deadcactuswalking

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 12/07/2025 (Oasis, Drake)

I really did not expect the follow-up to “The Days” to be as big as it is, but MK’s “Dior” featuring Chrystal has, to my surprise, reached the very top of the UK Singles Chart, the first time either artist has done this (for MK, that’s a considerable amount of years charting to get to this point). Welcome to an "empty" episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: brief discussion of sexual coercion

Rundown

As always, we start with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (it’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40, you know the gist. This week, we bid farewell to: “we never dated” by sombr (that was quick), “Gnarly” by KATSEYE with an Ice Spice remix (taking their own “Gabriela” out with it), “The Giver” by Chappell Roan off of last week’s return and finally, nine-week #1 “Taste” by Sabrina Carpenter.

Now for our gains and returns, with the big story in the latter being Oasis, whose catalogue sees another surge thanks to the kicking off of their big reunion tour. “Live Forever” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” return at #19 (again) and #18 respectively. These songs have already returned to the top 40 last year, with “Live Forever” reaching a new peak of #8 and the latter having spent one week at #1 in 1996. Outside of those, say welcome back to recent hits that briefly left us last week, “All I Ever Asked” by Rachel Chinouriri at #72 and “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez at #70 as well as “Juno” by Sabrina Carpenter at #59 doing switcheroo with “Taste” and finally, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac surging back up to #58 because that’s current.

And our big story in the gains would be the KPop Demon Hunters film soundtrack. I greatly enjoyed this vibrant film with a lot of heart, and the UK seems to agree with the “HUNTR/X” songs (by EJAE, AUDREY NUNA and REI AMI) “How it’s Done” at #32 and “Golden” at #20, and the “Saja Boys” song (by Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Danny Chung, KEVIN WOO and samUIL Lee) “Your Idol” at #26. Again, outside of those, we see boosts for “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits at #69 (definitely for swingers), “Dive” by Olivia Dean at #63, “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls at #61, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan at #55 and “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter at #46.

As for the top five on the UK Singles Chart, it should all be familiar: “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #5, last week’s #1 “Survive” by Lewis Capaldi down to #4, “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #3, “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter at #2 and “Dior” at #1. Now to cover what little we have in the way of new entries.

New Entries

#27 – “What Did I Miss?” – Drake

Produced by London Cyr, O Lil Angel, DJ LEWIS, FNZ, Elyas, GYZ, Tay Keith, OZ and Patron

Given how many producers are listed here, I can’t imagine anything was missed, especially not in the liner notes. Anyways, this is the new Drake track from his upcoming ICEMAN project, presumably at least in part a response to the feud with Kendrick Lamar because that’s not tired yet. This song is definitely still reeling from the loss, but I do somewhat understand Drake’s position – it’s probably the only thing on his mind right now. Revealed through a livestream, potentially the first of several for this project roll-out, “What Did I Miss?” is a whole lot of hot air and tough talk from someone who has publicly floundered plenty of his goodwill. As much as I would enjoy discussing Drake’s music without discussing the feud with Kendrick, he doesn’t seem to want me to forget as he frailly rambles about traitors in a vaguely sing-songy fashion over a series of flat trap-adjacent instrumentals with pleasant enough synth pads that should probably make for a song much bigger and more anthemic than this self-obsessed personification of standing in the corner pouting. I prefer the second half, mostly for an echoing falsetto loop in the instrumental from German artist Evîn Kücükali’s best Weeknd impression (I figured it was Elkan at first), and a more focused Drake performance that leads a Rick Ross diss into some nice wordplay with the girl group TLC. In spite of that, both productions sound pretty lacking and glassy, a lot less interesting or even complete than you’d expect from 10 producers. It doesn’t help that the lyrics on the first half get kind of rough as well – “She might decide to say no to me now but say yes to me later” is vague enough to excuse but doesn’t bode well considering the pattern of behaviour and sometimes even lyrically with how controlling Drake has historically been over women. Whilst definitely not the worst track he’s made since at least it has a pulse and isn’t some stodgy R&B crooner he got PND out of the sweatshop to write, it’s a flailing attempt at an unnecessary comeback, a sign less so that we need more Drake and more that Drake needs more rest. The “Iceman” can afford therapy as valuable as the chains, I’m sure.

#17 – “Acquiesce” – Oasis

Produced by Owen Morris and Noel Gallagher

This struck me as odd – why the B-side to “Some Might Say” and why now? “Acquiesce” was originally paired with said track which debuted at #1 in 1995 (knocking Take That off the top spot) but was eventually re-released as a promotional track pre-empting their 1998 B-side compilation, The Masterplan, with “Acquiesce” being its opener and possibly the most famous of their leftovers. The track was written by Noel Gallagher when the band’s train to Wales broke down, influenced by hearing the word “acquiesce” on the phone, at least according to the story he told The Sun in 2006. Noel also stated that Liam still does not know what the word means. I know they used to dig jabs at each other all the time but that strikes me as completely true. “Acquiesce” – to accept something reluctantly without protest – has been featured on remasters and deluxe editions of their iconic (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995) album (which stands at #2 on the albums chart this week) since but had yet to chart in the UK until they kicked off their reunion tour, which is being filmed by a documentary crew and officially started last Friday in Cardiff. Why this track in particular? Oasis are reissuing Morning Glory once again for the 30th anniversary, with an “Unplugged” acoustic recording of “Acquiesce” being revealed as a lead single. Bizarrely, however, this is neither an acoustic recording from 1995 nor an original recording newly performed by a reunited Oasis for the 30th anniversary. Instead, this is an ”interpretation” by Noel and co-producer Callum Marinho using the original master tapes, studio chatter and all. The song actually starts with banter about Noel being sacked from the band, which I assume 20 years ago would have upset him deeply, hence why on the original recording it was muffled, reversed and hidden in the left channel. I don’t mind this cute ode to friendship, even if the acoustic “interpretation” (why even release this?) feels more like a barebones remix than anything else, and the optimistic chorus is definitely grating on both versions, probably more with the newly clean and jangly acoustic rendition than it was on the fuller, electric recording from 1995, which definitely has a nicer Britrock edge to it I can appreciate if nothing much else. I’ve never been an Oasis fan, it’s unlikely this middling B-side will excite me at all, but I’m glad it does hype up their base enough for a big debut whilst being a pretty inoffensive tune. It’s just all their songs blur together for me. Pun intended.

