Star-Crossed
| Kacey Musgraves
Star-Crossed
Star-Crossed is the fifth studio album by American singer Kacey Musgraves. It was released on September 10, 2021, by MCA Nashville and Interscope Records. Musgraves co-wrote and co-produced the album with American musicians Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian, with whom she collaborated on her fourth studio album, Golden Hour (2018), as well. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Rolling Stone
The millennial country hero’s fifth album grapples with breaking up and growing up.
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Pitchforks
Kacey Musgraves’ chronicle of marriage and divorce looks to the stars but takes pains to stay grounded. Writing in the plain language of someone desperate to be understood, she sounds alternately vulnerable and triumphant.
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Treblezine
star-crossed further establishes Kacey Musgraves as a formidable presence in the pop universe without dulling her edges as an artist or erasing the fact that her complexity as a songwriter and performer is rooted in her country music origins. It does not mimic the seeming effortlessness and near-perfection of Golden Hour, because the story this album tells wouldn’t be right for that sound or atmosphere. Instead, star-crossed is incontrovertible evidence of Musgraves’ ambition, which could be far more boundless than even this album’s bold leap suggests.
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The Guardian
The bliss of Musgraves’ Grammy-winning Golden Hour sours on this follow-up, with a breakup narrative that is a little too tidy.
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Popmatters
On Star-Crossed, Kacey Musgraves continues to make use of her signature wounded wit to expose the hypocrisy that often lies within heteronormative gender roles.
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Slate Magazine
Star-Crossed has its rough spots, but so does the end of a marriage.
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Vinyl Chapters
Kacey Musgraves continues to beautifully evolve as an artist on her fifth studio album, Star-Crossed.
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Uproxx
Kacey Musgraves’ Divorce Album ‘Star-Crossed’ Sounds Like Another Classic.
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The Line of Best Fit
Kacey Musgraves reckons with life’s hurt and becomes an icon on star-crossed.
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Slant Magazine
Kacey Musgraves’s Star-Crossed Is Effortlessly Eclectic and Surprisingly Direct.
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Commedia
The whole album is a wonderful piece of work. She is clear about her story and the sound is amazing. She outdoes herself from her 2018 Grammy winning album, “Golden Hour.”
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Clash Magazine
This is heart on sleeve storytelling, but towards the end of the journey you sense our protagonist is doing a little better now. As she should - it’s the start of a seminal new era.
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NME
a powerfully honest depiction of heartbreak.
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AV Club
Musgraves reminds us and herself that as the sunset moves from the golden hour to dusk, the moment’s radiants color may fade, but a new day pulls closer.
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inews
Kacey Musgraves follows her Grammy-winning ‘Golden Hour’ with a divorce album that’s desperately sad, but finds hope and tenderness, too.
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Highway Queens
Kacey has always had a glamorous cool factor to her image, a willingness to push boundaries and bring in new ideas while at the same time appearing not to be trying as hard as some of her contemporaries. None of that has changed. star-crossed still has some of those beautiful moments which only a voice like hers can deliver. For me the only thing that’s lacking here is the self-deprecating humour and camp country fun of her previous albums.
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Stereoboard
There are moments to enjoy on ‘Star-Crossed’—Cherry Blossom with its charming aesthetic and the short and sweet Simple Times, for example. Largely, though, the album stands as a rare misfire from a musician who can evidently do better.
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The Times
Surprisingly catchy record about her break-up.
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The Needle Drop
Star-Crossed is a mess all the way up to its mastering.
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The Young Folks
The maturity and class displayed on star-crossed is a pleasant surprise for a breakup album as Musgraves honors the love of the man she was once in love with, reminiscing on the brighter memories as heartily as she stews over the darker ones. It’s a simple yet complex record where most of the songs unexpectedly click into place with ease given the music’s overarching themes.
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EW
Recorded in the wake of her divorce, the singer's new album feels like both the essence of country music (love hurts, life is hard) and an extremely 2021 refraction of it.
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Paste Magazine
The pop-country mastermind swaps sunlight for starlight in her exposé of estrangement, divorce and healing.
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Saving Country Music
And now we must consider Kacey Musgraves a pop artist. And with the performance on Star-Crossed, Kacey Musgraves very well might find herself as a small fish in a very big sea. Some country purists will applaud this development of Musgraves moving on, and profess Kacey was never country. But whether it was the songwriting of her breakout single “Merry Go ‘Round,” or the kitsch of her first couple of records that made country music cool to many, Kacey Musgraves was a critically important artist. But country or not, there’s just not much critically important to Star-Crossed.
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Esquire
The singer's fifth album invites listeners into the mess, a surprisingly delightful place.
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The Daily Nexus
However, through her processing of a universal hardship, “star-crossed” cements her place as one of the smartest and emotive writers of our time.
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Sputnik Music
The maturity and class displayed here is a pleasant surprise (which has nothing to do with Musgraves, and everything to do with divorce/breakup album stereotypes), and the experience is unexpectedly serene given the music's content and overarching themes, but otherwise star-crossed is merely nice: a lukewarm batch of songs eager to saturate backgrounds rather than absorb your full attention.
