Anne-Marie - Unhealthy (LP) - Clear Vinyl

Anne-Marie’s third album, Unhealthy, landed on 28 July 2023, and it feels like the moment she stopped sanding off the rough edges and leaned into them instead. The title tells you a lot. These songs sit in that blurry space where love gets messy and ego gets bruised, yet you keep going back for one more round. She has always been sharp with a hook, but here the writing is frank and funny in a way that cuts closer to the bone.

The headline grabber is the title track with Shania Twain, a collaboration that looked cheeky on paper and turns out to be a proper pop-country earworm. Anne-Marie slides into a bit of twang, Shania swoops in with veteran ease, and the chorus hits like a lasso snapping tight. It is the sort of duet that makes sense as soon as you hear it, even if you did not expect a British pop star to find such a natural swing alongside a country icon. The single rollout leading up to the record had already set the tone. “Psycho,” a hit with Aitch, plays like a flirty, suspicious back-and-forth, her sweet-and-spiky delivery bouncing against his playful verse. “Sad B!tch,” on the other hand, is a pep talk in steel-toed boots, shrugging off the drama and marching toward daylight.

Across the full set, you can hear the push and pull between resilience and relapse. Anne-Marie does not posture as a saint. She sings about jealousy and second guesses and bad impulses, then sneaks a joke into the line that made you wince. The production keeps things lean and glossy, built for radios and living rooms alike. There is plenty of punch in the drums, a few guitar swipes, and those bright, layered vocals she has always carried so well. When the tempo drops, she lets the space do the talking. You can imagine the silence between texts. Then the beat returns and the chorus snaps shut.

Part of the fun is how she threads her past into the present. Fans who came in through “Rockabye,” “2002,” or her Rudimental ties will hear familiar DNA, just more self-possessed. She has spoken about wanting this record to be more honest, and you can feel that in the way she writes to the camera rather than through it. It is a small shift, but it turns a kiss-off into a confession and a confession into a rallying cry. UK pop often gets dinged for being too clinical. Unhealthy breathes. It lets the laugh lines show.

If you are thinking about Anne-Marie vinyl, this is the one to spin when you want both gloss and grit. The title track with Shania practically begs for the tactile crackle of a needle drop, and “Psycho” jumps out of the speakers with that chorus you swear you have known for years even if you only heard it last week. I put on the Unhealthy vinyl in a friend’s place after a late-afternoon dig at a Melbourne record store, and by the second chorus of the opener the room had already started trading breakup stories. That is what good pop does. It turns one person’s diary into a group chat.

Critical chatter focused on the duet for obvious reasons, but the deeper pull is the sequencing. The album moves like a night out that starts with bravado, swerves into oversharing, then ends with clarity that might actually stick. No grand reinventions, no forced concept. Just sharp melodies, a voice that can flip from coy to stung in a bar or two, and a writer who understands that a petty line can be as healing as a tender one when it hits at the right time.

For collectors, this sits nicely beside other Anne-Marie albums on vinyl, and it is an easy recommendation if you are trying to buy Anne-Marie records online without overthinking it. It also slots into a pop section next to Shania with a wink that feels earned, not gimmicky. If you are crate digging anywhere, from Shoreditch to a shop that flies the vinyl records Australia flag, Unhealthy is the sleeve you clock across the bin and think, yeah, that one will go over well at home. It did for me, and it likely will for you too.