Conclusion

Worst of the Week goes to Drake for “What Did I Miss?” and Best of the Week goes to Oasis for “Acquiesce”. We might have more than two songs next week. For now, thank you for reading, rest in peace to Mick Ralphs and Young Noble, and I’ll see you next week.

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 05/07/2025 (Lewis Capaldi Survives at #1 + KPop Demon Hunters, Lorde's a Virgin, Alex Warren & ROSÉ)

We have a new #1 debut as Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi makes his comeback from a hiatus with “Survive”, landing straight on top of the UK Singles Chart, with that and more to be discussed in this new, “feisty” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, discussion of drugs, sex addiction, depression, Colonel Gaddafi and K-pop Satanism or something

Rundown

As always, we start our week with the notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40 (that’s what I cover). This week, we bid farewell to: “The Way I Love You” by Jorja Smith, “I need to know” by Denon Reed of Cru2 (assisted by remixes by Silky, MIST, Dizzee Rascal, KAV, Ghee-K, CLIPZ, Jauz, Tom Zanetti, etc. – see the review a few weeks back for that mess), “All I Ever Asked” by Rachel Chinouriri, “Hairdresser” by Skye Newman, “Tell Me” by Sonny Fodera and Clementine Douglas, “Carry You Home” by Alex Warren and finally, “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez. The sinking feeling here is that all of these songs are at least decent and I liked very few of the new entries from last week, so that should give you a good idea of the chart trajectory in my eyes.

As for our gains and returns… the re-entries are mostly bottom-feeders, namely “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls at #69, of course, and “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan at #60 for whatever reason, but there’s also Lewis Capaldi’s former #1 “Someone You Loved” from 2018 (most of its successful chart run was from 2019 to 2020) popping back in at #51 thanks to the new Capaldi single, which means that we’re likely to see even more chart weeks for this 200-plus week behemoth after it seemingly left for good last year. Joy. There’s also “The Giver” by Chappell Roan returning to #43 after peaking at the runner-up spot earlier this year, with its re-entry likely thanks to the release of additional physical versions. Our gains, on the other hand, are somewhat sparse despite the Glastonbury festival (since most of the headlines from that were derived from political punk acts) but include “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” by CMAT at #42, “What Was That” by Lorde at #35 thanks to the album boost (more on that later), “High on Me” by Rossi. and Jazzy at #28, “Illegal” by PinkPantheress at #22 and finally, “Just Keep Watching” by Tate McRae at #14 thanks to the release of F1 the Album, which is not a Fast & Furious movie.

Now for our top five on the UK Singles Chart as Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” is stable at #5, “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae and “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter drop to #4 and #3 respectively, MK’s “Dior” featuring Chrystal sticks to the runner-up spot and of course, Lewis Capaldi survives at #1. Now to check what landed on top of the albums chart.

New Entries

#66 – “Hammer” – Lorde

Produced by Lorde and Jim-E Stack

Last week, New Zealand singer Lorde released their fourth album, Virgin, which became their first #1 album despite the fact that their transparent CDs only work on PlayStations (or maybe, because of that – Brits love a gimmick). That’s not the only messy part of this new album, and whilst I find the entire record fascinating and adore it, that adoration does not come out of any kind of righteousness the album presents: it’s a coming-out party for Lorde to reveal themselves as a careless airhead who reveals a little too much and in increasingly awkward ways. The opener “Hammer”, released a week prior to the record with a music video showing Lorde getting a tattoo on their butt in the woods (why not?). The song itself is about some kind of spiritual rebirth wherein the uncertainty is what brings them peace – they described it on social media as an “ode to city life and horniness”, but I’d describe it as a mid-20s crisis based in the titular conceit of the hammer, quoting Abraham Maslow: “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”. Basically, Lorde strips themselves of all fucks possible to give and dives headfirst, particularly into sexual encounters with which this song is peppered with innuendo for, though “liquid crystal” refers not to any other kind of wetness (or even meth as I first assumed), but actually their phone, which is stupid but I can forgive a messy first verse on an even messier record. The refrain is a breathy moan of release, charged by a pulsing kick and wave of synths that would resemble house music if there was any groove worth dancing to – it's got all the elements of dance-pop but feels empty, like an attempt (though not in vain) to live a youth you never really had by losing the protection of your soul and sexuality you used to have. The weary outro signals Lorde’s death more than it does the flagrant life they’re living in this moment, looking to the aftermath of their passing over a metallic snare jammed in the mix, establishing the purpose of this album as being a “postcard from the edge”, to savour as a memory once Lorde – or at least the Lorde of Virgin, a collapsable force of ecstasy – has gone. It’s a brilliant opener, using its brevity and odd emptiness to put forward what the album intends to display pretty straightforwardly, leaving it up to the audience to listen and see what Lorde has in store, be immediately put off by this track’s perpetual edging or listen begrudgingly and notice the failures of this proposed lifestyle. We’ll be back with more Lorde after these messages from J Hus.