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musicOMH
While this may not always hit the same glorious heights of Golden Hour, it makes for a fine companion record, and is a reminder that, as smooth and effortless the journey may seem, some major bumps in the road always lie ahead. It’s not quite her Blood On The Tracks, but it’s a record that’s similarly compelling to listen to.
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The Butler Collegian
It’s getting to be more poppy, a bit more mainstream and not made for country [radio]. I feel like she’s having her Taylor Swift moment, with her shifting genres. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I don’t think she’s abandoning country in favor of something else. It feels like she’s evolving.
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The Alternative
Star-crossed may disappoint fans who wanted another Golden Hour, but it’s the natural next step for an artist who reads as entirely done with the world of country’s archaic tradition and muffled misogyny. We’re shown Kacey The Popstar here, and she’s a force to be reckoned with. There’s a line in “what doesn’t kill me” that you’re going to see in Instagram captions for weeks – “my golden hour faded black.” Musgraves sums it all up there. The serenity she once felt was replaced by something new, something more complicated. Fortunately, black suits her.
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Under the Radar Magazine
Musgraves will likely survive star-crossed and move forward, but like her marriage to Kelly, damage was sustained in the process. Nothing a little paint and powder can’t fix for someone early in their career, and life for that matter. That her producers didn’t better guide her is a little less forgivable, but considering the album is accompanied by a film of equal length, it’s not exactly clear who was calling the shots here. Ultimately, star-crossed is the sound of an artist trying desperately to change lanes without the aid of mirrors or blind spot detection.
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The Indiependent
star-crossed overflows with the charm present in all the great romance films, before crashing back to the realities of heartbreak in the real world. Most importantly, Kacey understands that the latter isn’t always such a bad thing, reminding listeners and herself that “There is a light at the end of the tunnel”.
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DIY Magazine
Far from spinning distant, third-person tales, each track feels incredibly personal.
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Gigwise
Devastatingly beautiful when it gets it right.
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Valley Magazine
Overall, “Star-Crossed” is an executed narrative about a relationship’s gradual demise. Many minor reminiscences, both happy and sad, are interwoven throughout the story in a way that audiences can identify with. Musgraves’ vulnerability shines through in a way that will heartbreakingly speak to her listeners for years to come.
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The Cowl
It is hard to believe that the relationship that inspired “Butterflies” and “Golden Hour” could ever have come to an end, but Musgraves has used her pain to inspire new and beautifully tragic songs to explain why it is over. Unlike other break-up albums filled with anger and spitefulness, star-crossed is more of a reflection of how desperately she tried to make her marriage work, but in the end, she and her husband just could not salvage it.
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Country Universe
star-crossed is a divorce album without meaningful stakes or a clearly defined villain – Gaslighter, this is not. So it works best when aiming lower, realizing that adulthood kinda sucks (“Simpler Times”) and wrestling with deleting old photos from a phone (“Camera Roll.”) I’m hopeful that this is a temporary resting point before Kacey gets her groove back.
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891 The Point
Overall, star-crossed is a solid record and will go down as an essential divorce album that many will be able to add to their heartbreak playlists. When you have the pressure to follow up the album that put you on the public map, it is hard to find that right sound. Musgraves does this exactly right.
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The Daily Nebraskan
Kacey Musgraves proves powerful storytelling abilities in new album.
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Ben's Beat
Ultimately, star-crossed feels like an album where the aspect of perfectionism was taken away in favour of Musgraves spilling her raw thoughts about the surprising turn her life has taken, allowing her to experiment with her songwriting – as she says on “justified,” she’s more than earned some time to process this whole thing. Until she returns with more of what she does best, this is still a strong, necessary chapter in her story.
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Thomas Bleach
The psychedelic influenced country song sits in a unique Tame Impala crossover world compared to what you usually expect from her. Cinematically inclined, it begins very minimalistic and gradually builds with buzzing synths and angelic harmonies. It really does feel like an intro song instead of a single as it’s all about setting context to allow her to tell her story in full as this is an album that will need (and deserves) to be experienced from start to finish.
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The Reflector
This album might need a couple of listens to fully enjoy it. However, this album is honest and heartbreaking, the way Musgraves allowed herself to be vulnerable through her music is beautiful and definitely worth a listen.
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The Forty-Five
What ‘Star-Crossed’ does best is add a tinge of darkness to ‘Golden Hour’, an album that’s now irrevocably changed, awarded a second, shadier life. And in turn, some gold finds its way to Musgraves’ new, post-divorce world. At the end of ‘Camera Roll’, the pain of old photos gives way to gratitude: “anyway, thanks for all the nights and the days, and everything that you gave, I’ll never erase it.” It’s these more positive moments that work best, poised like butterflies beneath a looming net. Normally art fares better with a little heartache. Kacey Musgraves might’ve just proven that wrong, upending yet another country tradition.
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