“I don’t acknowledge time,” Mariah Carey declares early on in her new album, Here for It All. Within her mythos, this line has become almost a mantra—one of those oft-cited quirks that orbit her celebrity. Alongside her signature “dahling” and insistence on being photographed from her right side, Carey’s aversion to time has long been part of her diva charm. It’s easy to see why she’d resist the clock. For one thing, it excuses any tardiness. More profoundly, time has never been kind to women in pop: their longevity is often met with indifference, their brilliance diminished as they age out of the charts. If she can’t stop time’s passage, Carey can at least reject its authority.
But on Here for It All, time makes its presence felt—most clearly in her voice. Once a peerless instrument that seemed capable of gliding effortlessly through the heavens, Carey’s voice now bears the marks of its journey. Across the record, it’s rougher, huskier, and sometimes flirts with an alternate key. The immaculate elasticity that once defined her range occasionally falters. Yet this doesn’t feel like neglect. Carey’s perfectionism has never allowed for half-measures. Rather, it’s a deliberate choice—a portrait of an artist unafraid to sound her age. When her voice cracks or grates, it adds texture and truth. Her rendition of Paul McCartney and Wings’ “My Love” replaces the original’s soft sentimentality with something tougher, more lived-in. It’s as if Carey has decided that realism is the most radical kind of glamour she can offer now.
Elsewhere, Here for It All delivers what listeners expect from her: finely sculpted melodies and plush arrangements that straddle pop, R&B, and soul. The album’s full-band feel—shaped in part by collaborators Anderson .Paak and Daniel Moore II—brings warmth and looseness to the project. Songs like the island-tinged single “Sugar Sweet,” the sleek, bass-heavy “Mi,” and the slyly venomous “Confetti and Champagne” blend pop sheen with emotional bite. The latter’s chorus—“Cheers cheers cheers cheers cheers/To me, not you, just me”—is pure Mariah, equal parts petty and triumphant, destined to soundtrack countless TikToks.
Beneath the gloss, however, runs a seam of bitterness. Many of these tracks hum with frustration or heartbreak. The Chi-Lites-inspired shimmer of “Play This Song” hides barbed lyrics aimed at an estranged lover (“Listen by yourself, please listen by your damn self”). “I Won’t Allow It,” a disco-driven hybrid of Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” and Carey’s own “Make It Happen,” skewers an ex’s vanity with biting humor: “So whatcha gonna do when your face all broke… Should have been more proactive.” Elsewhere, “Jesus I Do,” featuring the Clark Sisters, channels gospel ecstasy, while the minimalist “Nothing Is Impossible” reaches for quiet uplift. Even so, Here for It All often sounds like a record made by someone reckoning with disappointment, not escaping it. Whether this melancholy stems from her 2023 breakup with Bryan Tanaka or simply a lifetime in the public eye, Carey doesn’t say. “We were just doing a couple songs here and there,” she told Big Boy’s Neighborhood, “and then it just became like, ‘OK, this might as well be a project.’” The casual phrasing belies the precision of the end result.
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Like 2018’s Caution, this album carries an effortless looseness, but the seven-year gap between releases lends it extra gravity. In the context of her monumental career, Here for It All is a minor entry—but a fascinating one. It’s smaller in scale but larger in personality, revealing the woman behind the myth. And if not every song lands—lead single “Type Dangerous” falters in its hook—the overall charm remains undeniable. Carey’s chemistry with .Paak yields playful moments, like the pre-chorus of “In Your Feelings,” where she stretches out a line (“I think you might be getting a little bit tooooo…”) before tumbling into a breezy punchline (“…in your feelings!”). It’s self-aware, theatrical, and perfectly her.
Throughout the album, Carey continues to polish her persona with knowing wit. “You couldn’t walk a mile in my shoes/’Cause they hurt like hell,” she teases on “Mi.” The pun on her nickname, Mimi, folds her private and public selves into one: “I don’t care about much if it ain’t about mi.” It’s a line that captures her duality—part unreachable diva, part everyday woman flexing for her followers. Her lyrics are still rich with high diction and melodrama—words like “harrowing,” “gruesome,” and “diligently” pop up casually—but her humor keeps it grounded. The title track, meanwhile, distills everything that makes Here for It All so compelling. Over spare piano chords, she sings with unguarded tenderness: “The glory, the shakes, and withdrawals/Even when you bounce off the walls/Baby I’m here for it all.” Then, with a wink and a gasp, she delivers a line both startling and sincere: “Here for the clouds in your eyes/A kiss where the sun never shines.” It’s campy, intimate, and deeply human all at once.
By the end of Here for It All, Carey seems to be asking something of her listeners: to accept her in full—the cracks, the bravado, the contradictions. For all her talk of not acknowledging time, the album is defined by it: how it ages the voice, refines the art, and strips away pretense. In that sense, Carey has never sounded more real, or more herself.
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