As an album I actually quite like it . A really nice mix of songs & for me it's something I would actually listen to . It's very tongue & cheek & has a very Under The Radar vibe to it which I really love. I don't think the album is meant to be taken too seriously , I love the cheeky lyrics & cannot wait to get the physical album so I can check out the CD album booklet.

what would it mean 'not taking too seriously', Tess. I mean I understand what it means, but not linked to the album

Nice album launch in London ..

Robbie Williams has surprised fans by releasing his new album BRITPOP three weeks earlier than planned.

The unexpected drop came in the early hours of Friday morning, with the album artwork projected onto several famous London landmarks to mark the launch.

Originally due to be released in October, BRITPOP was pushed back to February, to avoid a clash with Taylor Swift's Life Of A Showgirl, with Robbie admitting that he 'couldn't compete' with the American star.'

The unexpected drop came in the early hours of Friday morning, with the album artwork projected onto several famous London landmarks to mark the launch

Source Robbie Williams surprises fans as he releases new album BRITPOP three weeks early and lights up London landmarks to celebrate launch | Daily Mail Online

Robbie Williams' Britpop: A Morrissey-dissing, gleefully weird triumph

Robbie Williams attempts to record the record he should have made after Take That split up, which is so wrong an exercise that it feels right

Robbie Williams

Jason Hetherington 4/5 ****

“I set out to create the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995. It was the peak of Britpop and a golden age for British Music…”

This is a curious idea for a record, and a curious move by Robbie Williams. Currently, he’s riding as high as he’s ever been, with his usual mainstream mass appeal now bolstered by Gen-Z viewing him as an icon with edge; in a carefully controlled pseudo-‘wild’ antiseptic content agency pop world, a mega-mouthed idiosyncratic funnyman like Robbie seems positively anarchic. But not only does he have that whiteboard wet dream of ‘generational crossover’, but he’s proper pals with alt. music titans like Sleaford Mods and Soft Play, their usual scowls softening at the presence of Robbie’s eccentric hilarity and ex-addict openness.

So why now take people back in time and try to make the album he should have made after he left Take That in 1995?

Why take people back to when he wasn’t cool at all, but a young man steeped in the antiseptic pop world of that era (a pre-social media, when the record industry had a Guantanamo Bay approach to their boy bands)?

What’s to be gained? It sort of feels like a therapy session that’s got out of hand: ‘Tell us again about the time you bleached your hair, went to Glastonbury, got bullied by Oasis and wrote a mediocre first album… why don’t you act it out and see what you would change?’

Any anyway, while his personal difficulties were huge, on record he was massively successful with is first post-Take That record – Angels was number one for eons.

Let it go, Robbie, you won, why bother going back to Britpop?

On the other hand, why not? While he’s recruited Nineties indie legends Chris Martin and Gaz Coombes to play on the album, this turns out not to be some desperate attempt to turn back the clock and recast himself as a cool guy with cool mates. Instead, the concept feels like a bit of a wind-up, and a gleeful chance to wilfully put himself in an awkward situation.

“I’ve made friends with knowing I’m strange/Masochistic but I’m always entertaining/And I know I’ll die but I’ll never leave the stage,” he sings on self-affirming self-awareness centrepiece All My Life

And this entertaining masochism, coupled to a bit of a free and easy approach to the music – very Nineties indie where you don’t want to be seen to try too hard - makes for a uniquely appealing record.

Opener Rocket sets the tone for a set of guitar-heavy songs, with Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi guesting – not particularly Britpop era, but yknow, it’s Tony Iommi, who cares? – helping to give it some Pixies flair as Robbie sets out his chaotic stall with some laugh out loud lines like, “I’m a disgrace and I do deserve it/But look at your face, nobody’s perfect.”

Spies is another guitar anthem that gives a wistful look at young days of staying up all night, while Pretty Face is a nice piece of that bleary-eyed romantic optimism that feels very much from that time when young folk were not put into penury the minute they left education and could enjoy a Hooch or three.

Bite Your Tongue is even more fun, very Wet Leg in its spoken word tangles and bouncing eccentricity, all goofy giggles and as it takes on complicity and lies, “If I’m really really good they let me pick up a mic and if I’m really really good they let me sing what I like,” and American dreams, “Wham bam, ain’t it a scam, Afghanistan and Vietnam.” Later, You pulls a similar trick of heading into alt rock territory before whipping out a Radio One chorus. He just about pulls it off too.

And that’s because this is all done with considerably glee. But not as much glee as the track called Morrissey. A hilariously sarcastic diss song which attempts to get under the skin, in every sense, of the former Smiths singer. Williams plays the part of a stalker who believes that the grumpy Mozza with his ‘divisive’ views just needs a big hug: “Come here, let me hold you, for the rest of your life/ Morrissey, it’s just you and me.”