#64 – “Gold” – J Hus featuring Asake

Produced by P2J

UK rapper J Hus, always one of the more compelling and distinct voices in the scene, is back with a new single recruiting Nigerian singer Asake (whose singles I’ve heard I also quite like) and prolific Nigerian-British producer P2J. He recently performed at the Royal Albert Hall and it seems like his celebration is dropping his first new music in a few years, though J Hus’ verse for “Gold” actually seem to have originated as a remix verse for Shallipoppi’s “Laho”, a song I reviewed two months ago when it debuted and peaked at #57. Naturally, this is an Afrobeats song, not unfamiliar territory for the genre-hopper J Hus can seamlessly be, and not a bad one at that, though there’s something missing. This is a more party-oriented song and one of my favourite parts about Afrobeats, the back-and-forth with group vocals, would work perfectly here but aside from Asake being compressed and multi-tracked, this isn’t really present, and with J Hus’ dry, loose flow, it does feel a tad empty, especially when the multi-tracking doesn’t spread across the mix like it should, it just stacks onto Asake, suffocatingly. With that said, the strings in Asake’s refrain are nice, the shuffling of the percussion (though somewhat stock) is fun and the distinct, dark bass tone that comes in is a great way to give a uniquely English feel to an Afrobeats track, especially against the strings, as it almost emulates grime. Oh, and if you’re going to compare yourself to Colonel Gaddafi and his golden attire, where’s the gunplay? You could get into some seriously menacing wordplay around the Libyan dictator but it’s just a name-drop in the chorus. Overall, I hope this isn’t a lead single and more just a throwaway because it seems rushed, more like a half-completed thought dragged out than a full song. Shame.

#44 – “Shapeshifter” – Lorde

Produced by Lorde and Jim-E Stack

This is the third track on Virgin, leading into “Man of the Year”, which I’ve already reviewed weeks back, and covers similar but very much not identical territory in terms of identity and gender expression. Whilst “Man of the Year” sits itself in a space that teeters towards existing binaries and uses (or even abuses) them for the rush that they can bring, “Shapeshifter” is looser and brashly sexual, with the sex-obsessed confusion of Virgin solidly invading what could be a free-spirited look at self-identity.

What struck me about the lyrics of Virgin, not dissimilar to other Lorde projects, really, especially Melodrama, is the observation and the use of set-pieces or props as lyrical ideas, even when they don’t seem to directly correlate, which is emphasised in this record as imagery just gets dropped into the song as a circumstance of wherever Lorde’s natural rhythm is flowing. This song’s opening lines are about chewing gum simply because Lorde was chewing gum in the studio (constantly, apparently) and it loosely (if at all) gets pasted onto the rest of the verse about the tense, intimate and enticing moments before sex… yet it fits, right? Chewing gum is temporary but it’s not like eating where there is a goal, an end point and a result, it’s not exactly nutritious either – it perfectly fits the album’s tone, and so does the lyric’s inclusion: a “vibe”, a plastered-on idea that just feels like it should be there because not much else is. It’s fitting, therefore, that this is a list song of things Lorde “is”, with the chorus reminiscent of “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks, but instead of presently being contradicting ideas, Lorde’s version is in past tense, showing an exhaustion with playing any kind of roles – and in the context of the album’s sexual experimentation, these could be as much metaphors for roleplay and positions as they are for the chosen moods and identities in which they’ve attempted to reinvent themselves. Tonight, Lorde just wants to “fall” and feel the experience rather than think about it and more importantly, think about themselves and how they want to come off, as the second verse shows that when they have the moment to see themselves and reflect on it, it gets too personal. It shows a regression to their teenage years. The song repeats the line “I’m not affected”, a fabricated detachment to escape any hurt that is increasingly unconvincing in the song and in the context of the album, is an outright lie, though perhaps there’s some truth in it. The album is about identity – who even is the “I” Lorde sings of? They might not be affected at all, if they’re even still there. I know that these Lorde reviews have been focused on lyrics, but realistically, there is a purposeful lack of elements to Virgin which is a minimal record, “Shapeshifter” having multi-tracking drenched in reverb but refuses to trape off lines in the melody they deserve, rendering them spoken word, but allowing for a wavering echo on the pre-chorus when Lorde loses focus, with stray vocalising that disappears in the second half of the second verse (a seemingly random choice that only makes room for self-loathing). The drums are cold, factorial steps that were probably breakbeats in a past life before being sapped clean of warm energy, the bass is a flat drone, and the choruses can be really bare until the distorted synth string loop jams itself in. This song is far from devoid or empty in the mix, it’s purposeful and there are much glassier valves of instrumental nothingness on the record like “David” and “Clearblue”, but much like “Hammer”, the idea that something – perhaps the soul – is missing is what grants the morphing identity and sexual recklessness its sad, overbearing truth. Oh, and Lorde kills it vocally on the outro here vocally. I understand this one has been divisive among fans but as someone who fell out of love with Lorde’s music during the Solar Power era, this album’s brokenness made me much more compelled in Lorde as an artist and character than I had been for a while, and also made me somewhat concerned, interested in re-evaluating those older records to examine the signs leading up to this kind of break. Virgin is a phenomenal record, in my opinion, one of my favourites of the year, and I’m glad that it is having at least some level of chart success.

