‎TRUSTFALL by P!nk on Apple Music

P!nk’s ninth album gets into the deep stuff instantly. The piano ballad “After I Get There,” which opens the record, is a letter to her father, who passed away in August 2021. “Is there a bar up there where you’ve a favourite chair/Where you sit with friends/And talk concerning the weather,” P!nk wails, her voice breaking. “I do know you will tell me once I get there.” It’s an intense technique to begin an album—however the pop star has at all times invited her listeners into her life in an intimate way. “You have to simply dive right into it,” P!nk tells Apple Music. “That is type of the way it is to sit down with me, though. It’s like, ‘Hi, do you would like to hear about that one time?’ It’s like an invite.”

Over TRUSTFALL’s 13 tracks, P!nk digs into her past few years, grappling with the ever-encroaching feeling that at the same time as people grow old, the thought of life having a road map is an increasing number of distant. Take “Turbulence,” a windswept anthem that reminds listeners of how even probably the most harrowing parts of life are only momentary parts of a protracted journey: “The panic is temporary/But I will be everlasting/So when it hits, do not forget/As scary because it gets/It’s just turbulence,” she sings, her voice breaking barely on the song’s title. “I really like ‘Turbulence’ for that reason,” says P!nk. “I played it for my friend’s teenager and she or he was just reduced to tears, and I knew that it was talking to her anxiety. I hope that that song helps just a little, since it’s such a pleasant idea—as bumpy because it gets, as scary because it gets, it’s just turbulence.”

“TRUSTFALL,” which P!nk co-wrote with Fred again.. and Johnny McDaid, has a very different vibe, nevertheless it’s one other example of P!nk showing how life’s lowest moments can lead to beauty. It is a simmering dance track that shows off P!nk’s airy upper register as she invites listeners to “go where love is on our side”—and it’s the primary moment where, as P!nk puts it, “I’m like, ‘ what, fuck this. I’m going to bop. I’m so exhausted, I will take my clothes off and I’m going to bop. I will roller-skate.”

TRUSTFALL also throws a few curveballs with P!nk’s collaborators, who allow her to showcase her powerful voice in country-folk settings. She duets with folk-pop outfit The Lumineers on the tense, spare “Long Technique to Go,” wherein she and vocalist Wesley Schultz regard one another warily, unsure about whether to make the leap into romance. Swedish sisters First Aid Kit accompany P!nk on the wistful “Kids in Love,” which includes a restlessly fingerpicked acoustic guitar and breezy vocal harmonies. And Chris Stapleton helps P!nk close out the album on “Just Say I’m Sorry,” a starlit duet that tackles, with empathy and tenderness, the ways in which pride can encroach on love. “It’s awesome that I could be this polarizing pop star who then is like, ‘Hey, Lumineers, you guys wish to do a song?’” she says. “They usually’re like, ‘Yeah, cool.’ I’m like, ‘Awesome. Stapleton, you would like to sing a song?’ And he’s like, ‘Absolutely.’ And First Aid Kit. I’m like, Who am I? That is rad.”

These three duets, together with tracks just like the glittery disco-funk cut “Never Gonna Not Dance Again” and the punky anti-hater broadside “Hate Me,” show how P!nk’s rise to pop’s upper echelons has been as successful because it has due to the way in which she’s defied expectations. “I’ve at all times been a mystery bag,” P!nk notes. “I’m enthusiastic about this album in the way in which I used to be enthusiastic about [2001’s] M!ssundaztood, since it’s a body of labor, regardless that it’s every kind of genres.”