Platinum (Miranda Lambert album)

Background

Lambert wrote or co-wrote eight of the album's 16 tracks. The album features collaborations with Little Big Town ("Smokin' and Drinkin'") and The Time Jumpers ("All That's Left"), as well as a duet with Carrie Underwood on "Somethin' Bad". Lambert and Underwood debuted the song at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards on May 18, 2014, and performed it again on June 4, during the CMT Music Awards. In support of Platinum, Lambert embarked on a concert tour of North America in mid 2014, featuring Justin Moore and Thomas Rhett as her opening acts.

Release and reception

Platinum was released by RCA Nashville on June 3, 2014. It debuted at number one on both the Billboard 200 and Top Country Albums charts while selling 180,000 copies in the United States, which was the highest first-sales week of Lambert's career. It was also her first album to reach the top of the Billboard 200, and marked her fifth consecutive number-one debut on the Top Country Albums, making her the first artist in the history of the chart to start her career with five number-one albums. It debuted at number one on the Canadian Albums Chart with first-week sales of 9,300 copies. On February 1, 2016, it was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). By September 2016, the album had sold 850,000 copies in the US.

Platinum received widespread acclaim from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 86, based on 11 reviews. Writing in Cuepoint, Robert Christgau hailed Platinum as the year's most daring and consummate big-budget record, featuring "apolitical de facto feminism at its countriest". New York Times critic Jon Caramanica found it "vivacious, clever and slickly rowdy", showing Lambert had finally become "a sophisticated radical, a wry country feminist and an artist learning to experiment widely but also with less abrasion". Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic said the record was shrewdly produced with Lambert's attempts at modern pop songs sequenced ahead of the more authentic country material, while Will Hermes wrote in Rolling Stone that Lambert incorporated both traditional and alternative elements from country into her homespun, feminine perspective. Spin magazine's Dan Hyman was less enthusiastic, singling out the collaborations on "Smokin' and Drinkin'" and "Something Bad" as contrived appeals to pop audiences on what was an otherwise consistent and carefully crafted record.

At the end of 2014, Platinum was voted the 12th best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics published by The Village Voice. Christgau, the poll's creator, named it the year's second best record in his year-end list for The Barnes & Noble Review. The album was also ranked fifth and nineteenth best by Rolling Stone and Spin, respectively. At the 2014 CMA Awards, it won in the "Album of the Year" category. It also earned Lambert the Best Country Album award at the 57th Grammy Awards in 2015.

Track listing

Source: Sony Music Nashville