Rating: 2.3/5

Shawn Mendes is a Canadian singer and songwriter, born on Aug. 8, 1998. Shawn Mendes’ first album, “Handwritten” in 2015 was on the US Billboard 200 charts, making Shawn one of five other artists who managed to debut on the US Billboard under the age of 18. The most popular song on the album, “Stitches,” reached number one on the UK charts and made it to the Top 10 charts in the U.S. and Canada. Shawn Mendes’s second album “Illuminate,” released in 2016, also broke chart records, with several hit singles like “Treat You Better” and “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back.”

In March, Shawn Mendes announced his first solo live performance with surprise guests like Ed Sheeran, Noah Kahan and Niall Horan. On July 31, he revealed his new album “Shawn” was going to be released on Oct. 18. However, the release date was later postponed to Nov. 15. Four singles, “Why Why Why,” “Isn’t That Enough,” “Nobody Knows” and “Heart of Gold” were released earlier, generating lots of excitement for the album. After the release, he embarked on an intimate tour around the U.S..

In my opinion, the songs in this album sounded very repetitive and used the same lyrics. The content of the album sparked very little interest in me because he constantly brought up the same issues as his previous songs throughout the album. Moreover, his songs didn’t make much sense lyrically and I found myself having a hard time deciphering what message he was trying to convey to the listener.  He also doesn’t have much variety of instruments in his music and the invariable genre of music became boring, which made it very difficult to listen to the full album. Overall, I rate “Shawn” a 2.3/5 and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.