In the opening moments of MNEK’s second album, the artist gives listeners a warning: They can “turn a bad boy to a bad bitch in seconds.” It’s as if they’re saying, “Press play on BULLDOZER!!, and prepare for your vibe to change.” That confidence is well-earned—the London-based producer, whose real name is Uzo Emenike, has been shaping pop from behind the boards for well over a decade, working alongside everyone from Beyoncé to Gorgon City to Stormzy. Most recently, MNEK teamed back up with Zara Larsson for her slow-burn breakout Midnight Sun (and its corresponding remix album), reaffirming their command of the dance floor and clinching a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording along the way.

BULLDOZER!!, MNEK’s first album since 2018’s Language, offers a recalibration, pondering what happens when the spotlight falls on them for a change. They set out to balance club-pop beats with introspective commentary on gender representation, LGBTQ+ beauty standards, and what it feels like to come into yourself when that self is constantly in flux. The album is most compelling when confidence and uncertainty coexist, but at times, the self-love inspo drowns in its own blind positivity.

The production across BULLDOZER!! is expectedly precise, with crisp, intricately layered beats and malleable vocals that make for easy listening. At times, its combination of piano-centric beat patterns and predictable rise-fall-rise structures toes the line between comforting nostalgia and dated 2010s regurgitation. “OH NO!! ALL THE BOYS!!” and “LADY!!,” addictive as they are, feel made for 2014 clubs, leaving something to be desired underneath the steady hooks. The record’s best moments lean into the unexpected, like the country pivot on “WANNA BE WANTED!!,” which hits with a jolt after 20 minutes of dance floor pop, or the rush of “DIRTY LITTLE SECRET!!,” with its choppy, Flume-esque synth cuts mixed with a slightly downtempo, hi-hat-heavy breakbeat.

BULLDOZER!! most often finds MNEK reckoning with romantic entanglements: how they approach love, how others approach them, how they navigate the see-saw of loving yourself and loving someone else. “WANNA BE WANTED!!” serves as a platform for meditations on stifling or changing oneself in the name of connection. Meanwhile, “MUSCLE MARYS..” chronicles how weight loss brought swaths of gym-obsessed men to their DMs—enticing, sure, but MNEK knows their worth: “Loving you would only make me insecure,” they sing, their vocals soaring across one of the album’s more compelling melodies.

The lyrics are sometimes cliché, other times sharp: For every “yas queen”-adjacent truism, there’s a blink-and-you-miss-it spark of wit. The spoken-word platitudes on “LADY!!,” for example, give way to quick-hitting, sneakily clever verses: “You don’t think he wanna be held?/You don’t think he wanna feel like mademoiselle sometimes?” But more often, their affirmations tend to settle for the conventional. See “WORLD DOESN’T HAVE TO BE SUCH A SCARY PLACE!!,” which feels like hopecore set to music, with its repeated “never be afraid” refrain, or “THE WALL!!,” with its on-the-nose hook: “I’ve got a wall to break through.” Several tracks use MNEK’s 6'4" stature to craft shallow metaphors for being a larger-than-life presence (“Take up space, life’s a king size bed”). These more generalized lyrics don’t reveal anything specific about the person singing them, and the confidence they project starts to feel more like corporatized positivity than genuine belief.

The marimbas of closer “CALIFORNIA..” arrive like a palate cleanser: breezy and melodic, a chillwave breakbeat draped in easygoing WeHo optimism. There’s a tension between the track’s instrumental brightness and the doubt that riddles its lyrics, its backing vocals repeatedly asking, “What are you waiting for?” But even when BULLDOZER!!’s songs express uncertainty, it’s clear MNEK has a strong sense of their creative identity. Even amid the album’s sometimes-dated production and occasional lowest-common-denominator lyrics, it’s nonetheless full of joy and a keen sense of confidence.