The kicker is that Williams wrote the song with Gary Barlow… you can practically see Morrissey turning puce at the very thought.

Britpop as a record just very him, and that him feels very of the moment. Once Williams’ egotism could be grating as it needed constant affirmation, but actually he was ahead of his time, considering the monstrous personalities social media is now breeding. And he suddenly seems positively mature in his egotism where it has become self-sustaining rather than desperately needing approval. Quite simply, he is comfortable in his weirdness now and wears it well. As with his recent move into art – art which makes you want to laugh as its top priority - he follows his own impulsive path, as if he’s compelled by his own demons to do the most raw and exposing thing possible, but has grown to be amused by this tendency and isn’t going to let it ruin his, or anyone else’s fun. He leans in to himself.

So on All My Life – just a straight up big ballad about himself - you find him saying, “You tell me I’m addicted to the light, maybe you’re not wrong but all my life I’ve chasing visions at the edge of my mind,” before shrugging, “I’m alright, even if it’s just another beautiful lie.”

Look this is not going to satisfy fans of Sunn O))) but the record reveals just why people like Williams. He’s raw and vulnerable and funny, quite simply, and very British in that way, far away from the American pop stars who are all bulletproof brand-bots. Williams still feels like the best pub singer of all time, which is not the criticism. Isn’t this the appeal of any footballer or comedian in this country? That they’re like one of your mates who’s fluked it.

The conceit of the record kind of slips away after a while, with Human – the one with Chris Martin on – being a message sent back from the future to encourage people to enjoy themselves before some dystopia ahead. And really this is not really about righting any wrongs of the past, to understand what happened, and fantasise what it would have been like if he’d actually joined Supergrass in ’95. It feels like a trip back in time that concludes he doesn’t actually give much of a shit about it.

In fact the record reaches a climax with a song called It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working. This is more of a 60s orchestral ballad – “The look of love becomes the beast of burden” etc. – which comes off like sub-Scott Walker but is actually closer to Serge Gainsbourg. In fact, isn’t that what Robbie Williams is? Britain’s Serge Gainsbourg, a loveable ‘wrong ‘un’, an eccentric who says something about our national identity. Britpop was always a delusionary thing, one big nothing, a media term which every single band from that era disowned. Well, actually it was Williams who was closest to it then and he’s grabbed it properly for himself now. He embodies Britpop, a pop star who represents the true f***ed-up, weirdo, funny, odd, mongrel, friendly, slightly crap but always entertaining Britain. As he puts it: “A wise once said use your delusions/I’d like to point out that man was me.’ Robbie for PM anyone?

Robbie Williams' Britpop: A Morrissey-dissing, gleefully weird triumph | The Standard

A record that plays to Robbie's strengths, and contains some of the best song-writing of his career...

ClashMusic

8/10

Words: Gareth James

Not only has it been some time since the last ‘normal’ studio album from Robbie Williams, but it has also been quite a while since the campaign began for this one. ‘Rocket’ was released in May of last year ahead of a tour that bore this record’s branding but only featured one of its songs while still on these shores. In total, four singles have emerged, each capturing a different version of our star and, therefore, somewhat confusingly mixing the messages around this being a concept album of sorts.

Speaking to Radio 2’s Scott Mills recently, he described the process as considering “what album would I now write if I’ve just left Take That, knowing what I now know, what would that album sound like? So, it’s 1997, let’s do this again.”

And it’s definitely that year in focus for the most Oasis-aping track here, ‘All My Life’, which suggests Williams is more than a little fond of ‘Be Here Now’. The sweeping, sneering chorus is very, very Liam, while the verses share plenty of DNA with the ‘Better Man’ soundtrack single ‘Forbidden Road’. The bridge is anthemic-by-numbers but, let’s be fair, it’s what he does so dependably well. After a first listen, it’s gently derivative but pleasant enough, naggingly familiar by play three and soon thereafter it feels like it’s always been there, just waiting for a Halifax advert to soundtrack. 

It’s a trick he pulls off on much of the record. Of those advance singles, ‘Pretty Face’ channels early Rob to perfection and the chorus is a gigantic earworm.

Opener ‘Rocket’ leant into the presence of Tony Iommi and Glenn Hughes to offer something a little harder, but it was so catchy it also appears here in its alternative incarnation as a delicate acoustic number, ‘Pocket Rocket’ at the album’s close. ‘Human’ is a synthy electro-plodder featuring Jesse & Joy with an eventual hook that makes up for faintly lumpen lyrics, but ‘Spies’ is one of his very best. Obviously brilliant when released in July, its unashamed bluster and posturing is backed up with all the melody. Williams has admitted that the chorus has more than a little deference to ‘Champagne Supernova’ and the whole thing feels like the track around which the whole ‘Britpop’ conceit was formed. 

