‘LOVE, LOVE, LOVE’ review: Stephen Sanchez cosplays 1968

Three years ago, Stephen Sanchez released a debut album called Angel Face in which he played a fictional 1958 troubadour who falls in love with a mob boss’s girlfriend named Evangeline and gets murdered for his trouble. I want you to sit with that sentence. The 20-year-old TikTok kid whose breakup-reconciliation single “Until I Found You” had just done over a billion streams. And he responded to surprise mainstream success by writing himself a fictional alter-ego, a fictional love interest, a fictional villain, and a fictional violent death. It’s the kind of move that suggests someone deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being looked at directly.

So when I tell you that LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, his sophomore record out today, opens with him singing “Ohh, when I was younger / I didn’t care for love at all / And all the world made me feel small / But, then again, I was never tall,” I want you to feel the small jolt. This is a Sanchez song that begins with Sanchez admitting he is short. There is no Troubadour. There is no Evangeline. No, there’s just a guy, copping to a height insecurity. And opening his record on the second take of the count-in because the first take didn’t feel right.

Reader, I am not entirely sure he knows what he’s doing. But I think I like it.

What’s actually different about LOVE, LOVE, LOVE.

The official line on this album, repeated with cult-like consistency across the rollout, is that Sanchez has shed the character artifice and the reverbed 50s/60s grooves of his debut for “bold, technicolor pop songs” that step “confidently into a vivid, modern new era.”

Translation: he hired Oscar Görres (Tove Lo, The Weeknd) and Rami Yacoub (literally a Cheiron-era Max Martin lieutenant — yes, the Baby One More Time guys), shipped himself to Stockholm, and made a record where the song architecture is contemporary radio pop and the texture is still horns, brushed drums, and a stunning room reverb that makes you feel like you’re listening through a doorway in a different decade.

Genre-wise, Angel Face was 1958 doo-wop. This album is roughly 1968-72. It’s Motown into Philly soul into Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On era, with a few alt-pop excursions that feel like Bruno Mars if Bruno Mars went to vespers. The runtime tells you what you need to know about the strategy all on its own. Just 11 tracks, 31 minutes, average song length under three. This is a Spotify-era pop album wearing a haughty vintage suit.

“It Might Be Love” is the whole album in miniature.

The opener is a manifesto meet-cute. Sanchez is “a sailor lost at sea,” she’s a “darl on a silver screen.” And the chorus is essentially a How To Court A Woman pamphlet your great-uncle would have approved of. “Give her all your time, don’t let her pass you by, try with flowers, call her on the phone, walk that lady home.”

The phrase “walk that lady home” is one to focus on. It’s not really a 2026 pop lyric, such that we have 2026 pop lyrics about 5 months on. And it’s not even trying to be. It’s a 1962 lyric deployed in 2026 with the full weight of the 30-year cosplay-pop discourse pressing down on it.

And honestly, Sanchez seems just…fine with that. He’s not winking or ironizing. He’s just a 23-year-old Nashville guy who sincerely believes the highest expression of romantic interest is walking a lady home. And you better believe he is going to write that song whether you’re there to listen or not.

Where LOVE, LOVE, LOVE might surprise you the most.

Then there’s the title track, and friends, this is where the album actually has something to say. Sanchez has been telling interviewers that he wrote “LOVE, LOVE, LOVE” in pieces — in his mother-in-law’s bathroom at Christmas, walking around Paris — and finally finished it after watching Selma and getting struck by the concept of agape love. Unconditional love. Love that doesn’t expect itself back.

You can hear that the second the song starts. “Hi, hello / Great big world, I’ve got something to say.” It’s such a goofy opening that I had to chuckle the first time. Then he goes: “I would rather die than hate you / Let the weight of my love just break you down / To build you up with agape kinda love.” Followed shortly by: “Don’t fight against your fellow brother / Black or white or rainbow colored / We all should try to be a friend / If you love the Lord or love your way / If you wanna change or stay the same / You don’t deserve to be mistreated.”

This is, technically, a Marvin Gaye homage. In practice, it’s a white pop guy attempting a civic-pop sermon, and your tolerance for it will depend almost entirely on your tolerance for the genre. Personally, I believe the gambit basically works, and the reason it does is that Sanchez sounds like he means it. The trumpet solo is doing the real labor, though. And the post-chorus repetition of “love” should feel cloying and instead feels try-hard in a weirdly good way.

“Chuck the Money” is the shocker.

Then track five hits and the entire conversation has to start over, because “Chuck the Money” is easily the best written song on the album. In fact, the verses tee up some of Sanchez’s most playfully horny lyrics of his career. “You move like water, daughter, so take the lead” is a line that should not work and absolutely does, in part because the daughter/water internal rhyme is a shocker of a move you only pull off when you’re having fun.

The chorus delivers the album’s best earworm: “If you play, I’ll play until the both of us fuse / I’ll make you stay with an offer, honey, you can’t refuse / Chuck the money ’cause I’m rich with love for you.” That Godfather reference is the giveaway. This is Sanchez admitting he’s a showman, dropping the reverent crooner posture for one song to actually flirt with you.

