Album Review: Do You Still Love Me? by Ella Mai
On her first album release since 2022, Ella Mai turns devotion into a contract and jealousy into a policy manual. The question mark in the title is ornamental.
Some relationships run on affection. Others run on inventory. The kind where warming his plate and packing his bag with extra clothes counts as proof of permanence, where sharing your location unprompted substitutes for saying you feel safe, where summing up who gave twenty and who gave eighty passes for intimacy. The woman at the center of Do You Still Love Me? has been living inside that kind of math for a while. After Heart on My Sleeve stalled commercially in 2022 despite strong singles, Ella Mai went quiet in a way that looked deliberate. She released the 3 EP on her thirtieth birthday in late 2024, modest and purposeful, and her personal life with Jayson Tatum stayed cordoned off from Instagram as thoroughly as if she’d signed an NDA. Now her third album with Mustard behind the boards arrives after a long stretch of selective silence, and it carries the energy of a woman who has been tallying for so long that the scorekeeping itself has become the relationship.
Half of these songs describe someone who wants closeness and then immediately barricades it with instructions. On “There Goes My Heart,” she tells him not to look at her, not to touch her, warns herself against wanting anything she could lose, and then within the same breath asks him to slow down so she can fall. The hook cycles “there goes my heart again” like a siren she can’t switch off, and the verses read like a woman narrating her own surrender in real time while issuing directives to prevent it. “First Day” burns hotter. In a piano and guitar-driven track, she slots “mine, all mine” into the middle of a commitment monologue, calls herself obsessed without flinching, and describes being “pressed” as though intensity and possession are synonyms. She swears nothing has changed since day one, which means she has been gripping at this pitch for years.
“100” is the record’s most revealing cut because it says the generous thing and the controlling thing in the same stanza. “Love ain’t never fifty-fifty” is supposed to sound unconditional, but every bar around it is arithmetic. She pledges twenty for his eighty, forty for his sixty, and keeps calculating until they hit a hundred, as if devotion were a budget and she’s running the ledger over the sample of Gladys Knight & the Pips. “Little Things” pulls a similar trick with domesticity. She warms his plate, draws his bath, pours his drink, and packs his bag, each gesture catalogued in order like a shift schedule. And then, mid-list, the toothbrush goes into a Louis tote and she’s polishing his Cuban links. The care and the conspicuous consumption sit in the same verse, and neither one comments on the other.
Jealousy on this album is almost bureaucratic. “Tell Her” hinges on “tell her you love me, put no one above me,” which sounds romantic if you don’t notice that she’s dictating what he says to another woman, scripting his phone calls, and calling the whole exercise petty without slowing down. “Yeah, that’s petty, but you can’t afford a loss.” The admission hangs for a beat and then gets swallowed by the chorus. It also borrows from Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name,” which is a neat trick given that the original was about catching a liar and this one is about installing policy for future liars. “My Mind” barely raises its voice, but the language gives it away. “At my pocket, where I go, you go/Baby, locket, we locked in for sure.” She converted proximity into jewelry metaphor. The word “locked” sits right where “loved” probably should.
When the record does get angry, the anger wears humiliation’s face. “Might Just” is a cheating retaliation fantasy where the worst wound is location and logistics. He slept with someone else in her bed, with her things, and made her look foolish. “The audacity to think that you could be with me/After you been in these streets, damn, it’s so embarrassing.” She imagines torching his house because she’s insulted, and the heartbreak barely registers underneath. “Somebody’s Son” goes the opposite direction, full surrender, but she wires conditions into the collapse. His mama raised him right. He walks on the outside. He talks to her nice. Even when he won’t apologize, she says she doesn’t care who’s right, except the lyric itself is an inventory of his qualifications. She auditions him while calling it weakness.
The upbeat “Luckiest Man” builds its entire argument on her own physical description. Five-nine, brown eyes, porcelain skin, natural aesthetics, “I am such a work of art.” The hook tells him he’s the luckiest man alive, and the reason is her. There’s confidence in it, sure, but the bridge slips in “be careful with my thoughts” right after the vanity recital, and the juxtaposition asks a question she never bothers to answer. “Audio Message” wedges between tracks like an interstitial voicemail where she identifies as a Scorpio and explains her own intensity as misunderstanding, sting and all. She narrates her personality the way someone preemptively explains their reputation at a dinner party. The slow-burning of “Bonus” circles lust without landing anywhere specific. While the verses stay deliberately vague about what the honesty concerns, it later drifts toward politeness and compliment, and the word “honest” just fills the gap where a real confession would go.
Sharper writing surfaces on the steamy “Chasing Circles,” where she stops managing the relationship and turns inward. She admits to oversharing, to staring when it hurts, to telling him it’s fine when it isn’t, and the chorus spirals by design without pretending she’ll find her way out. “Outside” is the closest thing to a joke on the record. She went out with her friends. It didn’t feel right. She shares her location on the blue dot and confesses she’s a homebody now, that the relationship has become the only address that matters. There’s something bracing in that smallness, in admitting that freedom bored her. “No Angels” tries to broker peace by demanding gratitude as the price of sticking around. “We’ve been through hell and now/This feels like heaven now/We should be grateful.” Even the reconciliation track wants credit.
Grant the album this much. It documents a specific kind of loving with unusual clarity. This narrator doesn’t betray, doesn’t flee, doesn’t even yell very often. She tends, she counts, she monitors, and she reminds. The writing on the page holds steady. She says what she means, and what she means keeps circling back to ledger-keeping and loyalty tests. The weakness is that this consistency flattens over a full LP. The emotional temperature barely shifts between the devotion tracks and the jealousy tracks because both run on the same fuel. Mustard’s production hums warm and unobtrusive, which serves her voice well but removes one potential source of friction. When a song such as “Chasing Circles” cracks the surface and lets genuine confusion bleed in, you hear what the rest of the record could have risked.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “100,” “Tell Her,” “Chasing Circles”