Things veer from the plan elsewhere. ‘Cocky’, featuring Gaz Coombes, channels Supergrass’ drab ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’ bloated glam era rather than the lively early euphoria that would surely be a better fit for Robbie. ‘Bite Your Tongue’ feels more like the song he would have made for ‘Rudebox’ if he’d known what he knows now, revisiting his, er, distinctive rapping style and stapling it to a refrain that feels like the one-off single from one of those Britpop supergroups that stretched the definition of the word ‘supergroup’ to breaking point.

A cut and shut of spat out verses that veer dangerously close to Kasabian territory and a route one melodic chorus that would fit right onto ‘I’ve Been Expecting You’, ‘You’ has the air of a slow grower prone to being dismissed in early listens. However, the shimmering disco pop of ‘Reality Killed The Video Star’ is evoked on ‘Morrissey’, a song written from the perspective of a stalker who thinks he’s misunderstood. It’s a glorious listen, co-written with Gary Barlow, that pivots around the repeated singing of The Smiths’ frontman’s name as if stifling a sneeze. Oddly effective. 

Rehashed ‘Rocket’ aside, the album concludes with the unashamedly Sixties orchestral bombast of ‘It’s Ok Until The Drugs Stop Working’. There’s a touch of The Walker Brothers, a hint of Phil Spector and a momentum that feels truly triumphant. It’s an approach he faintly hinted at in the more upbeat flickers of previous swing experiments, but the euphoric bombast of orchestrated indie – via the Wiener Symphoniker, no less – is a sound that plays to Williams’ strengths. 

‘Britpop’ is a record that hops about far more than its title would suggest and finds the artist in tremendous form. His live shows are currently as good as they’ve ever been and this is a tight, polished collection that pitches him right back into the heart of the mainstream. Whatever the latest trickery with release date changes to ensure the breaking of The Beatles’ chart record and the endless physical editions, this is an album that doesn’t really need any artificial bluster to draw attention. The songs are more than good enough. 

Robbie Williams – Britpop | Reviews | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews

Source Instagram

Robbie Williams ‘Britpop’ review: A rollicking love letter to the 90s

On his thirteenth album, Robbie Williams sounds like he's having the most fun he's had in years.

4/5

By Nick Reilly

Robbie Williams (Picture: Jason Hetherington)

By Robbie Williams’ own admission, his 13th studio album sees the national institution and now firmly mellowed hellraiser offer up the sound he wishes he had released upon notoriously leaving Take That in 1995. He’s bigged up the fact that guitar god Tony Iommi makes an explosive cameo on the lead single ‘Rocket’, while claiming it to be “raw – there are more guitars and it’s even more upbeat and anthemic than usual.”

All of this is true, and the result is a record which sees Robbie sounding more liberated and delivering some of his best songs in years. It’s unrepentantly mad, as illustrated by the swirling guitars on ‘Rocket’, but this constant sense of unpredictability is a strength. Here’s Robbie leaning into what he’s always done best: not giving a f*** and dancing to the beat of his own drum.

On ‘Spies’, he offers a swaggering, guitar-driven anthem that shares sonic DNA with fan-favourite ‘Monsoon’, but it touchingly comes from the perspec-tive of this zen family man reflecting on a misspent youth. “We used to stay up all night / Thinking we were all spies / Praying that tomorrow won’t come,” comes Robbie’s salvo on the chorus.

Elsewhere, the bolshy edge of ‘Cocky’ sees him boast that “you get to talk to Jesus, I get to talk to God” and – funnily enough – offers a bold guitar line which doesn’t sound a million miles away from Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’. He’s yet to confirm if he’s started a war of words with the 80s icons, but it’s something we’d certainly be here for.

If you thought that was weird, you haven’t heard anything until encountering ‘Morrissey’, which sees Robbie team up with old pal/sparring partner Gary Barlow for a song written from the perspective of someone who is “completely obsessed and in love” with The Smiths icon, so takes to stalking him. It’s ironic, then, that this maddest of premises actually turns out to be one of the record’s best songs – a glittering synth pop banger indebted to Erasure.

And by the time things wrap up with ‘Bite Your Tongue’ (let’s conveniently ignore ‘Desire’, the misfiring FIFA anthem which closes the record), Robbie’s talk of guitars and anthems has largely rung true. It’s unrepentantly bonkers and will do little to win over his detractors, but who cares when the rest of us are having this much fun? NICK REILLY

Robbie Williams 'Britpop' review: A rollicking love letter to the 90s

4 hours ago, elisabeth1974 said:

what would it mean 'not taking too seriously', Tess. I mean I understand what it means, but not linked to the album

As in terms of mood, fun , not serious ..