#40 – “How it’s Done” – HUNTR/X, EJAE, AUDREY NUNA, REI AMI and the KPop Demon Hunters cast

Produced by 24, ido, TEDDY and Ian Eisendrath

Okay… I’ll bite: what the Hell is KPop Demon Hunters? So, it’s a Netflix film by Sony Pictures Animation – who brought you Spider-Verse, Hotel Transylvania and The Smurfs – following a rivalry between a K-pop girl group “HUNTR/X” and a boy band “Saja Boys”. The Saja Boys are secretly from a demonic realm. Sigh, let’s just get through these quickly, shall we? EJAE is a songwriter who has written for many K-pop idol groups like Red Velvet, TWICE and aespa among others, she sings as HUNTR/X’s lead vocalist “Rumi”, who is the daughter of a demon and a demon hunter (which makes me wonder about the interracial relationship laws of this strange universe). Rumi is joined by dancer “Mira” (R&B singer AUDREY NUNA is her singing voice) and rapper “Zoey” (her singing voice is Korean-American indie-rapper REI AMI). If I’m getting anything from this song in particular, it’s that this seems to be a loving parody of the K-pop genre, with an awkward spoken word intro full of passion that comes off as try-hard and not built in actual menace, fast-paced multilingual verses that dip between Korean and English at random, breathy Auto-Tuned sing-rapping and swift trade-off not just between band members but between disparate song sections, all of which are dated western pop trends like DJ Snake-esque EDM trap, a rising dramatic dance-pop section and a drop-breakdown that includes gratuitous string stabs. The second verse even has a line about being “cute and savage” which is very BLACKPINK but I think the problem here is that it might be almost too convincing a parody that it’s not even funny, it’s just good – it has a more logical progression than some of the copy-paste K-pop I’ve heard, and EJAE’s vocal is genuinely impressive and very cinematic. It’s impressive that it holds strong through all the noise, she’s basically singing over fight scene sound effects. Turns out this song is good out of context, largely because of its context. Huh. More on KPop Demon Hunters after these messages from… K-pop and a demon hunter.

#37 – “On My Mind” – Alex Warren and ROSÉ

Produced by Ammo and John Ryan

Okay, maybe that description was a generalisation – this song isn’t K-pop at all despite having ROSÉ present and Alex Warren… well, his biggest hit may be Christian rock but he sounds too depressed to be hunting deer let alone demons. Speaking of how he sounds, this new duet has his vocal sounding very oddly manipulated – the way I described this when it happened to Morgan Wallen was “fuzzy”, but it might be more accurately described as just a stodgy vocal mix that makes certain line deliveries sound awkward and somewhat uncanny. I don’t know what exactly is being done to these guys with rougher voices, but they’d be better off without the Melodyne, not every note needs to be perfect and although this song has cleaner acoustics, he’s got a voice that can show imperfections. And no, Joey Moi was not involved so I don’t know what happened here, probably just a similar vocal treatment to ROSÉ’s lighter voice being used for Warren, not that they have any chemistry at all in this cinematic love song which pits a horn section against Warren’s feathery falsetto. The two clash on their harmony verse and the vocal melodies feel a little too fast than they should be, and without much of a hook outside of stray whooping, this makes for a pretty saccharine song, and one that seems exasperated at being as sweet and valueless as it is. I gave this Warren guy a few chances – and ROSÉ as many if not more – but come on, this is just as milquetoast as milquetoast can be. I don’t even see it sticking around because it is just that forgetful, yet not weightless. It’s a chunk of fluff-coated brick that will probably infect US radio like the plague. I’ve never been great with predictions but I really can’t understand why this would be a lasting hit over here on streaming, especially with “Ordinary” and “Bloodline” still around, but I’ve been wrong before (most times). There’s just nothing to this more than a heavy pile of air.

#34 – “Your Idol” – Saja Boys, Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Danny Chung, KEVIN WOO, samUIL Lee and the KPop Demon Hunters cast

Produced by 24, ido and Ian Eisendrath

Okay, so now for the “Saja Boys” roll call: “Jinu” is a demon with a pet demon tiger and leader of the group, whose singing is voice is provided by seemingly C-list K-pop singer Andrew Choi, whilst the other boys are “Romance Saja” (self-declared “multi-platinum songsmith” samUIL Lee), “Mystery Saja” (American TV host KEVIN WOO formerly of K-pop band U-KISS), “Abs Saja” (Korean singer Neckwav) and “Baby Saja” (Danny Chung, not to be confused with the fictional Minnesota politician). I cannot express how little I know about any of what I just said – for my money, Boyz 12 from American Dad! will have my heart in terms of cartoon boy bands (I’ve been trying to name-drop American Dad! on this show for years). I had no idea this KPop Demon Hunters movie existed until yesterday and I somewhat wish I had because, firstly, this is the kind of film I would actually watch and have a lot to say about – a camp animated music industry satire is exactly in my lane – so the fact that I can’t comment fully yet on the associations of these songs with the film’s plot and its characters without spoiling myself (as I’m going to watch it probably within hours of posting this episode). For now, I can comment on the songs sonically at least, and this one is definitely cinematic, with the song starting with ominous Gregorian hymns that are later implemented into a trap beat. I’m serious, this actually happened, I heard it with my ears and I’m going to see it with my ears, I am fascinated by the sheer bombast of this soundtrack. This song in particular connects K-pop standom and fan obsession with cults (of personality or otherwise), with the demons manipulating the innocent public into believing in them as “idols” – I didn’t think the religious themes would be this explicit – with still a lot of K-pop idolisms present. Chung even references “going viral”. This is another ridiculous song, but with the layers of drama here, I can’t help but be endeared by it – after a grinding industrial bridge, Choi’s electronically manipulated vocal is placed against the choir harmony and it sounds genuinely kind of scary (it almost sounds like the vocal was ran through an AI deepfake of a choir, it really is that uncanny). I’m a big fan of these songs, I am more and more intrigued in this film.

#31 – “Golden” – HUNTR/X, EJAE, AUDREY NUNA, REI AMI and the KPop Demon Hunters cast

Produced by ido, 24, TEDDY and Ian Eisendrath

Welp, our final song from this weird movie is another track from leading girl group HUNTR/X and yup, I like this one too. I should point out that amongst the K-pop producers 24 and Teddy Park, “ido” here could refer to the Korean producer IDO or Ido Zmishlany, known for his work with Shawn Mendes, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber and other western pop teen stars. Even if it's not Zmishlany, his influence comes out to play very audibly on this synthpop track “Golden”. You have the airy, manipulated vocal loop you could expect from a late 2010s electropop song before the buzzier 80s synths come in and feel a lot fuller than some actual pop songs, even if it is still a bit too compressed for me against the gated drums and vocals (which are a bit loud and even dry at some points, though this is to be expected for a soundtrack). Really, it’s a basic motivational song that has little reason to exist other than to be the kind of basic theme song they used to always make for these CGI kids’ movies. It’s like Shakira for Zootopia or Rihanna for Home, and Sony Pictures Animation knows exactly what this kind of song would be used for: an end-of-movie dance scene after all the problems get resolved, of course! Now I’ve yet to see if that’s actually how it gets used in the film, but that’s what it reeks of and in an honestly refreshing way with how it layers the cloudy vocal loop and the synth, it feels more atmospheric and purposeful than that kind of song whilst also filling in the void for dumb pop cheese. It’s also our second gold-related song today, for whatever that’s worth, but my main takeaway from these – and the other songs from the soundtrack I may or may have peeped a listen to during these reviews – is that I need to watch this film as soon as possible because these songs are amazing, the concept is stupid and I am hooked to the idea. I’m also glad TWICE’s “Strategy” found itself on the soundtrack, that’s an amazing song in itself. If any others from the soundtrack chart in the weeks to come, I will update on this show in regards to what I thought about the film; it may be a couple paragraphs long given what I’ve found out just from these reviews.

#1 – “Survive” – Lewis Capaldi

Produced by Peter Fenn, RØMANS, Andrew Wells, Connor McDonough and Riley McDonough

Why does this Lewis Capaldi song have five producers? Anyway, this is the big comeback for the Scottish singer, surprise-released exactly two years after his hiatus started, which was to focus on his health (an honestly good practice for those in the music industry who can afford to take those breaks). Combine that with a music video, a physical push and a surprise appearance at Glastonbury, and you get an easy #1, a feat Capaldi is surely familiar with. This song is a somewhat one-note motivational ballad about survival, just getting through it no matter how long it takes, particularly in regards to depression, with some decent lyrics especially in the pre-choruses that resonate pretty well. I like the line “I refuse to spend my best years rotting in the Sun” a lot, especially with how the Sun is used here as both as a motivator and a depressor: it’s beautiful out, but it’s also humid and the nights are short so the constant daylight feeds away at your sleep, which in a lot of heat can end up just being rotting. The acoustics rise into a swell that really isn’t that far off from post-Britpop – is that really the new throwback trend for singer-songwriters? – but Capaldi’s voice, also a rough one, has some very odd vocal mixing here too. It's not exactly the frog-throat I’m used to him but also not exactly the Joey Moi stodge-tuning, with many lines in the chorus sounding like compressed rubber underwater. I don’t particularly know why vocal mixing is the recurring theme of this episode but come on, the belting here deserves better treatment especially with all the string section drama that “Survive” eventually develops into. I actually really enjoy the final build-up – the song is somewhat a slog until that point, and it is too little, too late to make up for a song that could have placed more time and effort into areas like lyrical detail or fine-tuning the production than just sounding massive and airy. In that way, it’s pretty similar to “On My Mind”, but at least Capaldi seems more sincere. I’m not mad this is #1 either, it’s a welcome replacement for “Ordinary” and “Manchild” which both continue to sour on me and the potential replacement is the basic “Dior” so this is honestly preferred. That’s a bit sad.

Conclusion

I was originally going to hold off before seeing the film but no, Honourable Mention goes to the KPop Demon Hunters cast (particularly “How it’s Done” and “Your Idol”) with Best of the Week going, obviously, to Lorde, particularly “Shapeshifter” but also “Hammer” – both are excellent songs, there’s just more to “Shapeshifter”, especially in terms of progression, though “Hammer” is a dramatic mission statement. Worst of the Week goes to “On My Mind” by Alex Warren and ROSÉ, but I’m mostly glad that we had a refreshing, quality week after last episode was such a slog. As for what’s on the horizon… Kesha? Clean Bandit? Zach Bryan? It could be a chill week. For now, thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy, and I’ll see you then.

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 28/06/2025 (Fred again.., Skepta, PlaqueBoyMax, Sam Fender, Olivia Dean, Rossi., Jazzy, sombr)

There is a lot happening on this week’s chart, and I’m personally just glad that after a mostly consecutive reign at the top, ACR (look it up) has hit Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”, taking it down many pegs in the top 10 and leaving a song I dislike but at least is fresher, “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter, to take up the mantle for a second non-consecutive week at #1. Welcome back to this “flustered” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, references to sex and toxic relationships

Rundown

Honestly, I’m going to try and keep this episode as quick as I can –there are 10 new entries and few give me all that much to say or think about, so it would be best to try and go for a pace like the older episodes before each song review got unwieldingly long. I don’t apologise for that, by the way, sometimes I have a lot to say, sometimes I like to ramble and most of the time, my lawyer (*not a real lawyer) has advised me to never proof-read (*not real advice). Once the episode’s done and longer than War and Peace, I’ll eat these words anyway. Regardless, as always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, those being the songs that exited the UK Top 75 this week (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top five. This episode, we bid adieu to many fallen hits, namely: “Killin’ it Girl” by j-hope and GloRilla and “The Contract” by Twenty One Pilots both off of the debuts (as to be expected with songs propped up by heavy fanbase sales), “cliché” by mgk, “Old Phone” by Ed Sheeran (more on him later), “All I Know” by Rudimental and Khalid, “Steve’s Lava Chicken” by Jack Black (great run for what it is), “Beautiful People” by David Guetta and Sia (which lasted way longer than I expected), “Revolving door” by Tate McRae, “People Watching” by Sam Fender (more on him later) and of course, legacy act bottom-feeders “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, which may be back next week anyway.

