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Dove Cameron Balances Vulnerability & Sexuality In Haunting Debut Album
Alchemical: Volume 1 is absolutely the album the former Disney star's fans have been waiting for.
Over a year after winning hoards of fans with her surprise viral hit “Boyfriend,” Dove Cameron has finally released her debut album.
Alchemical: Volume 1 is an eight-track exploration into “love, sex, loss, trauma, darkness and eventually transformation and healing," according to a statement shared by the singer. Featuring both “Boyfriend” and another 2022 hit, “Breakfast,” the album oscillates between lusty bangers and heartsick ballads written to let go of relationships that couldn’t last.
“Some of these songs are about things that happened 10 years ago. Some of these songs are things that I've never been able to write about. I finally felt like if I didn't write about them, I was going to carry them forward with me,” Cameron told People. “You reach these impasses in your life where you go, ‘If I don't do this now, it's never going to happen, and my entire life is going to look like this.’”
Writing through her personal traumas may have been cathartic for the former Disney Channel star, but the songs have clearly already resonated with her intensely devoted fanbase as well.
Of particular note across the album is the way Cameron doesn't shy away from writing specifically about both men and women. Even queer artists who don’t define themselves as lesbian or gay (Cameron has described herself as both queer and bisexual in the past) often find themselves boxed into a specific set of expectations, either writing explicitly about men or women with the occasional one-off or keeping things gender neutral.
Cameron, however, mixes all of these options together in a way that’s refreshing even if it isn’t wholly unheard of. “Lethal Woman” joins “Boyfriend” as a deeply catchy appreciation of women, “God’s Game” and “Sand” are unapologetically brutal dissections of past relationships she’s had with men who let her down, and still other songs fall somewhere less defined—in a good way.
Although the Schmigadoon star has previously joked (ahem, “joked”) that her goal is to make music for everyone “except for straight men,” it really feels as if there’s music for everybody here. (And personally the two straight men I know already love it, sorry Dove!) More importantly, she’s making music without compromising any one part of her identity, something that’s blatantly been on her mind in recent years.
“I'm excited to feel like my music is actually allowing me to be the person I've always been,” she told Teen Vogue last month, “rather than the projected archetype of the person that I thought people needed me to be, wherever I was in my life at the time.”
The only disappointing thing about Alchemical: Volume 1 is that it’s only half of the album—but Cameron already teased a snippet showing her working on new music this week, and is determined to shareVolume 2 sometime next year.
“The only expectation is to create stuff that really resonates with me,” she told People. “But also, it's exciting, the fact that you never know what's going to connect.”
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Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