BRITPOP - ALBUM REVIEW

Today Robbie Williams released his latest album. A throwback to his sound of the late '90s and early '00s when he had big hits like Angels, Feel, Let Me Entertain You and many more. For this new album he collaborated with Tony Iommi and he even wrote a song about The Smiths vocalist Morrissey. What does this new album sound like?

Source https://www.youtube.com/@top5records796

Edited January 16Jan 16 by Sydney11

It only seems to be available on download. HMV still has it down as 6th February. Only way to get the CD is from Robbie’s store

Edited January 17Jan 17 by Hadji

Loving all these brilliant reviews! That must be gratifying when he's waited so long to release it.

Will be listening to it tomorrow ❤️

I wonder if Robbie will go number 1 next week seeing as physicals are only available from his website for now?

I think only on a chart week of February 6th, not now.

Label: Columbia
Released: 16th January 2026

The most Robbie thing about ‘BRITPOP’ is that it’s simultaneously both an ego project and a pop-up confession booth. Even when he’s strutting about like a primetime version of himself, you can hear the little internal narrator tugging his sleeve, going, ‘Mate, are you sure?’ Big choruses, “everyone sing” contours, but also a running current of that unique flavour of sincerity that arrives dressed as banter.

‘Rocket’, for example, comes in like it’s late for its own headline slot, Tommy Iommi’s presence less “guest spot” than “stamp of approval”. It’s Robbie trying to muscle his way into the lineage of proper stadium rock. He’s attempting to turn Britpop into a vehicle for immortality. Both ridiculous and, in his hands, weirdly plausible.

Where the record works best is when it commits to being a swaggering rush without over-explaining itself. ‘Spies’ sounds like a band trying to play faster than their own competence. ‘Pretty Face’ makes Robbie reject the solo pop monolith as the leader of a fictional group, obsessed with getting the best camera angle, while ‘Cocky’ is a stomper that understands the power of being a bit of a twat when you’ve earned the right to be. It’s all as you expect, and that’s absolutely fine.

And yet, the obvious criticisms land too, because ‘BRITPOP’ is sometimes so busy signalling its references that it risks becoming a spot-the-influence game. When it’s great, it feels like Robbie metabolising the era into his own language. When it’s weaker, it can feel like he’s borrowing someone else’s voice, then taking it back to the shop once done.

The most interesting tension is that Robbie is not a Britpop frontman. Sure, he’s flirted with the aesthetic from his very first solo steps, clad in three stripes with bleached hair and a lager in both hands. But at heart, he’s a pop star who learned to survive by turning personality into architecture. Britpop is meant to look effortless even when it’s engineered, even if the facade is so thin it’s transparent. Robbie’s default setting is engineered, and he’s proud of it. That’s why the album’s best moments aren’t the ones where he disappears into the sound, but the ones where he bends it around his own self-mythology.

‘Morrissey’ is a perfect example. On paper, it’s an eyebrow-raiser, if only because it’s titled after a man who has turned out to be a birrova plonker in a way Robbie hopefully never could. In practice, it’s a projection, a pop star seeking a funhouse reflection of outsiderdom, mischief, persecution, and self-created legend. The Barlow link (he’s a co-writer and backing vocalist, ‘FYI’) adds another layer, too, because it quietly drags Robbie’s own history back into the frame. Even when he’s wearing Britpop drag, he can’t resist writing the subtext large. His life thru a lens, if you will.

The ballads are where ‘BRITPOP’ risks losing momentum. ‘Human’ is positioned as the big emotional exhale, and it’s not that it’s bad – it’s that the record’s whole appeal is its forward motion. Slow it down, and you start noticing the joins.

Then there’s the closer. The album effectively bookends itself, ‘Pocket Rocket’ arriving as a tender reprise, softening the whole experience into something approaching a resolution. It’s a smart move. It reframes the project not as “look what I can do” but “this is what I wanted”, turning the grand gesture into something disarmingly human by the end.

Will ‘BRITPOP’ be remembered as a major late-career statement? Probably not. But that’s not quite the point. This is Robbie Williams doing what he’s always done best: building a world where cringe and ambition can coexist, where the joke and the wound share the same line. It’s messy, it’s self-aware, it’s occasionally a bit too on-the-nose, and it’s often a lot of fun.

A record brought forward like this can feel like a scramble. ‘BRITPOP’ doesn’t. It feels like a man pressing ‘deploy’ because he can’t stand to wait any longer to see if the myth still works. It does. Not perfectly. But more than enough for Rob to keep on being Rob.

Robbie Williams - BRITPOP - Dork

Pop

Friday, 16 January 2026

Robbie Williams still wishes he was Britpop

On his nostalgic and stunningly predictable new album, the former self-hating boyband member does his best Oasis impression

Kitty Empire Pop Critic

A few years ago, it felt as if Robbie Williams had entered his light entertainment dotage. He was a judge in 2018 on The X Factor; he started making Christmas albums and releasing reworked compilations of his old hits. He lived in LA, where the burden of his fame was somewhat lesser than in the UK.