Then we have gains and re-entries – the latter include “Gnarly” by KATSEYE at #74 thanks to the new song (sigh, we’ll get to it) and “All I Ever Asked” by Rachel Chinouriri at #71, whilst our notable gains are “What Was That” by Lorde at #56, “Cops & Robbers” by Sammy Virji and Skepta at #39, “Illegal” by PinkPantheress at #36, “No Broke Boys” by Disco Lines and Tinashe at #26 and not much else, most of our traction is in the list of new entries.

Our top five has actually been relatively shook up, and could have even been more so but we’ll get to that far later down the line. For now, Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” drops to #5 as a new entry launches in straight at #4 – “Victory Lap” by Fred again.., Skepta and a certain “PlaqueBoyMax” (whatever that means), I supposed we’ll get to that too. Then we have “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #3, MK’s “Dior” featuring Chrystal gaining to #2 despite not being of much quality at all, and finally, “Manchild” at #1, with just some few changes making this top five feel a bit fresher, in my opinion, and really top 10 as a whole, even if it’s not a very good batch of songs at all. Speaking of…

New Entries

#62 – “Outside” – Cardi B

Produced by Charlie Heat and HeyMicki

As charting music, in spite of a decent bit happening, are still functioningly on autopilot, if you’re a big artist with some risk of underperforming, and enough of a reputation to maintain or anything to prove, dropping an album now is a great idea. Ed Sheeran is somewhat in that place with Play but he’s much more confirmed to do well (and with more of a global sway) than New York rapper Cardi B, who you should be familiar with thanks to her massive 2018, the US #1 hits that followed, “WAP” and “Up”… but she’s still yet to release the follow-up until suddenly, we discover that not only is the sophomore effort Am I the Drama? releasing this September, but said tracks actually appear on it, with this being the 17th lead single or something ridiculous. I’m surprised it’s not debuted higher but a lot of her traction has dissipated and whilst this is a safe choice for a single, it’s also not one that would move the needle for UK audiences, having the typical Triggerman bounce beat and lyrics about how men aren’t shit, though specifically about her ex-husband Offset this time. I don’t think I want a public rap feud between former husband and wife, that just seems messy and liable to traumatise a couple children, so I can’t necessarily endorse or even be interested in the shots taken here, especially since it’s ridden with Hollywood gossip bullshit. Cardi doesn’t even sound as aggressive as she usually does, with a typical array of ad-libs and some gruff multi-tracking but overall, she sounds more disinterested than usual, kind of exhausted even with all the shit-talking which… makes sense. If I was in the booth rapping a diss track about the father of my children, I’d be tired too, and there’s not exactly any hard-hitting lines either, especially not with this basic, minimal instrumental that is basically just the bounce drum loop and some crowd noises. This sounds like a leftover leak, not a single, and it caters to a certain crowd that I’m just not that intensely a part of. Sure, I’m subscribed to r/fauxmoi, as much as I hate to admit that, but I’m not invested in Chloe Bailey getting with Offset or something about LeBron, especially if there’s nothing spicy or impactful there, just drama. I don’t hold Cardi to that high a standard but considering the attention she pays to social media, a vocal minority do, they probably won’t like this and I worry for her career if that really gets to her.

#55 – “Mr. Electric Blue” – Benson Boone

Produced by Evan Blair

So Benson Boone released his newest album American Heart to… rave reviews, I’m sure. I have yet to hear the record, probably never will, and whilst I’m no fan of YUNGBLUD or HAIM, you can thank them and Loyle Carner, who I actually do enjoy, for blocking him off the top of the albums chart, where he debuts at #4. I’ve been a big Benson Boone defender, but even I’ve lost the will to keep that up in recent months. I was really worried that this would follow “Mystical Magical” and sample “Mr. Blue Sky” and, well… thankfully, that’s not the case, it’s just another moonbeam ice cream situation with that title, I suppose. Despite the comical video where he does back-flips and responds to critics online (I think I hate meta-Boone more than most people hated sincere Boone), “Mr. Electric Blue” actually refers to his father, who he was in awe of as a child, with much of the song’s perspective being this naïve, childlike portrayal of his father as a superman who was just there one day and has always been there since, being so effortlessly cool and perfect. The most depth the song grants his father is that he was able to “chain [Boone’s mother] down” which is the worst phrasing you could ever have used and tells me a lot about Boone if that’s part of what he admires, alongside him being a “good, hard-working American”… yeah, if this isn’t satire (which I’m not entirely convinced Boone isn’t, with all this vapid Americana imagery), then it’s just worthless bubblegum. Cutesy synthpop pastiches about people you love are fine (and have been very common since the 80s), but Boone is doing a lot of hard work selling it, there is a post-chorus string swell and a pre-chorus that distorts his vocals as if he’s yelling through a megaphone how much he wants to be as cool as his dad. There’s even a vocoder bridge just repeating “Mr. Electric”, it’s just trying a little too hard to embrace the inherent cringe in an artist with Boone’s voice making this genre of song with this kind of subject matter, so much so that it seems confused. Is it ironic? Probably to some extent, sure, but is that irony, draped in American thematic motifs and plastic synth piss, based in a lot of sincerity to sell that idea? Absolutely, and the fact that there is an honest, admittedly interesting perspective here – a child’s love for his father, who he’s yet to see as flawed in any way – that’s just not given any nuance or room to breathe, is what makes it so much worse. This kind of song needs a bridge where he sees his dad cry or something and the chorus reassures that even through that, he’s still a superhero to him. Boone doesn’t want to touch on fragility or uncertainty at any point, however, and hasn’t for any of the three singles I’ve heard from this sophomore album. It was cute and breezy the first time but now it’s just saccharine. Ugh.

