Tucker Pillsbury sure looks like a pop star. He’s got the movie-star good looks, a collection of trendy tattoos, and an eccentric Fashion Week wardrobe. The 27-year-old Maine native nearly landed a role in HBO’s Euphoria but was passed up for Dominic Fike, another suave, tattooed singer. Like Fike, Pillsbury has struggled to channel his on-camera charisma into compelling music. Since 2017, he’s released room-temperature pop as Role Model, portraying himself as a sweet-natured yet mentally tortured heartbreaker. He’s clearly inspired by alt-pop heroes Frank Ocean and BROCKHAMPTON, but his music mostly resembles Shawn Mendes if Mendes were a mediocre singer. “I want something on the radio,” Pillsbury told GQ in 2022. Shuffle through his catalog and you’ll hear an artist desperately searching for a star-making moment.
Pillsbury’s second album, Kansas Anymore, is a step in the right direction. It’s a compact, confident, and well-produced pop-rock record about breaking up with one of Gen Z’s most influential stars, Emma Chamberlain, who has served as Pillsbury’s muse two records in a row. Rx, his 2022 full-length debut, was a frictionless and frequently excruciating collection of lyrically bland, Imagine Dragons-indebted love songs. While Kansas Anymore has shortcomings—cutesy choruses, unadventurous melodies, middling vocal performances—its personality and songcraft are more mature and palatable than any of Pillsbury’s past work.
Though it makes a few bids for radio singles, Kansas Anymore seems less concerned with landing a hit than it does building a sturdy home to hang out in. Pillsbury and executive producer Noah Conrad draw from a folk-pop playbook of Fleetwood Mac and Kacey Musgraves to pen a selection of sunny, sentimental songs. “Look at That Woman” is pleasantly arranged with bright acoustics, slide guitar, and grand piano, and Pillsbury maneuvers well within his vocal range, cruising through plainspoken verses before stretching into a faint falsetto hook. In slower moments, like on the beautifully raw “Slut Era Interlude” or the silky Lizzy McAlpine duet “So Far Gone,” he winds his way into genuinely moving melodies; when he croons “I don’t want you but I want you to spend the night,” it sounds like he really feels what he’s singing. It’s a first for Pillsbury: He elicits a sincere emotional reaction, and he’s not playacting.
There is definitely some playacting on this record, though. Pillsbury’s stomp-clap pivot feels slightly forced considering the recent success of artists like Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan. (“The Dinner” is a full-on Kahan rip—or Mumford & Sons, blame whoever you want.) Still, the role of cowboy-hatted songwriter suits Pillsbury better than the swaggering bad boy character he sought to cultivate on Rx, where he sang “I’d die for my bitch” with the conviction of a boy-band backup. In this softer, more contemplative mode, he’s an occasionally deft writer: “If I was younger, I’d take a downer/Lay on the carpet, pills on the counter/If I was lonely, I’d call up Rachel/Be there in twenty, jeans at her ankles,” he sings on “Slipfast.” He’s still prone to a weak chorus—the punchline on “Superglue” is a wincer—but Kansas Anymore proves Pillsbury to be a sensitive and competent songwriter, even when the G-C-D-major chords and verse-chorus archetypes wear thin.
Despite some biting moments, the album-wide breakup narrative also loses intrigue. Pillsbury admits to masochistically reveling in disillusion, embracing “the feeling of letting it all burn down.” But voyeurs looking to get a documentarian view into his and Chamberlain’s private lives—and the album’s marketing certainly alludes to this possibility—will be disappointed. For all Pillsbury’s claims that he’s a “scumbag,” he’s quick to a cliché, and even quicker to a cheery silver lining. He wants what’s right for her; he tried his best; maybe they’re still meant to be? Without show-stopping talent or anything that truly differentiates him from the gaggle of guys who hope to blow up like Zach Bryan, he remains stuck in pop star limbo. He looks the part, but the role may already be filled.
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