He had clearly done some work on himself: his redemption arc – from Take That bad boy via Knebworth-filling household name to sober, well-adjusted father of four – was complete. The only thing he didn’t have was a podcast wryly interviewing fellow slebs about their supplements regime.

But fame clearly remains one of the harder habits to kick. Of late, Williams’s story has been revisited first in Netflix documentary form, then as a self-narrated biopic in which the singer was rendered as a CGI monkey alongside human actors.

Ludicrous as it was, Better Man (2024) was a statement. The film’s visuals were nuts: audacious musical set pieces and a violent Planet of the Apes-style battle involving Williams and his personal demons at his 2003 Knebworth performance. Unflinchingly grim drug-taking filled the screen. Scenes in which Williams’s former girlfriend Nicole Appleton is persuaded to have an abortion were genuinely harrowing.

Better Man baffled Americans and younger people, who remain largely unacquainted with Williams’s work, but received critical acclaim. It lost money in cinemas before becoming something of a sleeper hit on streaming services.

Last year, Williams announced a new album, tendentiously titled Britpop, and went on tour in anticipation of it. Tracks such as Rocket found him impersonating Billy Idol while Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi added squiggly guitar – a tourist board accountant’s idea of British guitar music. Then came Spies, a nostalgic Oasis pastiche.

These would have been Williams’s audition tapes had Liam been kidnapped by aliens in 1995

Williams pulled Britpop from the schedules last October so it didn’t clash with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Described as the album Williams might have made when he left Take That, Britpop fulfils that billing in all sorts of stunningly predictable ways, then throws in some curveballs (not just the Gary Barlow and Chris Martin credits).

Anyone hoping for a new Oasis album – one that sounds like they used to sound like – may find a surprising amount to enjoy here. A self-hating boyband member, Williams worshipped Oasis, and Liam Gallagher in particular, becoming a puppyish hanger-on at Glastonbury in 1995, the summer in which he left Take That.

You could read Williams’s ape alter ego in Better Man as evolving from a cheeky monkey into an animal, before becoming an actual human; but really, it’s the simian roll of the younger Gallagher (or the Stone Roses’s Ian Brown, AKA “King Monkey”) that Williams is claiming as his own. How tremendously Robbie Williams it is to ride on the coattails of the Oasis reunion for his own comeback.

The guitar-strewn Britpop bears the influence of their glam rock anthemics. From the swagger of Cocky to Williams’s pronunciation of “yeeeew” on Pretty Face and the Beatles-by-way-of-Noel surge of All My Life – these would have been Williams’s audition tapes had Liam been kidnapped by aliens in 1995.

The most interesting moments come when Britpop deviates from its script. Whatever possessed Williams, abetted by Barlow, to pen a song called Morrissey, and to make it about parasocial fan behaviour? And then to swerve the Smiths pastiche in favour of an on-the-nose Pet Shop Boys homage instead? (“Morrissey is talking to me, talking to me in code,” it goes.)

Curiouser and curiouser: It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working is full of strings and 1960s references, the kind of thing Pulp and Blur sometimes gravitated towards. Bite Your Tongue is redolent of Blur punk. The buzzsaw You starts rather like Connection by Elastica – quite the niche reference nowadays. Sadly, the album ends without a love letter to Suede, one band short of full Britpop homage.

It’s hard to fault Williams for relitigating the 90s: everyone else is, after all. But whether or not Britpop, an act of wish fulfilment, lands as well as the Oasis tour, or the Blur and Pulp reunion albums, is by no means certain.

Williams’s own solo success was not particularly rooted in independent rock music, but in soaring songs of solo male transcendence: Angels, Let Me Entertain You. There is little of that on Britpop – this singer looks back not in anger, but in unresolved envy.

Photograph by Jason Hetherington

Robbie Williams still wishes he was Britpop | The Observer

Robbie Williams in 2026© Reach Publishing Services Limited

ROBBIE WILLIAMS has surprised released his new album, BRITPOP three weeks early.

Out now, the 11 track collection had already been delayed once to avoid competing in the charts with Taylor Swift last year. Robbie currently holds the record for the most UK No1 albums by a solo artist (15), a record he broke in 2022 with his album XXV. He is tied with The Beatles for the most No1 albums overall.

His hope is that BRITPOP will land him that 16th No1 album: "I want that more than anything in my career right now."

BRITPOP had been scheduled for release on February 6 and while no official reason for the change has been given, it does give fans the chance to get to know the tunes better before his intimate Long 90’s Tour’ which kicks off in Glasgow on February 4 where he will play the LP in full along with debut album, Life Thru A Lens.

