The most obvious points of reference for Demi Lovato’s It’s Not That Deep are Katy Perry’s 143 and Charli XCX’s Brat—the former trading in tired, by-the-numbers house beats and the latter elevating the inventive maximalism of hyperpop to the mainstream. It’s Not That Deep sits comfortably somewhere between those two wildly divergent dance-pop albums, merely nodding to Brat’s influence but bearing much more personality than 143.
Tracks like “Little Bit” feature glitchy, hyperpop-adjacent beats and vocal editing, while the standout “Frequency” throws it back to the early 2010s, when songs like Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been” and Kesha’s “Blow” dominated pop radio. Elsewhere, “Fast” melds diva-house verses—which nicely showcase Lovato’s vocal range—with stuttery beats and EDM synths.
Lyrically, It’s Not That Deep is made up largely of love songs that, true to the album’s title, feel less personal and specific than those of Lovato’s past releases. “Let You Go” is a midtempo breakup song punctuated by some ’80s-coded keyboards, while “Here All Night” sees the singer seeking solace from a broken heart—where else?—on the proverbial dance floor.
One exception is “Sorry to Myself,” which finds Lovato obliquely touching on her past mental health struggles: “Sorry for the starving, sorry for the burnout,” she laments. And “In My Head” is what many expected Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl would be: infectious synth-pop paired with autofictional lyricism. “I should be an author/The way that I can twist every word, every story, and turn you into the hero,” Lovato sings in a cadence not dissimilar to Swift’s.
With only two of its 11 tracks clocking in longer than three minutes, It’s Not That Deep doesn’t leave a lot of room for error. The album, though, does lose steam in its final stretch. The cheeky “Kiss,” for one, suffers from some painful innuendo like “The slower the motion, the wetter the ocean” and “It’s not that deep unless you want it to be/I’ll take the stick and drive it manually.” But while “Ghost,” the album’s sole ballad, closes things out on a predictable note, the song at least builds to a choppy electropop climax that keeps it tethered to the rest of It’s Not That Deep.
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