Reviews of the album are starting to come in now *.* the first I've seen is from US Weekly, who have given it 3.5 stars out of 4! SLAY :wub:

 

US Weekly

 

Shawn Mendes has grown up in front of the world’s very eyes. After finding fame on YouTube and Vine in the early 2010s, the Ontario native got bigger and bigger with each song he released. He dominated Top 40 radio and streaming services, toured with Taylor Swift (and eventually sold out stadiums on his own), performed at Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday party and scored coveted Grammy nominations. From the outside looking in, it seemed that Mendes had it all — but there was one thing missing: Camila Cabello.

 

On his new album, Wonder (out Friday, December 4), the 22-year-old takes listeners through his journey to falling in love with his “Señorita” collaborator, 23, whom he started dating in 2019 after admittedly crushing on her for years. Along the way, he finds clarity in himself and in his relationship, looking past his struggles with anxiety and egotism toward a brighter future.

 

Wonder starts and ends in very similar ways: acoustic, bare-bones tracks featuring just Mendes’ smooth-as-butter vocals over a piano or a guitar. They have kindred themes too: the haunting opener, simply titled “Intro,” stresses the importance of being oneself, while the Justin Timberlake “Pair of Wings”-esque closer, “Can’t Imagine,” calls for self-love even in times of loneliness and heartbreak.

 

The 12 songs that bridge the gap between beginning and end are the singer-songwriter’s most sonically experimental and ambitious to date. Wonder feels like a cinematic experience rather than just another album on a shelf. It’s tangible evidence that Mendes was born to create music (despite some critics decrying his work — and new Netflix documentary, Shawn Mendes: In Wonder — as uninspired).

 

He toys around with sounds and concepts like never before. Sudden rhythm changes midway through “Song for No One” and “Look Up at the Stars” will surprise listeners, while an industrial and occasionally jarring instrumental fully encompasses “Call My Friends.” He even forays into R&B with a groovy ode to physical touch, “Teach Me How to Love,” and a melodic dedication to Cabello’s hometown of Miami, “305,” the latter of which fills the void that Bruno Mars’ absence from the music industry has left.

 

Mendes does not stray too far from his roots, however. Day-one fans will surely notice similarities between “Higher” and his 2014 stomper “Something Big,” while “Piece of You” has a hypnotizing bass line rivaling that of 2018’s “Particular Taste.”

 

In the end, it all comes back to Cabello. The title track finds Mendes wondering how far their relationship could go and hoping that the former Fifth Harmony member has the same strong feelings for him. “24 Hours” details how the coronavirus quarantine brought them closer, with lyrics like, “It’s a little soon / But I wanna come home to you.” The most extravagant and beautiful love song, though, comes in the form of “Always Been You.” With its grandiose chorus, the standout tackles Mendes’ “scars and insecurities” and honors the evolution of his romance with Cabello. “You’re the only one that my heart keeps coming back to,” he croons.

 

And with an album like Wonder, fans are sure to keep coming back too.

 

Honestly that review alone has me even MORE excited :cheeseblock:

The Independent

 

On his 14-track fourth album, Shawn Mendes is airy, grand, intense and rapturous. It is the sound of a man totally and hopelessly in love

 

Adoration is baked into “Wonder ” from the almost religious-sounding title track as Mendes sings “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by you," to the last song, where, with a voice shaking with emotion, he sings over acoustic guitar: ”I can’t imagine what a world would be without you." The album's cover captures Mendes ecstatic, floating in waves.

 

Though she is mentioned only once — in the liner notes, thanked right after his family — it's not hard to find the source of this ardor: Mendes’ longtime romantic and quarantine partner, singer Camila Cabello Whatever happens to this couple in the future, she has inspired a hopelessly romantic set.

 

“Teach Me How to Love” flirts with ’80s disco (with Anderson .Paak on drums) and “305” (the area code to Cabello's Miami) is a candy-colored piece of '60s doo-wop in which Mendes sings to his lover, “If there’s a door to heaven, baby you’re the key.” The lovers are finding a new home to share in “24 Hours” — “It’s a little soon but I wanna come home to you,” he sings.

 

Mendes' falsetto soars with pure glee atop a pillow of strings on the standout “Look Up at the Stars” (where Mendes sings “the universe is ours” in a Coldplay “Yellow” way) and “Always Been You” is both soaring and triumphant. This is music you’d hear in a mall in heaven.

 

The only tune that veers out of the love zone is Mendes’ duet with Justin Bieber, “Monster,” an outstanding moody banger about how early fame messes with you, sung by a rising heartthrob singer-songwriter and an established one.

 

In-demand producer Kid Harpoon, who took Harry Stiles to new heights on “Fine Line,” is all over this gooey album. There's little of the urgency Mendes has shown before — no “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back” or ”In My Blood" — and “Wonder” is sometimes hard to take during extended plays — especially its pointless intro — but to find fault with it is to find fault with love itself.

 

Very good review from them :o

Another great review from Entertainment Weekly! :wub:

 

Entertainment Weekly

 

If pop idol-dom had a platonic ideal, it might look a lot like Shawn Mendes: dreamy, dimpled, dulcet- voiced. He’s like a sweeter Justin Bieber, minus the pesky personal issues and neck tattoos; Ed Sheeran’s strummy sincerity repoured into 74 inches of clean Canadian marble.

 

Over the past half-dozen years, the Toronto-bred singer has also steadily, almost stealthily, managed to amass a truly startling set of numbers — more than 20 million albums and 175 million singles sold; some 50 billion song streams, with over 8 billion music-video views on YouTube alone. In 2018, Time magazine named him to its 100 Most Influential People list alongside astrophysicists, tech moguls, and Kim Jong Un; his concerts, when those were a thing that still existed beyond a Zoom lens, briskly sold out stadiums.

 

And yet it can also be easy to feel like we hardly know Mendes at all: In a world of constant unmitigated access, his greatest scandals to date have been a handful of racially insensitive tweets unearthed from his early teen years (he promptly apologized) and a particular way of kissing girlfriend Camila Cabello that some fans dubbed “like fish.” (Kids! just let them do as the guppies do.)

 

Accordingly, even though Wonder is his fourth studio album, it often feels like the sound of an artist still discovering himself in real time — the pleasant but vaguely unplaceable style of previous hits like “Treat You Better” and “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back” now gilded with swirling psychedelic pomp (on the expansive title track), ring-my-bell disco (“Teach Me How to Love”), and slinky R&B (“Piece of You”).

 

“Call My Friends” blooms from its pensive piano intro into a kind of candied glam-rock stomper, a YOLO ode to wasted youth. Gossamer confection “Dream” yields to the plucked strings and spacious ’60s soul of “Song for No One.” At 22, Mendes is freer, maybe, to express his fondness for sexual tension and cocktails and reflect on the vagaries of early fame. Yet even those allusions tend toward the unfailingly polite. (You can take the boy out of Canada, etcetera.)

 

“You put me on a pedestal and tell me I'm the best/Raise me up into the sky until I'm short of breath,” he coos on “Monster” — a duet, no less, with his fellow Ottowan and traveler in Gen-Z existentialism Bieber — “But what if I, what if I trip/What if I, what if I fall?” He very well may one day, and even get a good record out of it. But for now the world, and all that wonder, are still his to lose. Grade: B+

Most excited for 305 from those!

Not even going to bother posting the review The Guardian has published because clearly the idiot that wrote it doesn't like Shawn at all, but his research is shocking and he's made so many incorrect statements about Shawn's career. :ph34r:

Critic reviews don't mean much to me but nonetheless it's nice to see some great press for Shawn :heart: