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[thesinglesjukebox]

MARSHMELLO FT. KANE BROWN - "MILES ON IT"

They did another thing wrong...

[2.53]

Tim de Reuse: A terrifying peek behind the bro-country event horizon; the whole genre scrunched up like a loaf of Wonder Bread in a hydraulic press. The "guitar" is an alien, glassy thing, kept around out of habit and inertia like a vestigial organ. Marshmello's instrumental is coherent only if you don't actually try to pick out a single instrument from the haze. Commodity fetishism finally stripped of pretense, un-sublimated, all metaphor drifting away like diesel fumes, leaving only the genuine desire to achieve orgasm with your dick in a $60,000 luxury pickup. [1]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: That sounds mad uncomfortable, dude. [2]

TA Inskeep: I hate this ode to fucking in the back of a pickup for the following reasons: 1) grown men need to stop calling women "girl"; 2) a trad EDM-adjacent boom-bap shouldn't be all over mainstream country radio; 3) "we could break it in, if you know what I mean" is an utterly icky turn of phrase.  [0]

Iain Mew: The instrumental is cookin’ on about half a burner, but the bigger problem is an acute case of metaphor backwash. By the time you’re singing “you and me in a truck bed wide like a California King” you’re not using creative ambiguity, you’re just singing about having sex on the back of a truck. From there the "it" easily glides into being about the woman he's with; read that back into the already weird “these wheels are innocent”, plus “no history and you just can't fake that” and “let’s put some miles on it” and there’s some gross implications. Basically the song is too easy to read as Kane Brown waggling his eyebrows and saying “hey babe, let’s get together and depreciate your market value”. [2]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: At least it’s a significant improvement from the last rodeo.  [3]

Julian Axelrod: Now this is a song that could use a big Phil Collins drum fill. [5]

Ian Mathers: This actually feels less ersatz than Brown's own "I Can Feel It," but he's still pretty generic; the real surprise is that Marshmello keeps the boshing relatively restrained, which is a pity. It's not bad, wouldn't be mad if I heard it in the wild. But I am also going to take this blurb space to talk about a superior modern country song (and track I missed blurbing when I was inconveniently sick last month), Shaboozey's superior "A Bar Song (Tipsy)", which is an easy [10] and makes this feel even more milquetoast than it does in isolation. [5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Are there any good EDM/country crossovers? This is just emotionally flaccid grocery-store-core. [1]

Taylor Alatorre: Justice for Icona Pop. [3]

Jonathan Bradley: It should be exactly the wrong point in the nostalgia cycle for anyone to be resurrecting the festival EDM meets festival folk of Avicii's biggest hits... and it is! [2]

Hannah Jocelyn: One quarter of a single Mississippi and three quarters of "Wake Me Up" -- much less leaden than "I Can Feel It," and so it's more likable! [6]

Aaron Bergstrom: I have to assume the new truck is a replacement for the horse they've already beaten to death. [1]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Could not believe when this ended that it did not break the three-minute mark. [4]

Katherine St. Asaph: This is an awful single that stops trying to be a real song somewhere around the four-"miles on it"-mark. But if you replace everything but the backing track with the hook from "Timber," it becomes catchy, so sorry, I can't score it any lower.   [3]

Nortey Dowuona: "Fuck this movie." - Sean Burns [0]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

AYRA STARR FT. SEYI VIBEZ - "BAD VIBES"

We mostly vibe with this...

[6.78]

Kayla Beardslee: One of the greatest casualties of TSJ pausing coverage in fall 2022 was us not being able to review Ayra Starr’s luminous breakout single "Rush" and give it the [10]s it deserves. Ayra is only 21, but her voice has a depth and wisdom beyond her years that imbues her music with a sense of warmth, purpose, and true star quality. "Bad Vibes" doesn’t match the lofty heights of "Rush," and I prefer "Commas" among the singles off her new album, but it's really an embarrassment of riches -- I’ve heard a lot of Ayra Starr songs, and not a single one of them has been bad. [7]

Julian Axelrod: Ayra Starr's new album The Year I Turned 21 features a stacked guest list typical of any buzzy artist's sophomore effort, from Asake to Giveon to Coco Jones. So it's telling that the teaser singles were solo highlight "Commas" and "Bad Vibes," a collaboration with fellow Afrobeats up-and-comer Seyi Vibez, who has a tenth of his host's monthly listeners on Spotify. This time, Ayra's betting on herself: her songwriting, her voice, and her eye for talent. The sidewinding chanted chorus gives the track enough heft to counterbalance its airy vibe. But the backing choir nearly overpowers Ayra's agile runs, and by the time you get through two spins of the hook and a totally fine Seyi verse, Ayra's bridge almost feels like a feature on her own song. It's also the highlight, mixing a weary flow with delightfully oblique turns of phrase ("If something's coming, I'll see it through my lashes") that prove she's shrewd enough to land a hit without relying on star power. But by the end of the song, I still don't fully understand Starr's power. [6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Somehow more of an Asake track than the one that actually features him, “Bad Vibes” is mostly interesting because of the group chants and melancholy strings. There’s not much underneath all this, which means I’m mostly stuck thinking about how everything that made Asake enthralling has been reduced to pure vibes here, which was also my impression of Seyi Vibez’s album last year.  [4]

Nortey Dowuona: Ayra's continued success does prompt me to say that the homie ran background vocals for her on tour, and you should ask for her to do so too. Would've been a better use of Seyi Vibez too, tbh. [8]

Ian Mathers: Both named performers do a fine job, but honestly the whole thing could have been the massed group vocals (yes, including doing the currently solo parts) and I'd be just as happy, if not happier. [7]

Jonathan Bradley: Ayra Starr brings an American flow to these Nigerian beats, sounding reminiscent of Future or Young Thug as she raps "I'm leading a life that can clean me from my past shit/Burn all this money and leave it in my ashes." It forms an oddly familiar anchor for a tune that floats otherwise off into a blissful transcendence. The choir massed on the hook resists those who might throw bad vibes; I can't imagine negativity having any chance of finding a foothold on a beat so liquid, so cleansing. [8]

Taylor Alatorre: I've always found the "good vibes only" type of song to be superfluous at best and nauseating at worst, not least because it points to a trend of younger generations speaking like the marketers who are paid well to capture them (see also phrases like "FOMO" and "life hack," thankfully neither of which is a pop trope). "Bad Vibes" guards against this tendency by aiming not to conjure positivity out of nothing, but rather to ward off the negative feelings and events that it knows are always skulking nearby. "I need my enemies deceased" sits a bit uneasily next to the multiple appeals for God's heavenly favor, but Ayra Starr says it with such lightness in her voice that it feels like she's requesting it as a favor to them. Nothing wrong with raising the stakes of an otherwise inconsequential party song to Old Testament levels. [7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Well, the title's half accurate. [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Contrary-wise, the vibe here is quite good — especially in the interchange between the chanted, monolithic choir of the hook and the verses, where Ayra Starr and Seyi Vibez deftly trade boasts. They both sound so cool; obviously trying quite hard in the way of early twentysomethings since time immemorial, but here their effort enhances the performance rather than detract from it: by the end, I was fully bought into the experience. [7]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

CLAIRO - "SEXY TO SOMEONE"

Sexy to someone, [6]-y to us…

[6.40]

Katherine St. Asaph: A version of the shut-in femcel dispatch of "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" or Mitski's "Nobody," via the chill/listless resignation of Colleen Green's I Want to Grow Up, "Some People" specifically. I imagine the song will resonate with a lot of people, but for me it does nothing. This isn't a topic you can psychoanalyze without being a colossal jackass; your sexy is not my sexy, and your relationship to feeling "able to pull it off" is not mine, nor fixed forever. But "Sexy to Someone," as a song, is ostensibly about being wanted but never fully inhabits the idea of wanting. The music expresses low drama and low stakes, and the lyrics are full of hedging and disavowal -- sexiness as something one "can't live without" yet also "just a little thing," "sometimes," "nothing more." It's as if sexy were a nice little mood-booster like a cool spring day or a sweet platonic text from a friend, but you know, if it doesn't happen, whatever. That concept is utterly alien to how I experience it. Sexy, to me, is about urgency, about being caught in sudden freefall by a grappling hook of desire and fascination such that the most important thing in that moment is the person pulling you in, and about flinging your own hook down other cliffs to be seized. There are playful variations, lived-in variations, but none that are indifferent. I don't even think this is an especially unusual stance, but it's not particularly aligned with the current milieu -- c.f., "Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny" -- which is perhaps why newer songs about the topic feel so un-visceral. (I linked three songs; the timeline isn't perfectly chronological and the genres aren't totally the same, but notice how each crescendos less than the last.) But the culture isn't ready for that conversation. [5]

Hannah Jocelyn: I've been mostly indifferent to Clairo up to this point, but I'm not going to mince words: this is an amazing fucking song about the lack of amazing fucking. In my life I often feel loved but not really desired; maybe because I'm an autistic trans woman, maybe I'm just weird and it has nothing to do with my gender identity. This sounds like every time I've dressed up nicely to go to a concert and secretly gotten frustrated nobody notices me -- yeah yeah, self-love and all that, but I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be desired by someone else. What pushes this over has nothing to do with the conceit: I love how she repeats "Sexy to someone is all I really want/sometimes sexy to someone is all I really want", with the emphasis on seeexxyyyy and then the emphasis on sooommmeeoone. If the whole song was just different phrasings of that one line ("sexy to someone iiiiiisssss all I really want, sexy to someone is aalllllll I really want") it would be a [10], but the lovely woodwinds and piano nearly get it there anyway. [9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: In which Clairo nails the precise emotional intersection of “I’m depressed and can’t leave the house” and “I’m hot and want everyone to validate me.” Her tone is confessional and intimate; her soundscape is playful and cheeky. “Sexy to someone is all I really want,” her inner monologue deadpans. Mission accomplished.  [9]

Ian Mathers: The vocals are kind of undistinguished, especially at first. Once she locks into the "want to get out of the house" bits towards the end and starts singing more forcefully it works better. Luckily the production is more intriguing, especially those sharp little bursts of sound interrupting every so often. Unfortunately those taper off even as the singing gets stronger, as if we wouldn't want to risk the whole thing being interesting at once. [6]

Alfred Soto: Singing in this breathy manner lends this credible yearning for self-respect a coyness it doesn't need nor can support, but that's the point too. Self-deprecating because she has no choice, Clairo performs not-being-there with feeling. The filigrees rule: the bass splats, the bits of what sound like distorted woodwinds and piano. [7]

Taylor Alatorre: I can relate. Not to the song, mind you – carping about some failed Hollywood auditions when you’re a commercially successful rock musician, in the 2020s, will tend to preclude that. But yes, I can relate. [4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The lyrics are great, the music not so much. It certainly doesn’t have the charm of the Rostam productions she’s had in the past; the woozy synths and reverberating piano are a smidge too too tidy to capture the semi-listlessness that this wants to embody. [4]

Jonathan Bradley: It would be missing the point to wish for more from a song this small in intention and idle in its thoughts: the most exciting thing that happens is a coy melody line that appears in the mix like a needle has just been dropped on a gramophone record. Comfortable like a couch with too many cushions and sun-dappled, it lolls in a space that could be lazy or could be anhedonic. "I need a reason to get out of the house," Clairo muses, but even if she's at a loose end, her tune is too easygoing to crust over into malaise. [6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: "Sexy": really hard word to fit into a pop song that wants to take itself seriously! This is, of course, part of the point of "Sexy to Someone" — it is easy to convince oneself that the desire to be desired is a frivolous one, and here Clairo turns that questioning of a deep want into grist for the pop mill. It's thoughtful and fitfully funny and really not very good at all as a song. It recalls a lineage of too-clever chamber poppers, conjuring a burbling mellotron and a loping bassline to convey not much beyond a stately whimsy. It's restrained to a fault; there's no closure or rupture, just a gradual fade into nothing much at all.  [4]

Nortey Dowuona: Clairo is yearning and hungry. She needs a dollar to get some water after she's found somebody worth of her.  [10]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

WILLOW - "RUN!"

The first time we've covered Willow solo since "20th Century Girl" in 2011!

[6.82]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: A phenomenal parlor trick of a song. It begins enjoyably obnoxious from the jump and spends its entire runtime transforming its needling bassline and insistent drums into something even-keeled. The way everything interlocks at the end is the direct result of Willow’s vocals — she was always the ringleader. There’s even a moment that has the unfurling beauty of Steve Reich’s minimalism. It’s apt; there’s so much joy in hearing the real-time transformations here. [6]

Nortey Dowuona: Asher Bank, the drummer on this song, has the most difficult job: he has to recede for the vocals to take center stage, emerge in order to provide sharp transitions, settle into a smooth groove for the pre-chorus, then carefully carry the outro. More difficult yet, he leans heavily on the kick/snare/kick/kick/kick/snare pattern, largely keeping the hi-hats on a straight, flat drone with no wild tom runs or heavy drum fills to provide flavor. He stays in the pocket for drum engineer Zach Brown to keep him at a low level for Chris Greatti -- handler of piano/bass/acoustic guitar too!!? -- to record. Then Mitch McCarthy quiets the hi-hats and buries them in the mix, letting the kick and snare take starring roles next to the bass as the electric guitar and Willow's vocals drift high over them, rounded off and cocooned with reverb. Willow's voice is a helpless, frightened cry until she settles into her deeper, lower register as the drums pause, rush back toward the front of the mix, then slowly thump into the last bars of the outro, only the kicks heard. All in all, fine job by Bank. Willow sounds great too. [8]

Alfred Soto: Listening to "run!" blind I'd have assumed HAIM or somebody were responsible for the freakout-in-real-time vocal. The wonder is drummer Asher Bank, whose unpredictable patterns recall similar work on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. The star is Willow, whose performance complements the rhythm. [8]

Jonathan Bradley: Willow’s anxious shrieks and paranoid gasps demand stronger accompaniment than one and a half post-punk basslines and an admittedly satisfying clattery drum kit. [5]

Dave Moore: In the past few years Willow has quietly become the most incredible pop artist that you are begging to hear in a language you don't speak. But, much to my own surprise, I couldn't care less about the dippy poetry and therapyspeak -- the right syllables always seem stick to the right melodies and assemble themselves into the right songs. She's a genius.  [7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Willow's A-list family has, maybe paradoxically, caused their musical career to fall into relative obscurity compared to pop's A-list; casual listeners and jaded industry types have seemingly written her music off as nepo stuff that's safe to ignore. Which is a shame, because they're making more ambitious music, more deserving of being called "artpop," than many of the up-and-coming artists marketed in their stead. "Run!" is striking and angsty in a way that shares more in common with '90s singer-songwriters than '20s nu-pop-punkers. There are places in Willow's vocal where I would believe that someone spliced in a Tori Amos sample instead -- the inflections can be uncannily similar. (Well, OK, half the time who I actually hear is Charlotte Martin; close enough.) Docked a point for the outro, which is the sort of indulgent meandering that the doubters probably expected. [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: As with many of the great stars of alternative rock through the decades, it's hard to separate the craft from the shtick here. This annoys me in the nervy first half and still doesn't quite land itself in the repeated phrases of the spacier second half, but I can't help but be charmed by the song taken as a whole. To take big swings and fail interestingly is always more valorous than to just muddle through. [6]

Taylor Alatorre: Saves the Day had In Reverie, the Get Up Kids had On a Wire, Panic! had Pretty. Odd., and Willow has empathogen. Once you have chosen the path of the Emo Girl, there's no going back; record your self-consciously mature and classicist follow-up album, or perish. This is of course an oversimplification, since not even the sellout-iest of emo bands has a career path remotely comparable to Willow's. "I can't get out" is an appropriate grievance for someone with her profile, whether it's stemming from generalized anxiety disorder or the fact that "Whip My Hair" remains her highest-charting hit. Even while Willow is re-enacting a nervous breakdown, she's still the diligent aesthete, arranging her yelps and squawks in a painterly manner between the gaps in the skittering percussion. Then she suddenly realizes that the song's halfway over and she hasn't said the title yet, prompting a vision of escape that sounds like an extended cut of a sensitive Blink-182 bridge. It's pedestrian, it's predictable after 5 seconds, and it's still evocative enough to make me want to re-evaluate a certain therapeutic mantra. "'Wherever you go, there you are'?" Willow seems to ask. "Actually, dude, I was there, which sucked, and now I am here, which doesn't suck. Take that, mindfulness." [7]

Ian Mathers: I was one of the few positive outliers when we reviewed "Meet Me At Our Spot," and a lot of that was specifically Willow's vocals, so I'm nonplussed that for the first two-thirds here they don't do much for me at all. Might be the production, because during the last minute's worth of "runrunrunrunrun" bits the song does sound better to me. But instead of that section feeling like catharsis or fixation or something equally powerful, it just feels like they ran out of ideas. Better luck next time! [5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: One of my favorite under-discussed trends in music was the blues rock boom of the early 2010s. Alabama Shakes, Gary Clark Jr., Rival Sons, Kaleo, Hanni El Khatib, Blues Pills, Curtis Harding and Sinkane occasionally, Cage the Elephant and Royal Blood arguably. “Run!” is a near-perfect throwback to this era. Even the guitar tone sounds like it’s from The Black Keys’ Turn Blue, and Willow’s vocal delivery owes a debt to Brittany Howard and St. Vincent (who appears on this album). I’m biased toward giving “Run!” a good score simply because that was most of what I listened to as a teenager, but here’s the deciding factor: when Willow starts to drift away from the formula, she expertly dissolves the outro into dreamy exhilaration.  [8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Major theater kid vibes (non-pejorative).  [8]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

AESPA - "SUPERNOVA"

Not exactly dying stars...

[6.83]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: Aespa aren't rookies anymore, and that comes across. "Supernova" sounds like it could be a SHINee single from 2008–2013, were it on the Matrix soundtrack; it's exactly what I've been hoping for from Aespa since their debut, and it's the first time I've felt like I really get what they've been going for. The synths are scribbly and cosmic simultaneously, and the often lackadaisical vibes of previous releases has been replaced by a maniacal aplomb. There are some shouty bits, as is the current trend, but they're tempered by that uniquely SM tunefulness. and backed up by the controlled and well-tuned performances. Two of our most familiar and beloved SM-associated songwriters are involved -- Kenzie and Dem Jointz -- along with Paris Alexa, who as far as I can tell has her first K-pop production credit here. I would strongly encourage the powers that be at SM to keep working with her!  [9]

Jonathan Bradley: It should be exactly the wrong point in the nostalgia cycle for anyone to be resurrecting the EDM maximalism of LMFAO’s “Sexy and I Know It,” but aespa’s “Supernova” is satisfyingly gigantic. It launches with a bass thud suitable for a blockbuster movie title card and follows it with bristling bass swells that only avoid sounding out of control because it doesn’t seem possible that they might have been controlled in the first place. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: In the SM catalog, you can trace a song like “Supernova” back to f(x)’s “Red Light.” The problem for me is that despite all the fun elements, there’s no sense of release, no actual ecstasy, no goddamn hook. I’m dragged along for the ride, and it’s just the same self-serious melodies and whirring synths we’ve come to expect. The epicness is tiresome. [3]

Iain Mew: The bass noises revving up like an incomprehensible machine and the group strutting forward with purpose keep everything through to the first post-chorus escalating perfectly. From there they add a lot of stuff that ought to work as thrilling expansions, not least the gorgeous digital rain of synths, but the switch is a bit too hard, too fast. The song loses something without the single-mindedness. [6]

Taylor Alatorre: The smile that crept across my face when the bass-heavy rap breakdown got flipped into a "Planet Rock" sample -- sometimes life's simple pleasures really are all you need. Aside from that moment of dimension-hopping, "Supernova" is fully content to play around in the expansive yet finite limits that it sets for itself, guided only by its mission to recreate the scintillating highs of K-pop's second generation while avoiding the chintzier pratfalls. There's no attempt at transcendence here, and if any shedding of old identities has occurred, it's evident only in the external branding. But why let that stop you from enjoying the way Ningning punches her way through "bring the light of a dying star" as she crests the wave of that brain-tickling synth line? [8]

Ian Mathers: Finally, a song using supernova imagery that actually understands that a supernova is a dying star (to the point of explicitly calling it out in the lyrics). Would love if this were even more crunchy and compressed throughout (you know, really lean into it, like the way the vocal processing sometimes goes a bit wild on "nova"), but this is solid. [7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The conceit is frustratingly, exhaustingly executed—intense and bold and shiny but devoid of fun. It’s not a good thing when I have to check whether will.i.am is involved in the production.  [5]

Alfred Soto: Combining Femme Fatale-era Britney Spears elastic electro-boogie and the best of Destiny's Child, "Supernova" fucks with time and space with its bass line alone: the girls could tesseract with it. The illustrative lyrics matter just enough.  [8]

Mark Sinker: Songs about space and robots are always better than songs about love or sex -- wait it's about sex isn't   [9]

Katherine St. Asaph: Adds some playfulness and sonic variation to the long-lost, much-mourned-by-me 2010-11 pop formula -- "Blow," "Till the World Ends," "Bad Romance" -- without sacrificing any of the electrogoth maximalism, nor any tension or explosion. I miss when pop music sounded like this. [9]

Nortey Dowuona: I’m just here so Dem Joints won’t get fined. (Marshawn Lynch voice.) Also Lance Taylor need to stay his freaky ass inside. [3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Went from a standard piece of aespan shock-and-awe pop to something altogether sillier and more glorious the second that "Planet Rock"/"Trans-Europe Express" break comes in — as TSJ's longest-tenured aespa defender I feel so vindicated that they've finally figured how to make ten perfectly ridiculous seconds of pop music that they've always deserved. [8]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

POST MALONE FT. MORGAN WALLEN - "I HAD SOME HELP"

You've heard of post-punk and post-hardcore; here's post-wallen...

[4.00]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Chipper and catchy, the ideal PSA for male friendships based in toxic masculinity. Can't wait for "Teamwork makes the dreamwork/Hell, I had some help" to play at the cookout before the next insurrection while the bros believe in their hearts that they're the good guys!  [3]

Aaron Bergstrom: The "Blurred Lines" copyright lawsuit was a net negative for music as a whole. It was a cynical cash-grab, it was incorrectly decided, and it set a dangerous precedent for artistic freedom. On the other hand, it's not like people were lining up to defend that song, and there was a pleasant hit of schadenfreude in seeing a lowest-common-denominator vehicle for smug misogyny get its comeuppance, even if it was for the wrong reasons. So, all of that said, on the matter of "I Had Some Help": I'm not saying Tom Petty's estate should get involved here, but I'm not not saying that, either. [2]

Alfred Soto: I can't argue with the confidence of the verses -- that's how you drawl, kids -- and I admire the hint of ambiguity. Morgan Wallen's recorded enough songs in which he can't remember what he said and did before he passed out, what he's going to drink to help him recover from passing out, and the consequences of passing out too many nights a week; I can hear "I Had Some Help" directed at a buddy who let him down as much as at a woman, especially since in the male-male duet tradition he and Post Malone look like they wanna cootchie-cootchie-cool each other in the video. I don't need to hear it again, though it's not like Top 40 radio's helping. Sure hope Martha-Ann and Sam Alito spot the upside American flag in the video. [6]

Katherine St. Asaph: A breakup postmortem presented as an Am I The Asshole post that -- like many Am I The Asshole posts --  is noticeably vague about the specifics of the breakup, about what exactly "all the shit she did" was and how it supposedly counterbalances whatever shit he did. This isn't meant as moral indignation -- the song might well be better if it were more clearly an asshole's POV (and certainly more believable from Morgan Wallen). It's just hard to have an emotional response given nothing solid to respond to; the music certainly isn't contributing much there. [4]

Scott Mildenhall: How would America have felt if, on embracing DHT's "Listen to Your Heart", it had been rewarded with the lesser half of Clubland 4: The Night of Your Life? Delighted, if it had any sense -- wait til you meet Jurgen Vries! -- but you have to take things step by step. Hitting the rest of the world straight with this bottom-of-the-barrel bottom-of-a-bottle country is likewise something of a liberty. If it wasn't for the familiar throat frog of Malone, it would be the kind of wallpaper you can only buy at Home Depot. [4]

Jonathan Bradley: There are engaging stories to tell about two people who take one another to worse places than they could reach alone — John Darnielle has produced an entire song cycle demonstrating as much — but Morgs and Posty speak in such non-specific and evasive terms (count the clichés: throwing stones at glass houses, fucking “teamwork makes the dreamwork”) that I can’t trust them about the source of the toxicity in this relationship. That could well be the basis for a compelling dramatic irony, but it would also require a much nastier song than this breezy Tom Petty facsimile of an arrangement could tolerate. [4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Real poptimism has never been tried; if it had, there'd be reams of essays about this track, a true mega-hit floating above all the various pop conversation objects of the late spring. Instead, nothing. No reflections on the grand symbolism of this link-up, no canny narrativization of the continued Post Malone country-turn, no long-form exegesis on Morgan Wallen's fraught relationship with rap music and his own proclivity for racial slurs, no pondering of the state of the charts. We've got a paragraph in the New York Times, a third of a Chris Molanphy article, a anti-Post jeremiad in Saving Country Music, and not much else. This ought to be the "WAP" of dryness, a discourse schelling point, but the commentariat has fallen silent. The obvious conclusion here is that there's nothing to say about "I Had Some Help" — that I've written 120 words of this review without talking about the song perhaps serves as useful corroboration. But that's not quite right; "I Had Some Help," like every one of the great blank chart-topping colossi that these two men have been responsible for, is full of interesting little details if you listen to it enough times— that little "Help!" yelped after the chorus, the surprisingly delicate mandolin and fiddle interplay on the bridge, the way that the two vocalists reach towards harmonies they can't quite nail by the last chorus. Do these details add together to anything of worth? God, no. Perhaps the most intriguing thing is comparing their two approaches as singers — Wallen continues his honking reign of terror, bulldozing those melodies and sounding less like the charming rascal the song wants him to be and more like your best friend's worst boyfriend, but Malone sounds more pitiful and beautiful, leaning on the fucked-up choir-boy warble that has always lent his music a certain pathos. I'd like this more if he didn't have the help. [3]

Ian Mathers: Two great tastes that taste great together! [0]

Taylor Alatorre: Rest easy, reader: our beloved Posty has not gone full Rock n Roll Jesus just yet. What he and Wallen have done is inadvertently craft an anthem that better taps into the mindset of post-Cold War conservatism than any tryhard harangue by the likes of Kid Rock or Jason Aldean. The duo breeze through the nominal relationship angst with such airy detachment that the song's pretext easily outstrips the text: this is little more than an excuse to bring together two imperial-era megastars and have them act out their dented masculine stoicism at the altar of Tom Petty. And wouldn't you know it, each of them happens to be repping a different red state milieu: Post from the affluent North Texas suburb that trended blue so much it had to be redistricted, and Wallen from the rural Tennessee outpost that was side-eying Democrats even before the Civil Rights Act. The result is less musical fusion and more Buckleyite fusionism, with each artist giving up a bit of their distinctiveness so the partnership can coalesce as smoothly and inevitably as possible. This might be a complaint if it didn't end up sounding exactly as seamless as intended, barring some tin-eared Wallenisms like "us a-crumblin'." Everything else is built along a frictionless straight-line path that offers little opportunity for resistance, which is fitting for a song that's essentially about passing one's agency into the hands of another. Post and Wallen want to take us along for a ride in which they too are being taken along by someone, or more specifically dragged under. "Help!" they numbingly shout at us from some unseen subterranean place, sounding at first like punctuation and only over time registering as desperation. There's a hard-to-explain thrill in watching these avatars of white America willingly make themselves into the subaltern for a few minutes, bemoaning their limited range of choices under the accumulated weight of history. Personal responsibility is an overrated concept, they imply -- finally, some bipartisanship! On the one hand, "I Had Some Help" is the cri de coeur of the anti-anti-Trump voter, the kind who has little use for the man except as a corrective lesson, a Mandate of Heaven against the haughty overreaches of the liberal elite. In Swiftie terms, it's "Look What You Made Me Do" for people who either write for National Review or drive lifted trucks. On the other hand, whataboutism is all-American fun; that's why Both Sides Do It™. "You blame me, and baby, I blame you" -- himbo insight, maybe, but ain't that really the truth, in a century where politics on all sides is less and less about improving material outcomes, and more and more about the proper rationing of sympathy and apportionment of blame?  A nation of stadium crowds, 30,000 apiece, all screaming along to a jaunty country rocker about the joys of denying one's own free will -- America, what a country!  [8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I cannot deny how propulsive the verses sound here and how much the song suffers when nobody is singing. And just as I’m about to give up on it, the two deliver a bridge that brings it all together. This would go so hard at a wedding — I hope I get to dance to this at one soon. [6]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[thesinglesjukebox]

KEVIN ABSTRACT FT. LIL NAS X - "TENNESSEE"

You're the only fivepointsixseven I see...

[5.67]

Julian Axelrod: If you showed me the phrase "Tennessee by Kevin Abstract and Lil Nas X" in 2019, I'd have a pretty clear idea of what it would sound like: a raucous, rowdy take on queer country soaked in tequila and self-conscious irony. But five years and a million stylistic pivots later, it sounds like even these two don't know what sound they're trying to achieve. All the humor and charisma of their past work has been drained out in favor of... a limp line about genealogy? Water-logged Devstacks strings? A guest verse that sounds like Lil Nas X is committed to hitting the minimum word count and not a syllable more? I'm all for maturity and artistic evolution, but this feels like a comedic actor taking a dramatic role and begging, nay, daring you to take them seriously. If Kevin's going to officially release a song from his Coachella set, it should be Sky Ferreira's cover of "Need You Now." [5]

Alfred Soto: We need songs about guys cruising gyms, and BROCKHAMPTON'S ringleader and this decade's most florid star are the ones for the job. Why does "Tennessee" run out of song in its last minute? [6]

Nortey Dowuona: Learning that Romil was involved in this little gem is a delight. Quadeca and Devstacks both share credits with him, and there's loping, bouncy drum programming that bubbles to life as synths swirl to surround Kevin. His still very anonymous tenor struggles to carry the song to life before dropping a haymaker ("I just know that I love being used as long as it makes me feel loved") and disappearing into a sweeping, bizarro-world version of Frank. Lil Nas sweeps in to remind Kevin that the latter is like Kool G Rap, and just like in that fantastic video where the young Big Nas and the elder Kool G trade bars, the young'n has the better verse and the better career prospect. Kevin better get used to playing the back — it's one role he plays well. [7]

Katherine St. Asaph: I guess we don't currently have Frank Ocean at home. [4]

Jonathan Bradley: The synth storm overwhelms both rappers, both of whose presence is more agreeable than memorable. That's particularly concerning in the case of Lil Nas X, whom I didn't even notice on the track until my third listen or so. He's never been a rapper who brings actual bars to a track, but he's usually good for spectacle. Here's he's overshadowed by Kevin Abstract's Dune puns. [5]

Aaron Bergstrom: Kevin Abstract loves it that you don't know your ancestry. Lil Nas X isn't interested in your old lovers and relations. The past has no meaning here, and to prove it the two artists trade verses over an achingly wistful track that pulls off the neat trick of creating a frozen present moment that seems pre-nostalgic for itself. [7]

Taylor Alatorre: The strange fetishization of rootlessness makes more sense when you consider that every artist involved here, including the producer Quadeca, is an "internet rapper" in the mostly non-pejorative sense. If Genius is to be believed, even the line "I love my phone, that's my device" is a reference to an Instagram post by Jane Remover, bringing us to hypercubic levels of Too Online. To be cut off from one's ancestral past is usually presented as a tragedy, but here it correlates with self-invention, blank slates, the eradication of borders and prejudices and other dusty concepts from the Hacker Manifesto. A fragile kind of utopia, and both performers seem aware of this — those "past lovers and relations" don't disappear just because we wish them to. Yet the allure of that utopianism has never fully dimmed, as shown by Kevin Abstract's willingness to lightly debase his own lyricism in order to give himself over to a grander, more spontaneous vision. "Tennessee" doesn't preach the gospel of cringe as hyperpop and its sister genres do, but it does have a native fluency in cringe, accepting it as the price of entry for communicating to another just who "all of me" really is. [6]

Ian Mathers: Ever been so mutually horny with someone you get a headrush like the edible just hit? Yeah, it's nice. [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: All of this just to refrain from making a "ten I see" joke? What happened to decency? [4]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[thesinglesjukebox]

TEMS - "LOVE ME JEJE"

We're on her wave right now...

[8.09]

Alfred Soto: Seyi Sodimu's 1997 "Love Me JeJe" serves as the foundation for this delightful thing, a popiano groover which like many of its best songs doesn't insist on itself but has a way of insinuating itself.  [8]

Aaron Bergstrom: Last year, in a conversation for Interview, Kendrick Lamar asked Tems how she avoided being pigeonholed as an artist. In a surprisingly combative response, she took great pains to distance herself from Afrobeats specifically, Nigerian music generally, and everyone telling her that audiences would only accept her if she presented herself and her music in a certain way. ("It’s not that your music is bad, it’s just that it doesn’t fit in Nigeria. Nigerians don’t like this.") While she tried to spin it as me-against-the-world motivation, I came away from the interview exhausted on her behalf, overwhelmed by the idea that she would always be locked in a battle against forces that would seek to flatten her into a stereotype just because of the place she was born. With all of that as prologue, "Love Me JeJe" is a miracle in its weightlessness. Here is Tems at peace, unquestionably an individual but also unquestionably the product of her environment. Here is Tems effortlessly breathing new life into a familiar Nigerian hit that was originally released when she was two years old. Here is Tems gliding through the streets of Lagos as if floating, as if she came out the other side of her fight for individuality with the confidence that she won't lose herself.  [9]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Every Tems single this decade has been a little masterpiece; this is no different. But it is different — this is the most comfortable she's sounded on record, her performance filled with the little grace notes and playful asides that only come when a singer is in their element. "Damages" and the other singles off For Broken Ears were beautiful showcases for Tems' voice, but she largely stuck to grand gestures, melodies that spread across the sonic canvas like she was singing arias, gorgeous and lonely. "Love Me JeJe" feels tender in a way that her music never has, a warm and lovely party of a song — nostalgic not just in its invocation of Seyi Sodimu but in its whole feel, those call-and-response vocals and that "Heartbeats"-esque guitar riff invoking an endless succession of warm summer nights. Every note feels like an invitation to the sublime; even just in the way she subtly adjusts the emphasis the last time she calls to her lover, turning a note of devotion into something more flirtatious. The best pop songs we write about here are the ones that are worlds in themselves, self-sustaining systems of sound that seem to unfold further and reveal more to love about them with every listen. "Love Me JeJe" is one of those worlds. [10]

Julian Axelrod: Until this year, Tems' voice felt like a rare and incredibly valuable natural resource, meted out over a few sparse EPs and occasionally used to apply a lacquer of prestige to a Marvel soundtrack or an air of gravity to a Future beat. It's been hard to know the singer through the songs, but "Love Me JeJe" feels like the fullest picture of Tems we've heard so far. She sounds looser and freer than ever, but her voice has never sounded richer, whether soaring or scatting or talking shit in the studio. The song is presented as not just a reinterpretation of the Seyi Sodimu song of the same name, but as an homage. And whether this is an act of earnest homage or an attempt to avoid a lawsuit, it's incredibly charming to hear Tems sing its refrain almost to herself, like it's been stuck in her head for years. It feels like an act of adaptation that tells you as much about the singer as the song. [8]

Nortey Dowuona: The way Tems sings speaks to me. It's a modal tone, so comfortable and gentle; her voice floats comfortably in her chest register and feels as if she is talking to you, explaining something very difficult. Tems may arc into little peals and soft whole notes, but she stays in her range, tantalizing and lively, showing the loyalty and tenderness she sings about. On the tail end, she simply jokes: "Why won't you just open your mouth and say something?" It's such a gentle rhetorical question, a taunt a lover would say to you as their friend rightfully points out your fraidy-cat tendencies. It's a simple moment of in-studio banter, and it fits the actual lyrics so smoothly, cresting as soon as it reaches its end, ebbing into the sea. [10]

Jonathan Bradley: Tems is too chill here for me to call her shuffling West Africans rhythms upbeat, but she lets her words ("I need and I need and I need and I need you more) cascade over one another with a lovely liveliness. "I'm on your wave right now," she confides, and little flourishes of highlife guitar endorse the intimacy. The convivial call-and-response — "love me tender" — enhances the coziness; "Love Me JeJe" relaxes into the comfort of familiar company. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: "I'm on your wave right now" is such a beautiful declaration. Tems sings it with an assurance of what it implies, of an unshakable bond with a future and past. She makes that known with the call-and-response interpolations; it is quietly pleasurable in the way that all in-jokes are when worked into everyday conversation. Those who don't know the Seyi Sodimu original can still feel its familiarity: it's the sound of a love that has stood the test of time, that has always felt eternal, that is capable of endless shared memories. [8]

Ian Mathers: Some love songs are overtly intense (wonderfully or horribly so), but this one succeeds by seeming, if not casual, at least laid back. A low-key ode to sharing a wavelength with someone, with that playful little guitar lick pealing away in the background over rim taps, there's a confidence and joy practically embedded in the music here that's infectious. [8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Infinite and intimate, tender and timeless, warm and unwavering. Tems’ voice sounds like golden rays of sunshine, and if this summer fulfills its full romantic potential, I’ll come back and change this to a [10]. [8]

Katherine St. Asaph: "Relaxed" and "breezy" are not mutually exclusive with "mid." [5]

Will Adams: Simply gorgeous. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[thesinglesjukebox]

RM - "COME BACK TO ME"

Permission to shower?

[5.17]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: BTS' thoughtful leader, RM, is actively rejecting the aggressively populist tropes his group has traded in for the past five years or so. "Come Back To Me" is a pretty nice song! Languidly downtempo, minimally arranged, acoustically instrumented — it's a trope in and of itself how much this song slots in the playbook of the post-boy group redefinition in progress. OHHYUK's production is the dominant attribute, which is not a bad thing but perhaps not quite what one would expect from a release from a BTS member. RM's vocals kind of drift on by indistinctly — so, perhaps less of an active rejection of the boy group tropes than a meditation. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: RM takes the typical café-friendly Korean ballad and makes it "respectable," bringing on OHHYUK and Sunset Rollercoaster's frontman. The result is something closer to the former's music but with a faux-deep seriousness (a common problem with BTS solo projects). The switching between English and Korean is fun, highlighting the differences in mood between both languages, but this is a song whose relaxed mood is too manicured and labored over. RM is in the shadow of the 2017 class of KRNB artists who could do this stuff effortlessly, from Rad Museum to 2xxx to offonoff. [4]

Nortey Dowuona: Apparently Sunset Rollercoaster were in the off-hours playlist. I hope none of my fellow writers who suffered the shocking betrayal of 2022 by Lil Yachty are surprised by this. I was though, so I will close my mouth. Praise Kuo for his fantastic guitar riffs, praise OHHYUK for having the good sense to trust RM to stick to his range so the Melodyning wasn't v obvious, and condemn Tame Impala for teaching young men my age all over the world the best way to make guitar driven music is to lock it in Logic.  [10]

Michael Hong: RM assembled some of Asian indie's biggest — here, he's got Hyukoh's OHHYUK and Sunset Rollercoaster's Tseng Kuo-hung — for an album engineered to sound tasteful. The result feels like a room dressed in the soft lighting and refined fixtures meant to look stylish but never lived-in. Beyond the pleasantness, "Come Back to Me" feels like nothing: a cursory outline of feelings sluggishly pulled together into roll credits that work better closing out the album than they do as a lead single. Even in the case of the former, it still sounds uninspired. [2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There's a cafe that I go to in my neighborhood fairly often — I'm not a regular or anything, but I know the different baristas and their tastes. There's a set that lean towards crowdpleasers: Motown, lite-'80s pop, some of the sunnier elements of the Jason Mraz-wave of the 2000s. Some lean more toward the Boygenius-National-Bon Iver constellation, and then a few more opt for even more anonymous choices: piano covers of pop hits, lo-fi beats to study and relax to. "Come Back to Me" is one of the few songs that could slot into any of their playlists, a pleasingly blank object with just enough heavy-handed marks of artistry that it sounds bespoke. [5]

Ian Mathers: This feels almost aggressively shapeless, and I mean that as a compliment. "I forgot the hour/I don't want to know about the hour" is pretty much the mood the song both engenders and reflects, and even when it hits a kind of stumbling crescendo, there something appealingly weary and wary about it. It kind of reminds me of Jack Johnson, but for once I don't mean that as a pejorative. [7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Drifts perilously close (and the verb here truly is "drifts") toward a set of sounds I normally don't love: Post Malone, How to Dress Well, Jack Johnson, "The Lazy Song." RM alternates between barely trying to sing and trying way, way too hard. Yet while I still don't love this, I like it well enough. He sounds genuinely introspective, maybe that's why. [6]

Alfred Soto: Maybe I'd prefer it in Korean, but I suspect it would sound like Post Malone or something. [3]

TA Inskeep: So sleepy it feels as if he took some Ambien before recording. I miss the old Rap Monster of “Do You.” [3]

Will Adams: If you're willing to put up with the first two minutes of post-coital guitar noodling from your worst college hookup, you'll be rewarded with four minutes of blazed-out relaxation on a blanket on the quad after finals week is over. Your mileage will vary based on how fondly you recall your college years. [5]

Mark Sinker: Every time I had this playing while I worked – concentrating, barely even half listening probably – I was loving it, for the mood and the simplicity and the whistling; for the husky lightness at the edge of my attention. And I like that even when you point your thinking listening mind at it, it’s still not much more than a feather dodging your grasp. It doesn’t firm up or settle or clarify, quite the opposite.   [7]

Jonathan Bradley: At close to a third of the way through these six-and-a-half interminable minutes, RM allows some drums to kick into his dorm room serenade, suggesting he has Anderson .Paak's stoned beach-soul headiness in mind for "Come Back to Me," rather than a deliberate attempt to whistle his way into Jack Johnson's deck chair. "I forgot to shower," he muses, and I think he's trying to suggest there's something filthy about his attempt at funk; he does, after all, pronounce "staying good" as if he hopes listeners might hear "stank good." Get dressed, dude. Use some deodorant. [3]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[thesinglesjukebox]

MIRANDA LAMBERT - "WRANGLERS"

Use promo code "JUKEBOX" at checkout to get 20% off your first pair of jeans...

[5.36]

Alfred Soto: She didn't write a note or a word for this, and I can tell. It's as if someone typed "Gunpowder and Lead" and "Mama's Broken Heart" into ChatGPT and out came "Wranglers." The brawny production hinders: every rote syllable gets punched up. [4]

Aaron Bergstrom: Miranda Lambert knows her way around a great revenge song, so I have no idea how something as bloodless as "Wranglers" made it past quality control. This sounds like if "Kerosene" was taken over by a hedge fund. [4]

Nortey Dowuona: Someone needs to get Audra Mae on the record on how long Wranglers take to burn. We would all learn a great deal. I mean, they're jeans, how long do they -- wait. [10]

Ian Mathers: See, other jeans burn like this [crowd goes "ooooh"] but Wranglers burn like this [crowd loses it, uproarious laughter]. Wranglers be burnin', amirite folks? [crowd goes absolutely feral with joy, rips up seats, destroys stadium] [6]

Katherine St. Asaph: As a bar, "Wranglers take forever to burn" sounds badass until you think about it -- so you're what, waiting around your no-good ex's house for a couple hours watching yourself fail to commit arson? As a piece of maybe-product placement, it's no "Wrangler butts drive the cowgirls nuts." [5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Just as schlocky as Chris Stapleton's take on prestige-country RAWK; just as charming, too -- you get the sense that Lambert knows she could do a little better than replicating the feel of "The Chain" for the Taylor Sheridan aesthetic universe, but she's clearly having fun. The drums unfortunately sound like Stadium Arcadium-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, but everything else is gorgeously-wrought in the way that Lambert's best singles sound: it's not subtle and brilliant in the way that "Bluebird" or "Vice" were, but even unsubtle Lambert can be an exceedingly good time. [7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The way that the chorus descends -- as if engulfed by flames and consumed by vitriol -- is satisfying as hell. This one is for your inner pyro.  [7]

Taylor Alatorre: One of the purposes of a song like "Wranglers," even if Lambert will deny this, is to demonstrate how much more "real" its performer is than Nashville newcomers like, for instance, Dasha. Which is fine on its own: gatekeeping, in forms both benign and ugly, has been a country tradition since it was still being called "hillbilly music," and it makes more sense to police the authentic in a genre whose very name embeds it in the soil. Lambert certainly sounds more comfortable tossing around the signifiers of battle-scarred, woman-scorned country than Dasha does -- maybe too comfortable, if all the instant "Kerosene" comparisons are any indication. But there's one fatal flaw that "Wranglers" shares with "Austin," and it's the intended wham line in the chorus that serves only to douse the narrative in the cold waters of an anti-climax. Steer your mind away from the familiar abstractions of vengeance and female autonomy, and actually picture what Lambert is asking us to picture here: does a pile of faded blue jeans burning in the desert sun for half an hour longer than expected really sound all that satisfying to observe? Why write a revenge fantasy where it can be assumed that the revenger is impatiently checking her watch every few minutes, waiting for the fantasy to be over already? [3]

Jonathan Bradley: A far cry from “Kerosene” or “Gunpowder and Lead,” what’s supposed to be a barn-burner turns out to be a damp squib due to a muddy mix that chokes the guitar in indistinct haze, taking Lambert’s own voice with it. Soggy kindling results in little heat and so much smoke you can’t make out much of anything at all. [4]

Mark Sinker: A pop song is after all no more than a cluster of commodities circulating within a set of interlinked markets -- so how is a Brit listener my age (me) still faintly rattled when said song’s burden is a straight-up major brand-name placement? As if that’s somehow not allowed (or anyway not really cricket). Blame the BBC’s straight-up long-term ban on any hint of advertising in anything they broadcast, and the penumbras of ideology beneath and alongside that ban, the smoke and the steel shaping my inner mind: it’s like The Who never Sold Out; like the late Nick Kamen kept his laundrette Levis on to Marvin’s “Grapevine,” like Sigue Sigue Sputnik never sold literal ad-space slots on their first LP (for L’Oréal, EMI, i-D magazine and more); it’s like Run DMC went barefoot. I escaped it enough that Vybz Kartel, Gaza Slim and Popcaan excitedly hymning their nice new furry suede shoes is one of my all-time favourite Jukebox entries. Sadly this is no “Clarks”: after a misleading Morricone lens-flare it slumps quickly into charred serge and claggy ash. No ethical immolation under capitalism! [5]

Michael Hong: If this is Miranda's attempt at returning to being the shit-talker and the fire starter, well, it sounds like she's got her kindling stacked too neatly and forgotten her matchbook at home. [4]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[thesinglesjukebox]

CASH COBAIN X BAY SWAG FT. ICE SPICE - "FISHERRR (REMIX)"

Contrrroverrrsy...

[5.83]

Julian Axelrod: Sexual attraction is intangible and unpredictable, and the same can be said of sexy drill, the cartoonishly horny offshoot of New York rap that's currently approaching a new cultural apex. When I first heard Cash Cobain and Chow Lee's 2 SLIZZY 2 SEXY, I was baffled and a little unnerved. A year later, I revisit it at least once a week. But while "Fisherrr" lacks the neon samples and class clown chemistry of Cash at his most unhinged, it's subtle and refined enough to suggest this micro genre might have legs. Bay Swag's no Chow Lee, but the way he volleys verses with Cash grounds the song in a classic New York hip hop framework, like the Beastie Boys if they never evolved beyond their penis balloon era. Ice Spice rises to the occasion with one of her most engaged performances in recent memory, trading diapers and delis for dinner dates and Danimals. (At the very least, she acquits herself better than other recent A-list attempts to jump on the sexy bandwagon.) The masterstroke (sorry) comes (sorry) almost two minutes in, when the insistent ticking of those signature drill hi-hats explodes into a flurry of drums that hit like a confetti cannon at the end of a Knicks game. It's a sublime moment of musical edging that suggests Cash Cobain's sound could go deeper (sorry) than anyone expected. [8]

TA Inskeep: The low-key almost lo-fi-ness of this grabs me hard and won't let go: it's mostly just some synth chords and a click track backing up Cobain and Swag, both of whom have oddly appealing voices. (Normally I'm allergic to the Auto-Tune they're using, but here it functions more like another instrument.) A bassline doesn't even show up until almost two minutes in; it also helps that it appears while Ice Spice is dropping her sharp guest verse. This goes so soft it goes hard, y'know? If this is archetypal "sexy drill," I may well be all in. [9]

Alfred Soto: The year's oddest track: a series of monologues, bits of which unintelligible, that end in a long u over a click track and basic keyboard chords. Drill baby drill! [9]

Tim de Reuse: Under a distant, high string pad, an eerily peaceful chord progression chimes out. Ice's flow is so relaxed he could melt. Bay Swag leads us to a gorgeous beat drop that threatens to escalate but quickly disappears. As I drift off I'm contemplating how to give head like you're playing a flute. I have dreams that are very funny, but I don't remember much about them. [6]

Taylor Alatorre: Where exactly is the line that separates the minimalist from the incomplete? If a beat drops without having received any discernable build-up, can it really be said to have "dropped" at all? Is the traditional hook obsolete in a world where any slightly off-kilter remark about the fatness of an ass can become a marketable byword? Such are the questions raised by "Fisherrr," and I have as much interest in answering them as Ice Spice has an interest in filling in the track's fundamental blankness. "Giving Betty Boop" is a line in sore need of a better home. [2]

Nortey Dowuona: Cash and Bay are lithe, nimble rappers, but they are not stars in the way Ice Spice is. Their ability to build compelling and catchy flows is good for making good songs that can fill a dance floor, but it's not the kind that's interesting to normal people who don't give a fuck about music. Ice does possess that quality (though not in spades). Her tone is cool, relaxed and calm, one that can afford to be a bit less lithe and more clumsy, so it doesn't fit over the light hi-hat pattern both Cash and Bay ride comfortably in a way that (quietly) AZ might like. But once the heavy kicks that swamp out the mix touch down, heavy handed and loud, Ice's tone feels more comfortable in this terrain, glittering and gliding between the kicks and snares. Even the return of Cash and Bay feels, rightly so, like they're playing on her terms -- and it's their song. They even leave with less of an impression, so I guess they couldn't make a baddie fall in love with them. (They'll have better luck with my homegirls, tho! They're so quirky!) [10]

Ian Mathers: Sometimes being laid back is a flex unto itself -- which admittedly has kind of always been Ice Spice's thing, but she's doing it a little differently here, in a way that meshes with the other two rappers and the varying layers of percussion in the production. Plus we get a reminder to eat our oats and vegetables! [6]

Aaron Bergstrom: As a song, it's forgettable. As a debate about whether "your rice and your cabbage" or "my oats and my vegetables" is the better thicc-ness diet, it's frustratingly inconclusive. [3]

Katherine St. Asaph: I feel like if a brand advertises itself as "Kids' Yogurt," you should probably compare your pussy to something else. [2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Thrilling by virtue of being very, very boring. This trio (Ice Spice clearly stitched in later, but who cares?) rap like they're narrating speedrunning tutorials or day-in-the-life TikToks; they don't float over the beat but get subsumed by it, hitting hypnotic patterns and reflex-like tics in ways that compel even as they're hard to explain. There's barely even a hook, just that "for surrrrrre," drawled out like that high-pitched synth sustained over the song's length. They aren't doing much -- despite the ~sexy drill~ hype, "Fisherrr" isn't, like, that horny. Instead, it captures the lazy joy of flirting out into the aether, of just saying shit out of pure love of saying it. I could probably listen to this for twenty four hours on loop. [7]

Jonathan Bradley: Rap homeopathy: synth vapor and sex rhymes present in such trace amounts that any effect they might have is coincidental. I’d say Cash Cobain and Ice Spice have chemistry, but I fear that would be pseudoscience. [4]

Will Adams: Woozy in the wrong way. [4]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[thesinglesjukebox]

TOMMY RICHMAN - "MILLION DOLLAR BABY"

Depressing math problem: how many streams of this song would it take for Mr. Richman to achieve its title status...

[6.92]

Tim de Reuse: In the TikTok age, when something goes megaviral and catapults an unknown into multi-platinum status, it's usually got, you know, a sound in it: something momentary, immediate, salty and fatty yet ephemeral and light, instantly repeatable, easily recontextualized. What single melodic hook or sound-flourish defines this song's insane popularity? It has found a way to not need one, opting instead to appeal by oozing personality out of every measure. The instrumental is bracingly dry, bright and spiky, with all atmosphere created by an uncountable set of overlapping, processed voices, braiding around each other, leaving no clear single path for your attention to follow. My favorite touch: the crunchy, dissonant minor seconds that are punched out by that synth right in the middle of the mix. The miracle here is that of a stylistic confidence, in composition and sound design, insistent enough to be as addictive as any melodic hook. [8]

Alfred Soto: Watching this model of simplicity -- beatbox, awkward falsetto, fat Miami bass -- go top five made my year. Like other flukes it justified itself. I expect no follow-up. [9]

Kylo Nocom: Great in parts: sticky funk synths, a slowed vocal sample, and some whining backing harmonies make for an impressive, cross-generationally likable cross-section of R&B. Unfortunately, the tune itself is lacking in small but vital ways, and not for the "TikTok era" song-length reasons that so many pop listeners bemoan. The chorus has a slight awkwardness that makes for increasingly grating relistens; the verse is negligible. Richman might be Brent Faiyaz's protégé, but the falsetto errs too close to Justin Vernon shoutiness for my liking. His voice is best as pure texture, so check out the "VHS" version to hear this in its peak form: densely-boosted bass clashing against strained vocal runs in a bid for primacy. It's close to what pop's decades-enduring noise vs. melody juxtaposition should be in 2024, a lineage traceable all the way back to the Wall of Sound and beyond. Gripes with this song aside, I still have hopes that this guy's got it: a recent TikTok snippet has the melodic immediacy I wish was here. [6]

Nortey Dowuona: I don't like you praising Rick Rubin, so I initiate the beef. Fuck those faux Timbaland beats, let's see you push Danja's teeth! You better off hiding his falloff than worming up to me, he's Tim Mosley, I'm Tim Curry, I'm zapping peeps. [4]

Aaron Bergstrom: Just to be clear, when I say "this dude gives me Kreayshawn vibes," what I mean is "hell yeah bouncy novelty summer jam goodness," not "I would like to have an exhausting and ultimately meaningless conversation about race." Thank you.  [8]

Taylor Alatorre: Ariel Pink if he had grown up watching MTV Jams instead of 120 Minutes, except that actually sounds like something with the hypothetical potential to be cool. Tommy Richman was born in 2000 and not 1987, but "Ariel Pink if he had grown up watching curated YouTube playlists" doesn't have the same internal symmetry. This isn't the first digital native to exploit a pan-generational Pavlovian affinity with the 808 cowbell, and it surely won't be the last. [4]

TA Inskeep: I like the vibe he's going for, and I wanna love it ('90s R&B yes please), but this is a series of Casio keyboard presets in search of a song. [5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Whenever someone unexpected lands a huge hit, I love looking back at their previous discography to see what made this song specifically click. (Just in case there's a One Hit Wonderland episode someday.) Many of Richman’s other songs exist somewhere at the intersection of Jai Paul, Chic, and Trilogy-era The Weeknd, which is theoretically a fun mix, but they’re largely hookless and nondescript. Where's the hook in “Million Dollar Baby”? Technically the chorus, but it's this production that really makes it bang. The ominous pitch-shifted chant (apparently just "do what I should think," according to Genius, which is a little disappointing). The beeps, which are doing a shocking amount of atmospheric heavy lifting. The "oooooohs". It all builds into a particularly grim kind of sleazy desperation. (This is a compliment.) [8]

Jonathan Bradley: What does the Commonwealth of Virginia have to offer us in 2024? Rumors of Drake's hidden progeny still echoing long after Pusha T first whispered them? A download-only Pharrell Williams album? Missy Elliott being accepted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? How about some rando signed by Brent Faiyaz exhuming the one-part soul, two-parts trunk rattler sound of UGK's country rap tunes and sending it to the upper reaches of pop charts around the world? That will do nicely, thank you. [9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: However funky and fun this will sound all summer long, it’s in spite of Tommy Richman, who sounds underwater and gasping for breath.  [5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Tommy Richman, a rando whose every photo has the distinctive pose of a college freshman trying to look badass, was largely unknown before 2024 except for (checks Google search-by-date) a Complex roundup, an interview about how he idolizes Andy Serkis and Dennis Rodman, and probably some PR juice behind the scenes. This guy listens to some dirty funk and R&B, attempts to match its freak, and... doesn't fail? Must be my critical faculties that are failing. [6]

Ian Mathers: Okay, I'm aware the background genres are very distinct (fuckboy funk-rap here, fuckboy post-punk there), but am I the only one kinda reminded of that Artemas song we covered last month? There's a similarity in vibe (although Richman seems less odious), they both basically just figure out a good hook repeat it for a little over two minutes and that's it, and I suspect the natural environment for each is driving around the city at night in the summer. They feel like beefed up interludes or parts of songs (not a complaint, honestly!). Or am I just telling on myself by revealing I'm too old for TikTok? [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Every time I listen to this I feel like I'm moving further and further away from sanity. This is not a pop hit but a funhouse mirror version of one, a misremembered version of every year between 1989 and 1998 thrown into a blender and then reconstituted; Tommy Richman's falsetto is possessed by an amateurish sort of confidence that ought to have annoyed me to death after a month of this song's omnipresence. Yet every time I hear this song -- whether by my own choice or as it blasts at dangerous volumes from passing cars -- I am all the more endeared to it. The bass, whether VHS-boosted or not, activates something within me that disarms all critical impulse; I feel swallowed up by this groove as much as I enjoy it. It's the kind of song that defies analysis -- what am I going to do, write a 4,000 word essay on the transformative power of Tommy fucking Richman? Those stacks of harmonies, those radar synths and cowbell pops and dense chord stabs: they talk enough for me, self-evident of the delirious craftsmanship of this track. People valorize the garage rock and avant folk savants of the 1960s -- the Alex Chiltons and Norma Tanegas of the world -- and I get it; this feels something like that transplanted to the modern context, a little pop symphony that sounds not quite like anything else in the world. A small miracle of the song; let me stop writing before I embarrass myself any further. [10]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

NEWJEANS - "HOW SWEET"

Breaking up: it's like sugar sometimes...

[6.69]

Rachel Saywitz: NewJeans has found a comfortable home in the production of DJ and electro-trot producer 250, whose musical style has become so singular that I'd start putting him up there with some of the other K-pop producing greats like Brave Brothers, the late Shinsadong Tiger, or Sweetune. His method continues to work well on "How Sweet": adding a little shimmering twist to American club genres (Miami bass in this case), seamless transitions from section to section, and the light vocal touch of every girl's vocals. But, as with the greats, I sense a slight loss of luster with the constant repetition. How many underground genres is 250 going to fish out of the Western world's murky waters to can up and ship out with a shiny new label? The catches are going to dry up eventually. [7]

Kayla Beardslee: NewJeans’ early singles smashed, bringing them ridiculous and unprecedented success for a first-year K-pop rookie group, because they delivered masterfully crafted pop songs in deceptively simple packaging. "Hype Boy" plows through enough memorable hooks for an entire album in a minute and a half, yet sounds so breezy and youthfully optimistic that the music doesn’t feel like work at all. Beneath the soft swells and whispers of "Ditto" is an instrumental that has a beautifully subtle touch with intimacy and a topline that stays in constant motion even as it tantalizingly holds itself back. In comparison, “How Sweet” is more of an underachieving graduate of the Tortured Poets school of songwriting. In each section of the song, they pick one melody with a limited dynamic range, hammer it into the ground, then tick the box and move on. For a Coca-Cola ad, it’s pretty flat.  [5]

Mark Sinker: Chirpy song about how breaking up with u is great and also v easy bcz u suck and I never liked u! Happily the real-world backdrop (MASSIVE INDUSTRY DRAMA pitting label against manager) cannot possibly ground this as a metaphor. The delivery turns the tale of the change from oops non-allegory into smilingly blank-faced stonewall. [7]

Iain Mew: They stretch simplicity as a virtue further than ever, relying almost entirely on immaculate floaty vibes. The almost is crucial, though; the "...now that I'm without you" kicker adds just enough bitterness to keep this from  feeling completely blank. [8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: "How Sweet" is one of the most powerful kiss-offs we've had in years because it treats the end of a relationship as something so effortless, so natural, "like biting an apple." Even when lines are acerbic ("toxic lover, you're no better"), they are delivered with the exact amount of lift needed to signal both disgust and nonchalance. NewJeans do not care about this ex anymore, and they wield their restraint with grace; this is living well as the best revenge, and the song is potent because it feels like mist on a hot summer day. Producer 250 has always known how to excavate the potential of a minimalist pop song, and he's found an especially strong avenue here with the skeleton of an Atlanta bass track. The regional style (and specifically the Ghost Town DJ's track "My Boo") has had a large impact on K-pop since "Body Party" got big, but 250 makes it a more congenial affair: the hi-hats are low in the mix, the handclaps have more pop than the kick, and it all feels muted so the bubbly synth melodies and percussion—the latter approximating the "Triggerman" sample used in bounce classics—can flutter about. "How Sweet" is the most everyday that NewJeans has sounded, and it's all the more biting for it. [7]

Ian Mathers: It's devastating enough to get a "I'm doing better without you" message delivered with such nonchalant cool, but to make it a bop too? Really drives the implied "I probably didn't care that much in the first place" home, ouch. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A very NewJeansian take on the break up-come down song; it's a harder feeling to make sound giddy, but they pull it off here. The fragments jutting out from the sing-talk ("like biting an apple"; "no drama, it's good karma"; "little demon in my storyline" most of all) are thrilling and deranged, the kind of phrases that become involuntary mantras and mutterings when you make your way out of something all-consuming and are faced with the shock of the new. Most of the writing about NewJeans centers on their musical trappings, but the Miami bass riffs here are more perfunctory than their prior dalliances with drum-n-bass and Jersey club. That's not to say that it's a bad song — that bassline itself, rubbery and grooving, is gorgeous — but that it shares less with the perfect grooves that "OMG" and "Ditto" than first appears. [9]

Oliver Maier: Unusual for NewJeans both in that it is kind of a retread (think "OMG" 2: Not As Good) and that the performances are really quite listless. The thing about girl groups from anywhere in the world is that their songs tend to implode the moment it sounds like they aren't having fun. [5]

Jonathan Bradley: There's not the great shock of the new provided by genre experiments like "Super Shy" or "Ditto," but the R&B-lite of "How Sweet" gets some extra mileage from burbling percussion runs and photon-light electro textures. Switching between English and Korean lines in the hook is smart songwriting as well as smart globalization; it adds variation to a melody that threatens to run out of ideas after a mere three-and-a-half minutes.  [6]

Michael Hong: Initially put off by how weary the vocals sound -- NewJeans have always been low-key, but they've never sounded so spent. But it starts making sense when you consider that NewJeans are just as much about the experience of sharing these milestones as they are living them. Backed by a laser show of synths, "How Sweet" is about convincing yourself that you're okay after a heartbreak and proving it to your friends. This exhaustion makes the sharper moments more effective: the wistfulness of "it's like biting an apple" longs harder, and the snarky "I'll see you out" that closes the track is a truly satisfying line read. With every chorus, the bitter tartness lessens and the the sweetness pops brighter. [7]

Alfred Soto: The relaxed sensuality is what I wanted from this week's Tinashe track. The melodies are sticky and sweet. [7]

Nortey Dowuona: The drum programming is a bouncy, yet flimsy kick snare pattern full of glittery lasers and clinking closed hi-hats. At first, it overwhelms you, with the rising hit arriving every four bars and doubling during the post chorus, but once you pay attention to the looping, ghostly synth melody, you feel toward a handhold in the wind. [6]

Isabel Cole: I get so excited by the aliens-attacking space-laser sounds at the beginning, and then it all mellows out to make room for an uninspiring vocal line delivered uninspiringly. Things perk up a little in the chorus (I remain a sucker for handclaps!), but unfortunately the actual melody continues to be the worst part of the song, to the extent that I think I'd prefer an instrumental version. [5]

Katherine St. Asaph: The melody on the verses sounds like something off PinkPantheress's Heaven Knows, which is some real influencer-becomes-influenced ouroboros shit. But "How Sweet" settles into a chorus that's undeniably itself, frenetic but small: kind of like "Let the Music Play" recreated by one of those miniscule Helmacron ships from Animorphs in tiny zaps and little plinks. And I do mean "settles": there's less fizz in the pop than there could have been, and NewJeans' vocals range from effortless to affectless, unbothered to unengaging. [6]

TA Inskeep: I'm absolutely here for NewJeans giving us a little bit of ecstasy. If this kicks off a revival of second-wave freestyle, I'll be very happy. (Someone call Sabrina Carpenter to the white courtesy phone, stat!) [8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “How Sweet” is the most subdued and pedestrian newjeans have sounded. The beeps and blorps and percussion taste sweet, but the vocals are bitter and dull. But when the production has so many dynamic flourishes, and the meta-narrative around the group is so interesting, the score floor is high.  [6]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

TINASHE - "NASTY"

The TikTok career-heating inferno strikes another match...

[6.46]

Alfred Soto: "Is someone gonna match my nasty?" she wonders. The listener might wonder whether this midtempo R&B track with a trap beat does more than tease.  [6]

Rachel Saywitz: Nasty Girls (nasty), rise up, our time is now! As the hot summer months sweat into our skin, now is the time to turn your ho-ing into overdrive. Now is the time to be a "Nasty Girl (nasty)," everywhich-way-when-where-how. You might be thinking: "but Rachel, I'm not a 'Nasty Girl (nasty)!' I don't grind on guys in the California desert dressed in raunchy Fast & Furious garb! I don't grab my crotch and then roll into a bridge pose!" My friends, listen to me. The nastiness of us has always existed deep within. It can be sex, sure, but nasty's birthplace is not sexual in nature. It is our soul's most primal desire—the desire to fuck. shit. up. Nasty is buying a pizza made for two people and eating it by yourself because this nastiness can only hold one worldly being. Nasty is reaching out to that friend you haven't talked to since college, then deleting all the photos you have of your college ex in your phone. Nasty is the carriage scene in the third season of Bridgerton where two characters hook up to an orchestral version of Pitbull's "Give Me Everything," and you watch it and realize: "Oh my god, listening to Pitbull is going to make me horny from this point onward," and you just kind of sit with that for a few months. Nasty is a white boy dancing soca with so much rizz that he lands a collab with Marc Jacobs and turn a Tinashe song into what might be a genuine hit, 10 years after "2 On." Nasty is your freak, unmatchable and entirely unique. One quick note on what Nasty is not—the reeking smell of your two-week old takeout leftovers. You should really throw those out. [9]

Julian Axelrod: How did it take this long for Tinashe to score a TikTok hit? She's been producing bite-sized morsels of freaky pop perfection since the Obama administration, so if it takes a nerdy white guy wining to recreate the magic of "2 On," that says more about us than her. "Nasty" doesn't reinvent the wheel because Tinashe's been honing that wheel for the past decade. She knows what lines to loop, she knows which beats will bang, and she has an endless arsenal of tawdry Tinashe-isms just brazen enough to make you blush. The success of "Nasty" is a testament to her unwavering commitment to horny excellence. Tinashe is the Malcolm Gladwell of matching freak. [7]

Ian Mathers: Match your freak? In this economy? [7]

Jonathan Bradley: Making a hot meme is nearly as good as making a hot song, but "Nasty" is too low-key to really be called a comeback. What is here is charming enough — robot voice, melodic kick sequencing, some nice vocal technique on the pre-chorus — but each idea comes back too soon, wearing out its welcome like a tired prompt tweet. [5]

Katherine St. Asaph: I have little to say that wasn't said better by Steacy Easton, about "Freak" by Estelle and Kardinal Offishall: "In two weeks I am going to a library at the Leather Archives in Chicago, and watching a video described as: 'unknown individual that calls himself Cowboy appears to be a master at whipping. Videos show various men tied to trees being whipped while having their genitals played with. Videos are home made and from his personal collection, they are copies of the originals according to a note found in the donation box.' This is my new standard of freakdom. Estelle does not measure up." Tinashe does not measure up either, not by monotonously matching the freak ante of a saucy Tinder ad on the subway. Basically, it's just moving kind of slow. [3]

Tim de Reuse: Something deeply funny to me about repeating the word "nasty" over totally clean, dry, unadorned sine waves: a dial tone in minor key, stark, inhuman, like the smell of a hospital. It's the opposite of sound design. Does that sound like I don't like it? I mean, on a purely sensory level, I don't, but it's a deliberate choice that's impossible to ignore. It's a lens that focuses everything down to that single repeated hook and the crunchy, over-articulated way she pronounces it. I let the whole track rattle through my skull three times on the bus yesterday and felt like I was being put under hypnosis. Your freak has my respect, Tinashe, if not my heart. [6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The type of runaway, mind-zapping hit that has even the straight white boys in my classes humming along unconsciously.  [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Is it a good song or just a good collection of bits — the "match my freak" bit that everyone is doing, yes, but also the hook itself, the soaring, horny grandeur of the pre-chorus, the way Tinashe says she might just let this guy pay her lease? How much does that matter? In terms of shiny objects, this is stronger than anything she's done since "Superlove," but a song made just out of hooks can get a little tedious. She's independent now, but this is still factory pop: a delivery device for an attempted hit that lacks the connective tissue that her best misses have. [6]

