Toy With Me

Since launching her debut single “All About That Bass” in 2014, Meghan Trainor has made a signature of her feel-good empowerment pop with a retro doo-wop twist. The 32-year-old singer’s seventh album, <i>Toy With Me</i>, arrives months after the birth of her third child, which got her thinking about the prospect of her kids growing up in a world where the meanest comments rise to the top—a climate with which the pop star was all too familiar. The songs that resulted centre around themes of self-confidence, affirmation and playful millennial misandry—from mugs of male tears for breakfast to a chorus (“Rich Man”) inspired by Cher’s iconic response to advice from her mother about marrying a rich man: “Mom, I <i>am</i> a rich man.” On “Get In Girl”, she hypes up a freshly heartbroken friend (“You been a little too patient/I wanna punch his face in”), backed by the requisite <i>shoo-wop</i>s and <i>shoo-be-doo</i>s, and on the ’80s-inspired “Still Don’t Care”, she brushes off the haters with a reminder that the best revenge is a life well-lived.