Album Review
March 27, 2026
Amber Asaly
Halfway through her new album Cloud 9, Megan Moroney delivers what might be the most relatable lyric of 2026:
“Zero outta ten, would never date again.
Don’t recommend all the back and forth.”
It reads like a one-star review of modern dating - and honestly, most of us would leave the same one - but Cloud 9 isn’t just fifteen tracks of heartbreak. It’s Moroney using her songwriting to explore the gap between the love her generation was promised and the love they actually got. And that gap started long before the first dating app. It started with the stories we grew up on - Cinderella and her perfect-fit glass slipper, fairy tales where love was destiny and the right person just showed up.
Disney gave us Ariel, blurting out “Daddy, I love him” to King Triton - the accidental confession of a girl in love with someone she was never supposed to want. Decades later, Taylor Swift took that same line and put it on The Tortured Poets Department as a statement. Where Ariel was punished for loving the wrong person, Swift dared the world to try. Then Sabrina Carpenter skipped the confession entirely and opened Man’s Best Friend with ‘Manchild’ - a gleeful takedown of the very boys Disney taught us to pine for. And now, enter Megan Moroney. Rolling Stone called her “the poet of Gen Z heartbreak,” and with Cloud 9, released February 20th - right between Valentine’s Day and International Women’s Day - she picks up where Taylor and Sabrina left off, but uses her album to do something neither quite did: she sits in the mess between delusion, devastation and hope. In doing so she’s becoming one of country music’s sharpest voices - an artist who doesn’t abandon the genre’s storytelling traditions but shifts them to reflect how her generation actually loves. Moroney sums it up perfectly: ‘waiting for that other shoe, or should I say boot? to drop.’
If you followed the Am I Okay? era, you’ll remember the deep blues that defined Moroney’s sophomore album. Cloud 9 swaps that for baby pink - the cover art showing Moroney ascending a heavenly ladder through a cotton-candy cloudscape. But “pink” doesn’t mean soft. Moroney has called this the strongest, most confident version of herself yet, and it shows: an album that pairs classic country themes of longing, loss, and waiting on the rain with the way contemporary heartbreak plays out over read receipts and group chat therapy. ‘Some cold killers have guns, but I’ve got songs’ she sings in ‘Wish I Didn’t.’ And fifteen tracks deep, she’s proving it.
So what does it sound like when this generation’s dating frustration becomes a song? Put Moroney’s lyrics next to Carpenter’s and the parallels are hard to miss:
“He’s a lotta bit pretty and a little dumb
He probably couldn’t spell ‘valedictorian’”
- Megan Moroney, “Stupid”
“This boy doesn’t even know the difference between ‘there, their, and they are’”
- Sabrina Carpenter, “Slim Pickins”
When pop and country's biggest voices independently arrive at the same punchline - he can't even spell - it's not a coincidence. It's an unfortunate pattern. But where Carpenter winks at the audience from a safe distance, Moroney is still the girl who's been left on read for two weeks, convinced there must be a perfectly good explanation. 'Maybe he's busy picking flowers / Cause he knows my birthday's next month, how sweet.' It's funny because it's delusional, and devastating because we've all been exactly that girl. That duality runs through the album. ‘Medicine’ turns heartbreak into a country anthem: 'Try crying in the shower, it’s really great'. ‘6 Months Later’ wraps a brutal observation - 'what doesn’t kill you calls you six months later' - in a melody catchy enough to sing along to.
This is where Cloud 9 becomes more than a breakup album. On ‘Convincing’ Moroney crafts a track that has everything on the surface - the beach, the dancing, the romance. Musically, the dreamy atmosphere makes you want to believe in it. But the lyrics tell a different story. She’s merely performing what love is supposed to look like, and she’s aware of it. The Etta James name-drop in the first verse makes it sting even more. She doesn’t name the song, but it’s hard not to think of James’s ‘Sunday Kind of Love’ - a 1960 ballad about wanting a love that’s steady, lasting, and real. On Moroney’s track, all the ingredients of Etta’s dream are there, but the feeling isn’t. The songwriting shows the gap between how love looks and how it actually feels. Moroney does what the best songwriters have always done - turning personal experience into something a whole generation can recognise as their own. We grew up being shown what love was supposed to look like - by Disney, by rom-coms, by Instagram - and are now left wondering whether independence is actually what we want or simply all that's left when every relationship looks better on screen than it turns out to be. In the bonus track 'Sorry... I Meant Tonight,' Moroney gives the whole thing away: 'For someone who prioritizes her time alone / I don't wanna be alone.' That's the tension at the heart of Cloud 9 - and instead of resolving it, Moroney lets the album speak for itself.
The fairy tale rewrites don't stop there. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy chants "lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" walking through a dark forest, terrified of what might be lurking. On ’Liars & Tigers & Bears’ Moroney swaps ’lions’ for ’liars’ - because the scary things were never imaginary. ’Speak your mind, but not too loud / Be sure of yourself, but never too proud / Paint yourself pretty, but don't do too much,’ she lists, cataloguing the impossible contradictions demanded of women. Fans on TikTok have compared it to Taylor Swift's ’mirrorball’, but where Swift sings about being willing to shapeshift just to keep people watching, Moroney lays out the impossible script that creates that pressure in the first place.
And then there's ’Beautiful Things’ - a ballad Moroney wrote for her niece. If ’Liars & Tigers & Bears’ is the forest, this is the message she wishes someone had handed her before she walked into it. ’You're pretty and you're smart / God made a work of art / Girl, don't pick yourself apart.’ It's the song on this album that will make you cry first and most often because of how gently music is used to deliver that message.
The New York Times called Moroney “the reigning queen of sad-girl country.” TikTok calls her a “professional emo cowgirl.” But Cloud 9 suggests she’s becoming something bigger than either label. The album title is a play on words - being “down to cloud nine” because she’s so happy she’s above it all. It’s caused some confusion among fans. And maybe that’s fitting, because the line between anxiety and butterflies has never been harder to read. Being happy can feel just as disorienting as being heartbroken when you’ve been bracing for the worst your whole dating life.
Cloud 9 is the album of a girl walking out of the fairy tale and into real life. The glass slipper didn't fit. The forest was full of liars, not lions. Yet what Etta James was singing about in 1960 still holds true - and Moroney knows it: wanting a love that lasts past Saturday night isn't naive. It's healthy. But the reason Cloud 9 works isn't because it has all the answers about love. It's because Moroney turned the questions into songs worth listening to on repeat.
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