#49 – “Drive” (from F1 the Album) – Ed Sheeran

Produced by Blake Slatkin and John Mayer

For some reason, it is odd for me to see an Ed Sheeran song about driving from the F1 soundtrack. He seems like he should be cycling to the studio with a picnic basket attache. Regardless, here’s the newest single from F1 the Album, the full soundtrack of which has just released as of the day of writing. John Mayer of all people joins him as a producer and co-writer here, though it’s not the first time they’ve crossed paths, musically or otherwise – here’s them talking about watches for an hour and change. If I were to compare this to anything in Sheeran’s discography, it’d be his innuendo-laced glam rock track “BLOW” with Bruno Mars and Chris Stapleton, mostly because there’s not many attempts in his catalogue to make an honest-to-God rock song, the kind that you could hear on rock radio, and I do think this will be big on US modern rock radio, it’s an easy crossover that you can take somewhat seriously if you don’t think about it too much. And you really shouldn’t think about it too much, because this does not fit Teddy at all. There’s not a grit to Ed Sheeran’s voice, not even with a dry layer of distortion and an attempt at a rawer delivery, because he’s still as feathery as ever, with a flat mix that doesn’t offer him much coating in these quiet, stodgy electric guitars – it just sounds like he’s doing karaoke on an existing rock song… but he’s the only one there who’s not drunk, he’s taken it seriously. Consider the acoustic guitars that back the earnest chorus, the attempt at a groovy post-chorus, the fact that the lead riff sounds like Guitar Hero couldn’t license Audioslave’s “Cochise” and came up with something similar but not tempting a lawsuit. The song’s still catchy even if lyrically, Ed can’t sell sex or intensity, has never been able to, and whilst he may be able to sell a fleeting acoustic ballad about escapism, that doesn’t apply to rock and especially not to running from police cars. I don’t mind the closing moments at all, and there is some promise to this – it might be a case of right song, wrong person – but there would need to be a lot added to give this the power it needs. As is, it’s basic, one-dimensional pop rock that Theory of a Deadman could do better. Ed Sheeran, I like your music but when I’m comparing you negatively to Theory… maybe stick to the lane you’re carving out for your solo record with all the international influences, that’s working out a lot better.

#47 – “GUILT TRIPPIN’” – Central Cee featuring Sexyy Red

Produced by Alex Lustig, Harley Arsenault and WONDRA030

Central Cee and Sexyy Red have a duet because both rappers seem to be willing to do anything with anyone for enough attention and notice I didn’t say money there, I think the streams are what captures their… “experimentation” with different artists and genres. Out of all genres to tackle for this one, Cench and Ms. Sexyy are going for Afrobeats. Our story starts in Haiti, however, in 2007 with Wyclef Jean, whose song “Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill)” featuring Akon, Lil Wayne and Nila peaked at #66 in the UK that year (when “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis was #1). A much bigger hit elsewhere in the world, it contains Auto-Tune crooning about then-President George W. Bush and despite that, is oddly ahead of its time (I’m serious), and already references plenty of older songs as the one-off quartet trade parts. It’s not a particularly great song, but I like Wyclef and he brings the best out of Akon, who you of course can’t hear in Cench’s song as Drake’s modern producers blur the sample in a watery mess as they try to emulate a relaxed Afrobeats instrumental. Cench calls Sexyy Red a feminist who doesn’t believe in gender roles but is still in the kitchen making meals for him. Sure. It’s basically one of those typical pop-rap songs about a bad boy with a girl he doesn’t treat very well, cheating on her, arguing, but still paying her back with jewellery, with the conceit mostly being that they’re as bad as each other and despite how vapid their relationship is, they somehow stick by, mostly because the sex is good and they’re both rich. That’s all fine and good – it’s not that far off from the “cash rules everything around me” theme of the original – but it’s… off. Mostly for Cench, who usually rides these Afrobeats instrumentals well but sounds completely dead on this, phoning it in with any sense of melody drained out of his voice entirely, even in the hook. Sexyy is somewhat off-beat but has a light-hearted delivery and looser sense of groove that makes her verse much more enjoyable, especially with those backing ad-libs and slightly comic subject matter. Speaking of, I just find the theme a bit unfitting for the kind of song it is. You expect it to be at least rough around the edges, but this is streamlined Afrobeats without many of the human back-and-forth elements that make those songs interesting, just liquidy Drakeisms, the kind that makes his worst music such a slog because the melodies in the original samples and loops have been blended into a soggy ball of air. It’s just… nothing. For a song about a relationship between Central Cee and Sexyy Red, being boring is perhaps the least expected outcome, and definitely the worse crime.

#44 – “Plastic Box” – JADE

Produced by GRADES and Oscar Görres

Jade Thirlwall is still trying to launch these solo singles, with nearly a full year of singles with middling performance (“Angel of My Dreams” being the exception) and personally for me, no staying power, with the debut solo album THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! still months away. Is this new single any different? Well, a lot of the singles have taken different approaches, it’s just that they haven’t reached a point since the very first where I can say the song goes far enough to be what it clearly wants to be. This song uses the conceit of having her lover’s heart in a plastic box, wanting an untouched, pure love with no existing baggage from prior relationships the two have had with other people, because even knowing that her partner once felt a similar way for anyone else hurts her a little bit, makes her feel less special. JADE acknowledges this as obsessive, a bit irrational in a very compressed mix that has her echoed, processed vocal mould into the rote synthpop dreck, though at least this time with a more interesting snare, I suppose – the bar’s low for this kind of synth slop now. Spending a lot of the chorus in a nasal, higher register with iffy pronunciation is a choice I don’t really understand, like why would she be meekly requesting this if it’s torture for her to read love letters to others in her partner’s handwriting? The pre-chorus gets half the way to belting, it feels like a bit of an anti-climactic cop-out to have a more low-key chorus where much of the emotion lies in wispy background riffing. I assume that’ll be the point, as she’s a bit afraid to ask directly, but when there’s so little to the song, both substance-wise and in terms of actual unique words, it just sounds pointless, with an abrupt cut rendering this as a practically unfinished cut that would only be a single if you’re really desperate for something, anything to work. Basically, it’s Ava Max’s demos.

