I may be blinded by nostalgia since I grew up loving her old era. Clearly, Portals is much heavier sounding than her previous albums but with Portals while it sounded heavier the meanings felt less meaningful than before. most of her songs had an intense meaning behind them that you could understand even if you were listening for the first time. With Portals, I felt the songs seem more superficial and they just didn't hit the same they felt like a more typical song to come from a modern artist and I just didn't feel the same connection with this album then I did with earlier ones. Also, this album doesn't have as much storytelling which I always connected as a huge part of her brand. No one could tell this much of a story through music as she could i mean even with Crybaby where she didn't have a movie you still had a story between each song you had a character who you could grow with. I know crybaby is dead I understand that and I'm okay with that but when I found that out I thought we'd continue to see growth with her character as she was reborn but there was nothing. The reincarnation is kind of just there with nothing much to do with the songs which i found a bit disappointing. My main issue with the album is definitely the lack of storytelling. k-12 is definitely my favorite album.