The Singles Jukebox

Music with a message?

[Video][Website]
[4.50]

Juana Giaimo: Alessia Cara started her career portraying what she was: a 17-year-old girl who didn’t fit in much here. “Growing Pains” continues the journey of youth, this time revealing the sadness and confusion it holds. However, although this song is about insecurities and realizing that “Ms. Know-It-All” was just a mask, her voice sounds disappointingly too confident. And the song itself is a bit bland — especially the chorus with those empty “hey”s and a synthpop production that is too safe.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: On songs like “Here” and “Wild Things,” Alessia Cara evoked youth as affect, a means for channeling discontent or defiance. The themes sounded natural for her age, but didn’t depend on it. Cara is still young — she turned 22 a week ago — but growing pains afflict children; even as a metaphor for the uncertain path to maturity, her claim to suffering them sounds infantilizing. “Growing Pains” also demonstrates the less interesting side of early adulthood; youth can sparkle with spirit and sincerity, but it can also be tedious and self-obsessed. Cara’s extremely thorough interrogation of her career uncertainties would have been better kept to close friends and support staff. 
[3]

Matias Taylor: Realizing that young isn’t always fun and grown often means alone is a well-worn topic, but Alessia portrays it with confidence and wit, a careful balance between insight and accessibility. And those “hey hey hey”s, in all their wordless glory, blare in as an antidote to the overthinking and self-doubt typical of a precocious mind.
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: Nakedness and honesty are admirable qualities, but laying these issues bare can get a pop song only so far. “Growing Pains” isn’t the brightest mood to inhabit, but it also lacks any hooks to make the experience worthwhile. It’s almost anti-chorus, with Cara rushing to get back to the heady verses, and the tweet draft of a bridge doesn’t entertain the idea that there’s something to get back to.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: As someone with sympathy for Alessia Cara’s earnest, occasionally grating self-importance, “Growing Pains” isn’t objectionable off the rip for me. But somewhere along the line she decided to up the influence of Lorde but without the ambition — or rather, with the ambition in less capable hands. Pop & Oak have really lost the plot here, distorting her flattest vocals into robotic farts, providing absurd “stadium smash hip-hop beats” and letting Cara’s songs just sort of meander in ways that sound less conversational than indecipherable. Making Alessia Cara sound unfocused and hazy when she’s spent so much time pushing against that is a real betrayal of her better qualities.
[2]

Alfred Soto: “A short leash and a short fuse don’t match” is an aphorism for our times, but the generic electropop is a straitjacket around Alessia Cara, whose emotional range is limited anyway.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Alessia Cara, more than anyone else in pop, seems genuine and grounded, and on “Growing Pains” she navigates the dark night of the Gen-Z soul with the stream-of-consciousness delivery of Julia Michaels and the earnestness of someone still unscathed by industry bullshit. But bullshit there regardless is — specifically, the misguided belief that “genuine” and “grounded” mean bland, or “music with a message” loses its message unless set to bland adult contemporary. (The video, sort of middle-grade-series “Bad Romance,” is illustrative.) A short fuse doesn’t match a waterlogged arrangement either.
[3]

Ian Mathers: I was really hoping that Portishead sample wasn’t as load-bearing as I suspected it might have been.
[6]