Robbie Williams live© Dave Hogan/Hogan Media

However, there are whispers that Rob changed the release date to avoid competing with another big release, possibly Harry Styles in his attempt to claim that 16th No1. Whatever the reason, BRITPOP is undoubtedly a return to form for Rob who describes it as the music he wishes he had made after quitting Take That back in the day. The end result is a love letter to the 90s with plenty of opportunities for fans to spot familiar nods to 90s classics.

The world loves Robbie when he’s strutting around enjoying being Robbie Williams, and it does sound like he’s rather fond of himself again. Here's the Daily Star's low down on the music track by track:

Robbie album© BBC

ROBBIE WILLIAMS / BRITPOP ****

1. Rocket - featuring Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi this is Rob playing the garage rocker with aplomb and turning the guitars up to 11. It's raw and visceral, but Rob's vocals can't help but keep it in the realm of pop.

2. Spies - the first of two anthemic Oasis-alike moments, Rob acknowledges its similarity to Champagne Supernova and joked: “Noel don’t f**king sue me – all the things you’ve nicked!”

3. Pretty Face - armed with guitars crunchier than a bag of McCoys crisps this is an anthemic ode to Rob's missus Ayda Field who he serenades with "the biggest prize is what's behind those eyes."

Robbie and Ayda© Getty Images

4. Bite Your Tongue - Rob is on his 'best behaviour' for this electro charged rocker with echoes of Republica (remember them?) and Damon Albarn: "I don't condone bad things, I condone what's nice...embrace the madness."

5. Cocky - The DNA of Supergrass star Gaz Coombes is all over this swaggering 70s glam rocker that sounds a bit like The Sweet's classic Blockbuster. "You get to talk to Jesus while I get to talk to God," he hollers Rob confronts his alter ego.

6. All My Life - don't be fooled by the chirpy intro, this rousing mid tempo anthem soon morphs into another Oasis pastiche with a gargantuan chorus you can almost picture Liam Gallagher singing with his hands behind his back. Lyrically it's a celebration of everything that Robbie is: "The only thing I miss is misbehaviour."

7. Human - Rob’s delicate AI takedown, “We’re too smart. We’ve got hearts, we’ve got souls. This is a song about our dystopian future." He's assisted by Chris Martin and Stoke’s favourite son gets to compliment God on his decor skills during the middle eight.

Robbie's new album BRITPOP© Reach Publishing Services Limited

8. Morrissey - amusing synth pop gem about stalking The Smiths legend who he clearly feels is misunderstood. Gary Barlow helped write this one, and it recalls Rob's Pet Shop Boys collab She’s Madonna in spirit.

9. You - Rob was clearly an Elastica fan as he pinches the verse to their hit Connection, but the soaring chorus has all the hallmarks of prime Lightning Seeds or You & Me by The Wannadies.

10. It's Okay Until The Drugs Stop Working - Top of the lot, this is blatantly a love letter to the Divine Comedy with a few cheeky doffs of his Union Jack pants to the Spice Girls, namely their smash Stop.

Robbie Williams© Dave Benett/Getty Images

11. Pocket Rocket - a sweet ballad style reworking of the opening track shifting the focus of the lyrics from Robbie himself to a woman.

Source https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/music/robbie-williams-surprise-releases-new-album-britpop-track-by-track-review/ar-AA1Uj3dK?ocid=BingNewsVerp

Edited January 17Jan 17 by Sydney11

ADRIAN THRILLS: It's Robbie Williams' Britpop album - but is it 30 years too late?

By ADRIAN THRILLS 4/5

When Robbie Williams hits the road to play four low-key concerts next month, he plans to perform his latest songs alongside every track from his debut 1997 solo album, Life Thru A Lens. 

The message is clear: our greatest showman is looking back, in order to move on. An it's a technique he also employs on his 13th studio album - a typically madcap trolley-dash through pop's past. Originally due out last October, Britpop was pushed back to February, to avoid a clash with Taylor Swift's Life Of A Showgirl, and then brought forward, to today.

Despite all the changes, it reveals Williams at his most effervescent on a string of songs built around loud guitars, big choruses and notable guests ('my heroes'). There's even room for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Robbie and Britpop are unlikely bedfellows. When Oasis, Blur and Supergrass were emerging, he was still singing with boy-band Take That. By the time of Life Thru A Lens, and its singles Angels and Let Me Entertain You, Britpop was fading. You could argue Angels sounded its final death knell. Yet Williams is unapologetic, calling this 'the album I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995'.

Among the guests are Supergrass's Gaz Coombes, while the album artwork features the red tracksuit and bleached-blond hair Williams sported when he famously partied with Oasis at Glastonbury soon after leaving Take That. Chris Martin and Tony Iommi put in appearances; and there's also a mention of former Smiths frontman Morrissey.

