beside of me, reminding me?"

Taylor Swift might have wanted to dwell on every little detail of her recent break ups on The Tortured Poets Department – musically, PATTERNS’ most obvious comparison along with Kacey Musgraves' Star-Crossed – but Ballerini’s recovery technique feels more straightforwardly out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new. There's a new bed for her boots to go under, and she doesn't spend a lot of time reminiscing over what went on between the sheets of the old one she used to sleep in. "We both slept on a mattress with 'I love you' people," she concedes on 'Baggage' in a shared moment of recognition of her relationship patterns. "Shit, I even took it all the way to the steeple / So, boy, I know the weight and gravity of keychains with same keys / But if you want that welcome mat, then roll it out with me."

Writing the album amidst the fallout of her marriage breakup, its reverberations ring naturally through PATTERNS, but she rarely touches on it directly; it's only on the pragmatically carefree 'We Broke Up' that she really spends any time picking over the debris. When she does, she does it with a breezy insouciance that feels almost subversively lightweight in an age when deeping often feels like the sixth love language. "I could take a deep dive in the details / I could hide, I could cry ‘til I throw up / Take a stroll, camera roll, old emails / But it’s as simple as, we broke up," she sings matter-of-factly. "I could call my friends and bitch about it / Write a 7-minute song, but for what? Tale as old as time, I don’t gotta wrap my head around it / It’s as simple as, we broke up."

Ballerini saves the album's most outwardly confessional moment for 'This Time Last Year.' Tucked towards the end of the album, the song wistfully reflects on everything she's been through in the last year as she embraces where she is now and all the messy contradictions that come with being a woman in love. "This time, last year, right around the holidays, there were messes in my mind / I was learning all the harder ways, livin’ it down, and drinkin’ a lot," she sings on, in a full circle realisation. "But hittin’ the town didn’t hit the spot / But oh, how the tides change, in 365 days."

In a year when a lot of the albums released by country's big hitters have landed like bloops, Kelsea Ballerini has smashed it out of the park with a country pop grand slam.

9/10

Kelsea Ballerini’s 2024 project, PATTERNS, is available everywhere now via Black River Entertainment.

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