Nortey Dowuona: Tinashe went a whole decade constantly failing to launch then suddenly slipped out of the iron grip of RCA and started dropping classics. But a lifer like Tinashe wasn't meant to stay away from the industry that's had her since she was part of the Stunners (which also included the excellent Hayley Kiyoko), so she signed to Ricky Reed's Nice Life imprint, released the bouncy, light BB/Ang3l, and went back on tour like any industry pro would. Now, we have "Nasty," a light bubbly fizz drink of a song co-produced by Ricky Reed and the fantastic Zach Sekoff (architect of "Crabs in a Bucket," "Homage," and "Party People" off Vince Staples's Big Fish Theory, as well as sharing in the spoils on "Freeman" from Dark Times). "Nasty" feels so comfortably settled and relaxed that you foolishly feel like volunteering to match her freak -- until the beat switches into a rippling bass wave over the drums that presses you until you crumple. Guess it wasn't you. NEXT! [8]

Taylor Alatorre: As good an illustration of the Duality of Tinashe as you'll find anywhere, almost as if it was constructed by her and Ricky Reed for that exact purpose. She sounds downright proud of herself in the chorus for pulling off such a clean bait-and-switch, with the "nasty girl" mantra a mere wind-up for the kind of angelic R&B slinkiness that she rightly feels should be her trademark. The problem with nastiness-as-pretext is that it threatens to make the parts of the song that aren't the chorus seem more vestigial than usual, but this is a problem that singers with half of Tinashe's talent would love to have. And it's not like there aren't steps taken to mitigate this issue: the pre-echo of the chorus gently hand-holding us into the confession booth, where Tinashe plays with her enunciation in weird enough ways to keep us invested until the portal to 2002 opens up.  [7]

Dave Moore: I'm happy to see Tinashe reach official meme status, but "match my freak" is also the highlight here and it happens in the first 20 seconds, which makes me wonder how much of the single's success is the opening bit insinuating its way into popular consciousness. The song stalls out afterward.  [6]

Michael Hong: "Nasty" is a solid distillation of Tinashe: confident and playful, with a hook that's immediately memorable and a pre-chorus melody that's just skillful but not showy. Doesn't stop the fact that she's released at least a couple dozen tracks in the past decade that are more interesting. [6]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

BILLIE EILISH - "LUNCH"

We reconvene for Pride month, and Billie Eilish is serving...

[6.94]

Jackie Powell: I had a conversation with a semi-retired recording artist back in 2018 insinuating that Billie Eilish “had to be queer.” So when Eilish confirmed her queerness by saying “wasn’t it obvious” in her red-carpet interview with Variety this past December, I was reminded of that conversation. It was a bizarre comment to make at the time, when Eilish was only 16. A generalization about Generation Z is that they learn their sexuality and preferences earlier in life, but that’s not everyone’s truth, and certainly not Eilish’s. “Lunch” is the sonic expression of that “aha” moment for the now 22-year-old, and Eilish allows her listener to feel just as sensual, confident and quite honestly horny. There’s such a stigma toward women, and especially toward queer women, who communicate their desires, but Eilish has a swagger on “Lunch” that provides compelling evidence that she’s reached a moment in her life when she just doesn’t give a damn. When she was that brooding teenager who pretended not to give a fuck, how many people saw through that? The crescendos of each chorus and the louder guitar strums alongside the nervous and flirty bassline mirror how she becomes more confident in her vocals and delivery as the track continues. Eilish seems to make everything she touches just that much cooler, and that includes queer expression. Happy Pride! [8]

Julian Axelrod: In an April interview for Rolling Stone, Billie Eilish described her "no singles" approach to her new record: "This album is like a family: I don't want one little kid to be in the middle of the room alone." But when "Lunch" pops up as track 2 on Hit Me Hard and Soft, it stands out like the gay cousin in a family reunion photo. While the songs around it are shrouded in shadows and shifting beats, "Lunch" is brash and direct in every sense, never breaking eye contact as the bass line slowly snakes its way up your thigh. It's not just that "Lunch" is more sexually explicit than anything else Billie's released; it's also the most explicitly pop song she's produced to date. She's pulling us in instead of pushing us away, trying to keep her composure while stumbling over every word of her obsessive internal monologue. (If "Lunch" has a tether on the back half of the album, it's probably the twisted stalker narrative "The Diner." Don't tell Billie I said that.) It's probably the least cool she's ever sounded on record, but she wears desperation well. [8]

Will Adams: Lyrically and vocally, Billie’s in her element, with winking deliveries — “left it under… Claire”; the mumbled “I just wanna get her off”; “she’s the headlights, I’m the deer” — that add her signature menace to this ode to queer lust. It’s the production that loses me. The Greg Kurstin-esque sheen brings less to mind a torrid affair than it does safe radio pop where what’s being eaten might literally be cake by the ocean. The warped bass in the outro is nice, but too late. [6]

Tim de Reuse: The sex-as-food tune is a well-known stumbling block for the established 21st-century star. The ones that succeed enough to gain significant cultural relevance are not remembered as masterpieces, and more often their metaphors are so strained and grotesque that they're remembered primarily for being mocked. "Lunch" is not immune to these issues because the whole pursuit is, on a base level, extraordinarily goofy, and the song does little to elevate the concept aesthetically. The instrumental, in particular, is just a sleek post-punk-pop serving platter until it hits the outro and turns into a bass throb that gestures in the direction of sexual release but feels far too clean and filed down. Unlike her predecessors, though, Eilish seems to understand that she's singing about a goofy thing, and so her performance aims for a difficult triple-point between meekness, bravery, and desperate arousal. There's a little flare of vocal fry as she dips her voice as quiet as she can get it while still holding a tone, delivering lyrics that are indisputably silly with an undertone of "ah, fuck, I can't believe I'm actually saying this out loud." It's an apt synecdoche for the process of convincing yourself to pursue your first-ever same-sex attraction: get so turned on that your self-enforced inhibitions are finally broken and ridiculous things start spilling out of your mouth. Awkward, in a charming, genuine way. But still awkward. [6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Less vorecore than you'd expect, a little more coy vulnerability, and a lot more louche dirtbaggery, especially in Eilish's vocal delivery -- it's not just the outfits that make this seem like something that'd play on VH1 between RHCP and Sublime. [7]

Rachel Saywitz: "Lunch," lyrically and visually, plays as more than just a coming out for Billie Eilish: it's delightfully fuckboy-esque, suave and amusing and definitely eye-roll inducing, but in that intentionally flirty way—she laughs at her pick up lines as much as we do but doesn't hide her lust. I love it for her, but I don't love how muddied it sounds. You don't need to get everything wet, Billie! [6]

Ian Mathers: Kinda feels like the production is falling between stools. The two most successful parts happen in a row: first when you get the relatively subdued, sparsely accompanied vocal (the closest thing to the ol' wispy minimalism here), and then immediately after when the maximalism gets cranked up and the bass gets to properly growl as Billie only gives us fragments of earlier lines. Why does the middle ground throughout the rest not work quite as well? The guitar and the bass both seem a bit off. Maybe growing pains? [6]

Jonathan Bradley: A contradiction underlying Billie Eilish’s work has been the way the insularity of her affect — her high and wispy vocal encased in bedroom production steered by brother Finneas — has built pop music that is so outré: hers is big music made in small ways. That’s particularly notable with her ballads, which are robust in their frailty, but it’s true too of her more upbeat singles too. “Lunch” is notable, even more than its palpable rather than revelatory queerness, for being Eilish’s biggest banger since “Bad Guy,” which was also driven by a thick bassline more commanding than its gothy setting might have been expected to tolerate. Add a nearly bumptious drum machine and spy-guitar accents, and “Lunch” turns out to be an update on 2000s dance-punk, albeit with the lights turned low. It’s good for unexpectedly bold flirtations at the discotheque, though perhaps ones made while still avoiding eye contact. [8]

Dave Moore: Billie Eilish can do ASMR-pop, sure, but for all the whispers and murmurs, she's never really tried to sell sexy, per se -- and I think that kind of works here, where the energy is closer to something like Art Brut's "Good Weekend." For me the key lyric is "I could buy her so much stuff," all of those possibilities short-circuiting linear thought: an overwhelmed nerd giddy with desire awkwardly lugging a random haul of gifts -- chocolates, books, clothes, a lamp, decorative stationery -- upstairs in eager anticipation. [8]

Taylor Alatorre: More than any single lyric, it's the constant subtle switching between postures of dominance and submission that defines this song, fleshing out its scenario in ways that prevent it from being either a trifle or a dreaded "statement record." The innuendos feel mandatory because in a screenwriting sense they are, quickly setting the scene and freeing Eilish to tinker with her kitchen-sink realist approach to the subject: early-stage romance as defined through surreptitious gift purchases and altered eating habits. These details are partly foreshadowing of the album's drama-to-come, but in the song they serve as real-time narration of a moment where judgment and caution have been deliberately, defiantly suspended. This being a Finneas production, that lapse in caution is paradoxically expressed through restraint rather than release, painting Eilish as someone who's both eager to display her coolness to another and fearful of what any loss of that coolness, and hence control, might entail.  [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Too cute; too limp. When she's writing about herself — or moving away from others — Eilish can summon depths of feeling that defy the increasingly slick productions she and her brother have been cooking up over the past half decade. Here, she's writing about loving (or at least craving) others (mirrored others in the text, identities disguised under fake names and all, but others nonetheless) and she doesn't sound nearly as involved. I'm not the kind of fan who wants artists to suffer or anything of the sort, but Eilish doesn't seem like she's having any fun either. The Fitz & the Tantrums-type-beat is also a hard sell; the nostalgic turn has not yet caught up to 2014. [3]

Mark Sinker: I was reading a Bluesky exchange about the way “crickets” has pleasingly come to mean “total silence as awkward response”, and it has me thinking a lot about the LP’s many crisply concrete strategies for expressing extreme ruminative gentleness of intimacy: as witnessed in this song the precisely locked horizon of sound-mirrors, the offhand return of the vworp, the closing lacework of sampled gasps. In Billie's case, the key word in the phrase “assured expression of vulnerability” is these days much more the first than the last. I caught myself in a spasm of irritation against a Facebook mutual declaring that “Lunch” had to be the single because the rest were (his words) “very dreary” — and I mean, no it isn’t dreary at all, but it isn’t as if the Juggernaut of the Dread Pirate Baird will be even faintly derailed by one solitary dissenter’s jadedness, either. She doesn’t need my help, or ours: from beneath us it devours. [9]

Alfred Soto: I’ve seen social media grumbles over “Lunch” as an aberration, a concession to skittish record company execs as if even in an era more grudgingly tolerant towards queer culture they’d dig a fat, stentorian song about cunnilingus. It's catchy. It booms.  [8]

Nortey Dowuona: Pop constantly cycles between puritanism and co-optation, often at a whim, depending on what the industry feels comfortable choosing at any particular time. "Lunch" ducks that by simply sitting with the reality of being in a relationship; Billie buys "Claire" cool things, drinks in her beauty, and makes love to her without even glancing at anyone who disapproves. If this were released a decade earlier it would have had to be cloaked in metaphor, now, as we're on the cusp of another tipping of the hand towards fascism, it's just very straightforward. Why hide anymore? Claire's just too sweet. [7]

Isabel Cole: A few months ago, watching Love Lies Bleeding, I had the deliriously happy thought, I love to live in the future where anyone can just go see Kristen Stewart suck on some buff lady's toe at the Union Square Regal on a normal Tuesday night. I have a similar feeling listening to one of the few inarguable A-listers in pop's most youthful cohort sing about eating pussy and spoiling the shit out of her girlfriend; it's rare that what a song means culturally impacts my experience of it, but damn, that feels fucking good! Billie strikes a delightfully endearing balance between wide-eyed, marveling I could buy her so much stuff! with kid-in-a-candy-store glee, and mischievous: there's a beat in "And I left it under... Claire" where you can almost hear her smirking before, I assume, bursting into laughter at her own antics. It's a performance that nails the giddy goofiness of wanting someone so bad it makes your brain short-circuit. Finneas's production brings out the song's playfulness, giving it a respectable groove whose details appeal to me more with each listen; I'm a sucker for a well-deployed handclap! [8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Lunch” is a straightforward hit that will sound great during Pride month, but her third studio effort contains more ambitious and epic work. In the context of the album, it's more of an appetizer. [6]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[thesinglesjukebox]

Steve Albini

The late Steve Albini was many things: musician, engineer, longtime punk, unrepentant gadfly, eventually repentant edgelord, one-time recipe blogger, pretty good poker player, excoriating essayist, late-career Twitter personality, and general opinion-haver–but not, he insisted, a producer. (He’d probably have some specific words to aim at all the obits calling him one.) Producers, he argued, were generally charlatans, in it for the wrong reasons. They could care about music, in theory; they just didn’t have to. And Steve Albini was, perhaps above all, a person who cared.