Black Sabbath guitarist Iommi sets the mood on opening track Rocket, which feels like an update of Let Me Entertain You. Spies is an arena-ready ballad, while Pretty Face sounds like a love letter to Williams's wife, Ayda Field.

Elsewhere, he sings of celebrity, religion, Artificial Intelligence and social media. But his favourite topic, as always, is himself. 'My life is... one of dreams, chaos and audacity,' he informs us on the Oasis-like singalong All My Life.

Robbie addresses his past problems with addiction on It's OK Until The Drugs Stop Working. '

t's all fun until the ashtray's full... it's all good until the birds start chirping,' he warns, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra

supplying a backdrop that is a throwback to his 1998 album I've Been Expecting You.

Human is a dreamy ballad about a future governed by robots, with Chris Martin on guitar and Joy Huerta (of Jesse & Joy) on additional vocals. And then there's

Morrissey - a number co-written with his former Take That bandmate Gary Barlow. 'I like the singer, he's a little eccentric... I'm a little like you, but a lot less worthy.'

Some might think Britpop wears its influences too readily, or that Williams is 30 years too late with his homage. But despite two rap-orientated missteps (Bite Your Tongue and You), he stamps his playful but knowing personality on an infectious comeback.

A record-breaking 16th chart-topping album (including his 2024 film soundtrack) surely beckons.

Robbie Williams's Long 90's tour starts at Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow, February 4 (robbiewilliams.com).

ADRIAN THRILLS: It's Robbie Williams' Britpop album - but is it 30 years too late? | Daily Mail Online

4 hours ago, Better Man said:

I think only on a chart week of February 6th, not now.

He might go top 10 then climb to number 1 once the physicals are released

Edited January 17Jan 17 by Hadji

Hammy, reflective and laced with self-loathing: Robbie Williams is back

On his new album, Britpop, the star finally embraces his contradictions

Emily Bootle Commissioning Editor, Culture

January 16, 2026 12:01 am (Updated 2:07 pm)

Robbie Williams has always liked to make a splash – so it’s fitting he has chosen to release his 13th album, the winkingly titled Britpop, two weeks early as a surprise. It is, save for a 2019 Christmas album, only half of which was original, his first record in 10 years.

In that time he has put on an art exhibition, made a Netflix documentary and helmed a biopic as a CGI chimp, all of which sought to portray his struggles with addiction and mental health issues, and which – perhaps save for the art – left us with less of a sense of a cheeky outlandish showman and more a complex and troubled person who, despite it all, still craves the spotlight.

Britpop is clearly made in the same vein – with more than a touch of bitterness directed at his 90s nemeses, Oasis. The album cover shows a portrait of young Robbie in an Adidas track top being defiled by protestors wearing T-shirts saying “just stop pop” – his proclivity for big-hearted crowd-pleasers and sequins never seeming quite cool enough next to the Gallagher brothers’ macho swagger, that boyband sentimentality always leaking through somewhere.

The album shows a portrait of young Robbie in an Adidas track top being defiled by protesters wearing T-shirts saying ‘just stop pop’

This was, he said, the album he wanted to make when he left Take That in 1995; as in the biopic, Better Man, here he tries both to dispel that pop-star image and excuse it. The album veers between pop punk, grungy 90s rock and Radio 2-friendly ballads. And through it all (sorry), his oh-so-familiar voice shines – heavy influence there is plenty, but this could only ever be Williams.

The more defiant numbers include opener “Rocket”, also the lead single, which launches at breakneck pop-punk speed into the album and, featuring Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, screams “ROCK!”. “What a time to be alive!” sings Williams in the chorus – it’s like doing a shot of aniseed infused digestif, but before you start the meal – clearing the pipes and setting the tone. Unfortunately, the din dies down quite quickly, as the album continues with the chugging, big-bridged “Spies”, and resolutely sunny “Pretty Face”, whose lyrics “Such a pretty face, such a pretty face… she’s everything I love about this world” leave much to be desired.

The album hits its stride a few tracks later on “All My Life”, where he ditches the bubbly everyman act and gets reflective. “All my life / I’ve been chasing visions at the edge of my mind”, he sings, over a steady beat and a Gallagher-esque melody. “Masochistic but I’m always entertaining/I know I’ll die but I’ll never leave the stage” – there’s a heavy sense of self-loathing here, mixed with those rays of genuinely moving pride that came through at the end of Better Man.

Williams still has a knack for combining theatrics with authenticity (Photo: Jason Hetherington)

On “Human”, featuring the Mexican duo Jesse & Joy, he goes further: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but your words could make me kill myself”. Williams still has his sense of humour – the next track, an 80s-inspired ode to Morrissey, proves that – but Britpop feels most authentic when it wallows, and explores these deeper – if not hugely complex – feelings. After sluggish love song “You” and a slightly hammy, theatrical sounding “It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working”, replete with strings, he reprises the first track in a more subdued way, featuring acoustic guitar, laced with sadness, undercutting the bombast of the opening. It adds a meta air to proceedings, and rounds off the album with an emotive, authentic feel.

