Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco's Adorable Valentine Album (2025)

Here’s a toast to the happy couple. For Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco, turning their love story into an album is the least they could do. I Said I Love You First is a valentine that delivers exactly what it promises — a pop icon and a superstar producer celebrating a real-life romance that we all can root for. As Selena once sang, it’s just like the Battle of Troy — there’s nothing subtle here. These two crazy kids are young, they’re in love, and they can’t keep their hands to themselves — well, they could, but why would they want to?

Selena and Benny really had no choice but to make this album, since they’ve already consummated their romance in the most public and official way — eating spicy wings on their instant-classic episode of Hot Ones. (Benny, after tasting the Sicilian Scorpion sauce: “I feel like I would have crumbled without her.” Selena: “You DID crumble.”)

But there’s a long pop tradition of valentine albums like this: who can forget when Cher and Gregg Allman made their newlywed album together as Allman and Woman, Two the Hard Way? Or John Lennon and Yoko Ono making entire albums where they did nothing but sigh each other’s names for minutes at a time? Beyoncé and Jay-Z taking over the Louvre for Everything Is Love? So why shouldn’t Selena and Benny celebrate their passion with songs about getting naked in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and touching in the summer rain?

Selena and Benny have worked together since long before they fell in love, and their musical chemistry is a crucial part of her story. Ten years ago, he was there when she found her adult voice on Revival, one of the era’s most innovative and influential pop albums. She spent that album getting a load of the poison bad-relationship mojo out of her system, but hey, now ain’t the time for your tears about whatever our girl might have suffered in her past romantic history, because as her pal Taylor likes to sing, all’s well that ends well.

Since Revival, her music output has been sparing — her 2020 comeback Rare and her 2021 Spanish-language EP Revelacion. But she’s just kept building her legend as one of the most universally beloved of pop icons, the one who did a cooking show from her mansion, Selena + Chef, based on the premise that until then she’d never even set foot in her own kitchen. She also revved up her acting career with Only Murders in the Building, stealing scenes from no less than Steve Martin and Martin Short. Remember just last month when the team won at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and Selena announced, “Marty and Steve aren’t here because, you know, they don’t really care”? Who else but Selena could give that line such an angel-face knife twist?

I Said I Love You First is crafted as a story spanning the years — it begins with a recording of the young Selena giving her weepy speech at the wrap party for The Wizards of Waverly Place, when she was just a Disney child star. The couple invite plenty of their famous friends along, teaming up with Finneas for “Scared of Loving You” (“If I lose my shit, promise not to laugh/If I throw a fit and get photographed”). Gracie Abrams bonds with Selena in the boppy pop-rock duet “Call Me When You Break Up.” There’s even “I Can’t Get Enough,” a years-old collab with J. Balvin and Tainy that already charted back in 2019.

The album peaks in the middle with a trio of bangers starting with “Sunset Blvd,” a romantic fantasy of coupling in the middle of the street until the cops arrive to pry them apart. Selena serenades Benny with lines like “Woman of few words, but for you I’d keep my mouth wide open.” It builds up to the Austin Powers-style raunch of the chorus where she pants, “I want that big, big, hard…heart!” “Cowboy” is a sensually lazy sex-on-the-range ballad, one of the album’s many tributes to Lana Del Rey, then takes a comic swerve at the end with an out-of-nowhere filthy guest rap from Glorilla. “Bluest Flame” is their fantastic disco reunion with longtime collaborator Charli XCX, who makes the song feel like a very Brat wedding toast.

“We live in a cruel world, Benny,” Selena informed her man on Hot Ones. So true, but Selena and Benny are doing their best to make it a little less cruel with the hopes and dreams of I Said I Love You First. Let’s hope we get many sequels to this album over the years to come, because the world needs all the uplifting pop-star love stories we can get.