Albini shaped a tremendous swath of the pantheon of punk and alternative rock – though he’d perhaps say that the pantheon shaped itself by itself, and he was just there to facilitate. The volume and breadth of music he facilitated was so vast we’d never be able to cover it all. So in the spirit of his lifelong egalitarianism, we present songs spanning the many decades of his career by both major artists and cult faves, critical giants and deep cuts, canonical highlights and highlights of our own musical worlds. We like to think it’s what he’d have wanted. If not, we’re sure he’d have something to say.

Read on here for our writers' blurbs on:

TA Inskeep on Big Black, “Jordan, Minnesota”

Jeff Brister on Big Black, Songs About Fucking

Harlan Talib Ockey on Pixies, “Gigantic”

Mark Sinker on Ut, “Griller” and “Griller X”

Taylor Alatorre on Superchunk, “Skip Steps 1 & 3”

Mark Sinker on Cath Carroll, “Train You’re On”

Jonathan Bradley on Jawbreaker, “Ashtray Monument”

Katherine St. Asaph on Souls, “Sonic Sorehead"

Nortey Dowouna on Oxbow, Let Me Be a Woman

Frank Falisi on Veruca Salt, Blow It Out Your Ass, It’s Veruca Salt

Alfred Soto on Bush, “Swallowed”

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann on Pansy Division, “February 17”

Ian Mathers on Low, “Laser Beam”

Rebecca Gowns on Joanna Newsom, Ys

Brad Shoup on Shellac, “Be Prepared"

Claire Biddles on The Breeders, “Bang On”

[thesinglesjukebox]

KENDRICK LAMAR - "NOT LIKE US"

From “fucking Drake” to “fuck you, Drake”…

[6.73]

Katherine St. Asaph: "Meet the Grahams" was more vicious, but this has schadenfreude off the charts: one-upping "Family Matters" with something even more engineered as a crossover bop and succeeding at that crossover, thus depriving Drake of his one argument in the court of public opinion; the simultaneous coinage of many new memes dunking on Fucking Drake; the various streams of Drake stans squirming in anguish trying to suppress the urge to dance; clubs playing it almost immediately; the NBA playoff broadcasters adding it to rotation almost immediately (especially considering OKC is in them); the sheer fact that there is an enormously popular track that calls Drake a predator for his publicly predatory behavior. [10]

Will Adams: i ain't reading all that. i'm happy for u tho. or sorry that happened. [3]

Alex Clifton: “Meet the Grahams” was one of the darkest songs I have ever heard and took the Kendrick-Drake beef to an entirely new level. But while “Meet the Grahams” has more damning accusations, “Not Like Us” acts as a real sucker punch because it’s so catchy and funny. Why not beat Drake at his own game by rapping about how he sucks over a dance beat? A jab about Drake’s predilection for younger girls turned into the most quotable line of the summer—honestly a genius move. People will be yelling “it’s probably A minorrrrrrrrrrr” whenever it comes up. The rest is fun, too; the colonizer line in particular makes me snicker. The fact that it was written so quickly with such smart lyrics leaves me in awe. Do I feel good about watching all this unfold? Not exactly; if any of the accusations these men hurl at one another end up being true, I don’t think anyone “wins.” But I am a messy bitch who loves drama, and this is drama to the highest fucking degree. If it sounds this good, all the better.  [7]

Nortey Dowuona: The most seething, unflattering portrait of a theater kid raging that their talent and charm has not gained them the unflinching loyalty of their audience (and by extension their partner), and we will either have to hastily disavow this in four months/four years/tomorrow. That said, incredible, so full points! [10]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: All moral and ethical concerns aside, I celebrate this as the triumphant return of the most notable figure in West Coast rap over the past decade: DJ Mustard! And thank god for it, too — before this, the aftershocks of "Like That" were mostly caught up in boring video essay-type beats (Jack Antonoff was involved) that existed merely so that these guys didn't have to just do spoken-word poetry. (I refrain here from talking too much about "BBL Drizzy," maybe the most interesting work in all of this scuffling.) It's not just that this is a fun beat; it's a beat composed with such obvious glee that it forced Kendrick into doing his best Drakeo (RIP) impression, taunting and generating quotables like he'll never need to rap again. Even when he comes back to his senses and executes a rigorous and serious cultural critique of Drake's extractive practices with regard to the Atlanta rap ecosystem, he gets some good jokes in – if some told me that 2 Chainz had LIED when he said I was good, I would retire immediately. [8]

Jackie Powell: I compare this titular moment in music, the now very public feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, to a sports rivalry I follow quite closely. Kelsey Plum of the Las Vegas Aces told reporters during the 2023 WNBA Finals that her rival team, the New York Liberty, didn’t really “care about each other” in tough moments as teammates. She compared them to her Aces, a group of players who show on the internet and on television how close they are. In other words: For Plum, they (the Liberty) aren’t like us (her Aces). This rivalry was built from a couple of ideas: 1) these are the two teams with the most talent in the league, and 2) rivalries are hot-button stories that elevate and bring more eyes to the product. That second idea is where I land when it comes to our hip-hop feud at hand -- and hey, the WNBA is super in style now, so hip-hop should be honored that I’m making this comparison. Reanna Cruz remarked on "Switched On Pop" that this beef is “getting played up to get people to pay attention to rap music again.” She’s not wrong. A huge difference between these two conflicts, of course, is that Drake and Kendrick Lamar are taking cheap shots at each other that make the trauma and pain of many women public. This beef is becoming too personal, rather than just a promotional catalyst for the genre. The synth strings that accompany Lamar’s flow do make this a worthwhile listen without soaking in the numerous disses on the track, and I always enjoy when Lamar adds jazz elements. But the compelling and catchy arrangement aside, I was disappointed in the hook. Saying someone isn’t up to par is a weighted statement, and repeating the title of the track six times isn’t an innovative way to hammer that point home.  [5]

Alfred Soto: I acknowledge the anguish of many writers deploring the unfounded accusations here and in "Meet the Grahams." Exploiting the misery of the victims for the sake of a diss track is gross. Maybe Nas vs. Jay-Z spats no longer suit our times -- I grew up with them and loved them. But I'd be lying if I denied the motherfuckin' catchiness of Mustard-on-the-beat and Kendrick Lamar's arsenal of whines, repetitions, and biographical data. I also remember: art and journalism intersect but have divergent responsibilities.  [8]

Julian Axelrod: If there are any winners in the great Graham-Lamar Beef of 2024, it's the cadre of Genius-pilled rap fans who scour over every stray Kendrick line like it's holy scripture, teasing out assumed allusions and nebulous entendres. Now Kendrick's footnoting with purpose, each toss-away reference loaded with subtext about Drake's personal (and potentially criminal) misdoings. But the most shocking thing Kendrick did -- the thing that probably made Drake madder than any other slight in this saga -- was make a good old fashioned rap radio banger, the kind he hasn't attempted since SZA dropped Ctrl. And even more thrillingly, it's an obsessively reverent LA rap resurrection that nobody does better than Kendrick at his loosest and best, alternating between Drakeo yammers and E-40 yowls over a Mustard beat that sounds like congested traffic on a hot day. (What's crazier, the fact that two of Kendrick's diss tracks are produced by Mustard and Jack Antonoff? Or the fact that the likely chart-topper is produced by one Dijon McFarlane?) If anything, the diss/bop duality is a disadvantage; there's too much weight for the song to feel truly breezy, and it's hard to turn up to direct accusations of sex trafficking and pedophilia. But casual menace is the defining trait of a West Coast diss track, and it's satisfying to hear Kendrick returning to his home turf.  [7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I've seen criticisms for the mix, and anyone who's followed my blurbs during my eight years (!) writing for TSJ knows I'm all for that; believe me when I say that for once, it actually is nitpicking. All that matters for a song like this is that the vocals are intelligible but not too far above the beat. And these vocals are very intelligible, with every syllable as enunciated as Pusha T's "you are HIDING a CHILD" for three minutes straight. The verse calling Drake out for his genre-hopping is as insightful and intense as anything Kendrick’s ever written. But this is obviously most famous for the "A minorrrrr" joke, mocking both Drake's "Dave Freeeeeee" delivery on "Family Matters" and Nicki Minaj's eccentric drawn-out deliveries. (Never mind that the line isn't that strong -- it's the same pun Bo Burnham used over a decade ago.) Even as things get dark, it's an incredibly fun listen; I enjoyed the showmanship of the beef, culminating in Kendrick beating his sworn enemy at his own game. But everyone who hates what it's become is right. Do we really want jokes about these topics? If any of it is true, does that even change anything? Drake's not too famous to get caught, despite what he said; he's just too famous to face any meaningful consequences. The humiliation in "Not Like Us" might be the best we can do about alleged predators on this scale, in place of anything resembling justice. [7]

Oliver Maier: It should be valid -- encouraged, even -- to admit that Kendrick Lamar is at his most annoying when he makes chart music. We are all losers in this godforsaken beef. [2]

Taylor Alatorre: It doesn't live up to the promise contained in that heart-resuscitating DJ Mustard tag, but I don't know if any song could. The song that could live up to that DJ Mustard tag exists only in the realm of pure forms, alongside the band that could live up to the name Libertines and the album that could live up to the title ARTPOP. The actually existing "Not Like Us" lives down here in the muck with us fallen people, in a place of impermanence and unsettledness and compromise. A place where productive collaborations from a decade ago can be recast as colonial thievery in an instant; where populist pandering comes in the strategic use of the words "pedophiles" and "minor"; where sex offender registries are of dubious criminological impact; where my YouTube homepage just looks like this now; where apps are now battlefields and "post-truth" is a casus belli; where the bloodied gears of History churn on in the background, or foreground; where the Macklemore apology form exists; where in some arcane yet deeply intuitive way this all prefigures another Trump electoral victory. And yet, for all of Kendrick’s “me against the industry” posturing, only by climbing on the shoulders of its fraught context is “Not Like Us” able to claw its way into the halls of pop immortality. From "euphoria" onward, this has been the diss track as alternate reality game, roping in everyone from confused Chinese restaurant patrons to the luminaries named in Kendrick's Real Atlanta Roll Call. We bob our heads to the lines about statutory offenses not because the bars are the hardest-hitting ever, or because we particularly care about the legal fate of Baka Not Nice, but because we imagine the thousands of other people bobbing their heads at that exact moment, astounded that (or wondering whether) we're allowed to do so. Because the floodgates have been opened, Carnival is upon us, and for a few charged weeks even a beat that Stay Dangerous-era YG would have left alone can become a defining document of its time. Monoculture status: alive, in Serbia.  [7]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]