In Real Life

Mandy Moore signed her first record deal when she was 14, set up to become a teen pop superstar with seamlessly engineered bubblegum hits like 1999’s “Candy.” In the more than two decades since, her albums have grown more and more introspective, and, as a result, more and more unfettered: 2007’s *Wild Hope* was optimistic country pop; 2020’s *Silver Landings* was a love letter to Southern California, the sound of a woman learning to make peace with her past. On 2022’s *In Real Life*, she has evolved into a mother (as heard on the title track), an empath (“Little Dreams”), and a wife (“Four Moons,” with its romantic organ and tender lyrics like “I wanna hold your hand a little too much/Step on your toes, pull you in close/Never really close enough”).

It's easy to call In Real Life a sequel to Silver Landings, the 2020 album that found Mandy Moore resuming her music career after a decade hiatus.

Mandy Moore, she of This Is Us and film fame, has always maintained a rather discrete profile as a pop rock songwriter with a flair for the picturesque. In Real Life, Moore’s seventh full-length effort, continues that modest tradition with a nuanced but safe record that, if nothing else, is mildly pleasant and simplistically enjoyable.

“I spent every day filling every page/ How the world revolved around me/ When I saw your face, I knew right away/ We’d be whoever we wanted to be,” sings Mandy Moore on the title track and lead single from her seventh studio album, In Real Life.