When Lorely Rodriguez sings as Empress Of, she can spin pop transcendence out of thin air. You can perhaps hear it most clearly on the 2016 Blood Orange track “Best to You,” where she practically steals the song from Dev Hynes with the crystalline immediacy of her voice, begging for a quick fix of a thrilling connection. Her voice is like an electric rush, all-consuming on one beat and gone the next. She has retained that impressive quality across several studio albums, and on her fifth record, Dream House, her distinctive voice is once again the centerpiece of her music. But while her virtuosity hasn’t wavered, that initial spark of individuality is now absent.
Rodriguez wrote Dream House following a period of devastation: Her childhood home was destroyed in the 2025 Altadena fires. She spends most of the album’s runtime trying to summon the words to define how lost she feels in the aftermath. Rodriguez has always been able to conjure the audible crackle that can spin out of conflicting feelings—yet here, she seems to handle this material in the safest manner possible, smoothing over complicated emotionality into a handful of undercooked alt-pop sketches. Even as she sings of wanting to “lose myself/even if I’m losing everybody else” on the Hynes-assisted Dream House track “Blue Light,” she floats over the harmonized choruses sounding like she’s already detached.
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In the past, Rodriguez elevated her precise brand of electro-pop to the proverbial moon with a degree of specificity, taking a slightly skewed approach to styles that another pop diva might tackle head-on. But these songs, meant to convey Rodriguez’s darkest hour, feel like they could be sung by any stock singer in her place. “SYW,” featuring SOPHIE collaborator Cecile Believe, aims to reach the heights of a dance floor, but the hammering, toothless repetition of “say you wanna” during its chorus means the track never quite achieves its potential. Even as they beg for someone to follow them down the crooked path away from disaster, neither vocalist ever makes the plea they repeat sound very convincing.
On the other end of the energetic spectrum, “Machete” slogs over a sludgy synth while Rodriguez assures her suitor that she’s “turning water into wine/and I’ll know that you’ll be thirsting.” Her delivery, however, sounds like it’s threatening to put her to sleep. “Missing Out On” nearly builds to an anxious peak, providing a rare passage of vocal flexing—but then fizzles out before its climax can hit. The lyrical observations only get as deep as the type of tea she wants to make on the stove in her mother’s house once it’s been rebuilt—something of a surface-level image, but one that reaches deeper than the record’s half-hearted, EDM-inflected production.
The album’s heavy premise doesn’t necessarily require Rodriguez to mine the most harrowing details of her family’s loss, and it simultaneously makes sense that she’d lean away from frothy, irreverent bangers for an album recounting this tragedy. Yet it’s disappointing that this record doesn’t reach the same highs as previous Empress Of projects: brimming with her point of view, sharply produced, and delivered with a sticky urgency that no other vocalist could capture. Instead, on Dream House, her voice floats through her own songs as a supporting character, denying us the glimpse of greatness that came with sounds only she could make.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