The trumpet line is also funkier than anything on Angel Face. The “I need, you need, let us funk out the floor” pre-chorus is far more rhythmically alive than at least half the other songs. The bridge breaks open into ad-libbed “Just chuck the money to me” and “Falling for you, truly / Dancing under the leaves” — and that last image, that pivot from money-chucking strut to leaves-dancing tenderness in the same song, is the album thesis in 30 seconds. Material things out, real connection in. If radio gives him a fair shot, this is the one that crosses over.

The Devi of it all.

Yeah, we have to talk about it. The “Until I Found You” muse — Georgia Webster, the woman whose name appears in Sanchez’s biggest song — is not the woman this album is about. The woman this album is about is Devi Tuil, the French singer-songwriter Sanchez met at one of his European shows, moved to East Nashville with, and proposed to on Christmas Eve 2025 at his grandparents’ house.

In fact, they’ve already released a duo EP together as Dress & Tie. The “Sweet Love” video stars his grandparents. The whole aesthetic universe of the album comes drenched in the swoon of his current relationship.

I bring this up because “Forgetting Your Kiss” exists. It’s one of two songs on this album that doesn’t sound written from inside the engagement. “I don’t think I’d ever get used to saying your first name again / And, even if I could, I’d still feel the same about you.” It’s the only song on the record that admits the existence of a previous chapter, and it’s tucked in at track nine. Late enough that most listeners will already be in the bag.

The other song that drops the rose-colored filter is “Don’t Let Me Go,” which maybe contains the album’s most interesting line: “Love to me was always a paycheck / But you came to me longing to change it.” That’s a man with a past, in a song asking the present not to leave. The U2 comparison nis probably obvious, but only if your main U2 reference points are Achtung Baby and not The Joshua Tree, but whatever. It’s a big song. And it earns the bigness.

The sweet stuff and the sweet-stuff problem.

Now. About the rest of the album. “Sweet Love” — the lead single, the one that opens with Sanchez actually saying “One, two, three, f***it” before launching into doo-wop tenderness — is the album’s most efficient pop machine and also its most mannered. The bridge (“There ain’t no pleasure in life without your love / Now that I’ve had it, baby, I just can’t get enough / You’re my prayer come true”) is sub-Bruno Mars by maybe a half-step.

And yes, the schmaltz factor is real. But Sanchez sells it because his falsetto is, no notes, absolutely beautiful.

“Home to Mother” is the duet with Stephen Day (Nashville singer-songwriter, not to be confused with anyone famous), and the conceit — “I was seeing colors in black and white / But then she walked into my lonely life / Now I only see in technicolor” — is so on-the-nose that it loops back around to charming.

Stephen vs. Stephen.

There’s a French phrase (“Ma chérie, ma fleur”) that I have to assume is a Devi shoutout, and a sunflowers-posies-red-roses pre-chorus that lands somewhere between “wedding photo caption” and “actual sweetness.” The electric guitar solo at the end is the sound of two Stephens simply enjoying themselves.

“Already Got Me” and “Ooo Baby (I Love You)” and “Dance Away the Music” are the three tracks where the album risks blurring into wallpaper. “Already Got Me” has a lovely conceit — “you’re walking around like you’ve already got it” — but doesn’t develop it. “Ooo Baby” is two minutes and six seconds of pure Motown chorus structure. Which is to say: the entire song is the chorus, and the chorus is “Ooo baby I love you.”

“Dance Away the Music” wants to be your wedding-reception slow-dance and probably will be, in approximately 18 months. At weddings hosted by people who own a record player they actually use.

The closer won’t be beautiful for everyone.

“You Are So Beautiful” closes the record, and Sanchez has been telling anyone else who’ll listen that it started as a song about what God might say about him during a difficult time and evolved into something he wants to give to listeners. “All this world can be so cruel, what did it do to you? / You don’t have to hide your face, I’m not ashamed of you… Never once have I looked in your eyes and wished that you were somebody else.”

This is the song that will either undo you or annoy you, with no in-between. If you read it as a pop singer addressing his audience with unearned spiritual paternalism, it’s going to grate. If you read it as what Sanchez says it is — a song that started as him sitting with his own self-loathing and trying to imagine being loved through it — it’s probably a pop benediction that contemporary radio almost never produces anymore.

I land closer to the second reading because the album has spent 30 minutes earning the right to land there. And also because Sanchez sings it like a man who needed to hear it himself first.

The bottom line.

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE as an album is not as great some of its best songs. But it’s still quite good overall. The deep cuts soften in a way the singles don’t, the Görres/Yacoub production occasionally smooths the corners that the songwriting needed to keep. And the album’s thematic ambition — please be kind to strangers in Parisian shops! — sometimes outruns its actual lyrical specificity. There’s a version of this record that pushes the agape stuff harder and emerges with a real statement. This version mostly gestures.

But at least Sanchez bet that being a person on record would sell better than being a character. And even if the streaming numbers don’t fully validate that bet on the first pass, he’s set himself up to make a third album that doesn’t have to argue with the second one. He’s not hiding, anymore. The Troubadour is dead and unmourned. What replaces him is a guy in a dress and tie to walk you home.

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE is available now.

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Images courtesy of Mercury Records.