If his aim in this new stage of his career is to add depth to his work with a strong narrative arc, it’s definitely working. And despite several stodgy moments, on Britpop he is finally being true to himself – and all his contradictions.

Hammy, reflective and laced with self-loathing: Robbie Williams is back

Edited January 17Jan 17 by Sydney11

ROBBIE WILLIAMS 'Britpop' - Everything A Great Album Should Be.

Published on 17 January 2026 at 14:27

Find a review of “Britpop” and read the comments. 

 

Grown men, well into their forties in all likelihood, frothing at the mouth about everything to do  with Robbie Williams. Bile. Vitriol. Rage. You can hear them slamming their porcine fists into the  keyboard. Their eyes clouded with tears of fury at the sheer audacity of a bloke who was in a  boyband using the word “Britpop”! Doesn’t he know that Britpop isn’t something to be played  with? Doesn’t he understand that it belongs to THEM? Has he no care for “Mosely Shoals”, “All  Change”, “Be Here Now”, or the collected works of Northern fuc***g Uproar? These are albums  that positively reeked of raw talent and that soundtracked a generation, not the lumpen,  moribund, stinkers that continue to soundtrack the pre-gig rituals of men in Penguin polo shirts,  jeans from M&S, and those funny Cornish pasty shoes.

 

No sir. 

Honestly I cannot get enough of that stuff. 

I can see them so clearly. 

I can see through them even more clearly. 

 

I can see deep into their withered souls. Boys trapped in the sagging bodies of middle-aged men, desperately clinging to the idea that  their teenage years were the bestest years not just of their lives, but ever, ever, ever. They hate  the very idea of a man like Robbie Williams. They want to dismiss him as a “fat dancer”, a Butlins  Red Coat, a fake, a charlatan, and they can’t understand why it isn’t the bloke from Kula Shaker  who has the same number of number one albums as The Beatles instead of him. 

 

I have bad news for you “lads”. 

 Most of the things you cherish are fuc***g rubbish - and the rest only matter because you were young when you heard them.

 

There isn’t a single song in the combined catalogues of any of those dreary trad rockers you so  adore that comes anywhere close to the songs on “Britpop”. Not a single one. Not “All Around  The World”, not “Finetime”, not “Life From a Window”, not “Tattva”…Jesus Christ, fu***ng  “Tattva”. If you are willing to pop that on a list of your favourite songs and kick the fu***ng s**t  out of the radio when “Angels” comes on you are worse than awful. 

 

The truth of the matter is that Williams is a man who has transcended pop music. He is  something greater than his own work. Like Morrissey he is as important for who he is, for his  journey through the pop culture landscape, as he is for the myriad songs that have topped the  charts everywhere from here to eternity. He is, I am afraid to tell you chaps, a star. He is an icon.  He will be remembered long after the bloke who played bass in The La’s has passed away. The  acts, not artists, you so adore won’t leave a smudge on the pages of pop history…Robbie will  have chapters dedicated to him.

 

 

13 studio albums as a solo artist, 12 of them hitting the top spot in the charts (the other one  reaching number 2 - and still went multi-platinum). Over 50 singles - 7 number ones. Continuing  to fill stadia across the world. By every metric he is one of the most successful artists in the  history of pop music. He is also a man who LOVES music…he gives nods and winks to other artists in his lyrics, he speaks with adoration about his inspirations, he has Lufthaus as another  outlet for his passion for music, and he does it all with humour, wit, verve, and a level of honesty  that few others can match. 

 

But it isn’t just about music with Robbie, he is a man who has scaled dizzying highs, hit  devastating lows, been mocked, ridiculed, questioned, and attacked by the “real” music crowd,  by sneering upper middle class Guardian types. He has endured the horrors of drug and alcohol  misuse. He has had to deal with trauma while in the public eye. His response to all of that has  been to be true to himself, to find out who he is, to do the work, to accept the faults and failings in  his make-up, to be willing to speak out about anxiety, depression, childhood trauma, and to finally  put himself in a position where he is inspirational for others who suffer. That isn’t something you  can say about too many other stars of his size. 

 

“Britpop” is evidence of all of the things that I love about Robbie. Every morning the last thing I  do before I head into work is listen to “I Love My Life”. It has become a mantra, it has played a  role in healing me from my own trauma. Now with this collection he is nodding to the time and the music that once meant so much to me, but which almost ended up killing my interest in music  completely. It is everything that a great album should be. It offers a path to happiness…and isn’t  that the whole point of everything?

 

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