#42 – “Gabriela” – KATSEYE

Produced by Andrew Watt and John Ryan

I’m generally disappointed we’re lending any attention at all to KATSEYE after the flagrant manufactured viral slop of “Gnarly”, but I’m not surprised. If they’re not going to continue down the route of what I can only call brainrot, I have no problem with them charting more songs, I’m sure there is talent within the “group” and behind them. If you notice the production and writing credits, they’re much less out there than “Gnarly”, with professional hitmakers Watt and John Ryan alongside Charli xcx in the mix as a co-writer, which is pretty much what I expected would happen after the group blew up, they can reject the weirder elements of their viral hit. Part of that could be how it was reportedly a demo left on the cutting room floor by Rita Ora and Anitta in 2019, meaning it’s at least five years old and had been shipped around the label block for years to a lot of rejection before it finally met its match in an opportunist follow-up for a girl group amorphous enough to take it. It’s a “Jolene” narrative with Auto-Tuned vocals and Latin guitar, and “back off my fella, Gabriela” being the vaguely memetic line. At least they actually have a Spanish-speaking member for a Spanish bridge, but the drums are stiff, the lyrics are typical and a lot of the vocal deliveries are telling of it being a Rita Ora song from 2019. Their EP, BEAUTIFUL CHAOS, is out this week as of writing, I don’t know if it’ll launch any hits but this may as well be white noise… which might be worse than offensively annoying because at least that’s something. Resorting to this as early as they are in their career after such a distinct breakout reeks of either confused management or utter facelessness. Just really worthless stuff.

#37 – “we never dated” – sombr

Produced by sombr

What frustrates me most about sombr is that he could make really good music, I see the potential in some areas, particularly how he has a relatively unique blend of sounds, even if they aren’t distinct at all, and his voice could be worked in an effective way by the right producer and especially writer, that’s what he needs. I was actually hoping he’d get a third hit so we can see how he develops an artist with all these new eyes on him. The title and the fact it is solely credited, both writing and production, to sombr himself, did worry me a bit however. I was right to, at least lyrically, with the condescending verses about how clever and sly this person was, how infatuating they are despite them not being romantically involved with sombr and the post-chorus mantra of “I can’t make you love me”… it’s all just kind of sleazy (not in a rockstar way, either) like sombr’s other two hits were. If I can ignore that, we do get some decent indie rock hidden somewhere in here, even with stock drums, because the riff is memorable, it definitely could be part of a good garage rock sound a decade or two ago, but it’s washed out by sombr’s yelping and even more so by his saccharine harmonies that make these patronising lyrics sound even more childish. Even more so than “Plastic Box” or “Gabriela”, there is so, so little to this song lyrically that it is impossible for me to care if I’m not a fan of the main conceit which, in this case, is regret with a hint of guilt-tripping. I like the swell of the bridge, there’s something to that, especially with the pianos, but it doesn’t have much room to breathe, I’d appreciate if it was more dynamic of a song and didn’t just slog around – I can imagine being more sold on this content in an alternate universe where this is a post-Britpop track (it already isn’t far off). Keep the bongos in the outro, though, I like those.

#33 – “High on Me” – Rossi. and Jazzy

Produced by Rossi. and Mark Ralph

Okay, I’ll bite. Who the Hell is Rossi… full stop? Well, as you may have expected, Mr. Full Stop – real name Ross McCornack – is a DJ from London known for his minimal house sound, active since at least 2018 (with an older, unrelated release erroneously slapped onto his Spotify page). This is his first time charting thanks to a collaboration with now chart mainstay, Irish singer Jazzy. There’s no delay to this one either, the song immediately starts with a crash into slinky house percussion with a lighter blend of melodies and what sounds like stuttered crowd noise before a swift drop into a throwback garage house bass that is sticky as Hell, I love that bassline. Sure, it’s simple, I actually wish it was louder in the mix, but it’s a catchy progression with good texture, especially against the 90s keys, and whilst I was unsure about Jazzy’s Auto-Tune-drenched half-singing at first, which seemed like a bit of a regression from her more sincere-sounding vocals on “Somedays”, her performance really grew on me over listens. This is mostly because I started to see her tuned-out vocal as a bit of a response to all the sound effects like the alien synths, array of presumably royalty-free male vocal soundbites and metallic drum percs. Her most effective companion is probably that groaning synth in the drop that sounds like Pac-Man on pain meds, but I love the rise that follows even more, with an even stickier synth (one I can only imagine as a puke-green sprite following Jazzy in a maze), before a smooth fall into that drop, with that bassline again just hooking me. Out of all songs this week to like, I didn’t expect it to be this week’s EDM nobody but yeah, good song, might count as a guilty pleasure if I believed in that but mostly just a solid throwback house jam. Hope this sticks around.

#6 – “Rein Me In” – Sam Fender featuring Olivia Dean

Produced by Sam Fender and Markus Dravs

Okay, finally, maybe this last stretch can have some quality. I mean, it’s basically guaranteed with Sam Fender and Olivia Dean, who is a new act I’m definitely keeping my eye on after how much I loved “Dive”. Originally a solo album cut from his latest, People Watching, Ms. Dean has been added for the single version. Let’s start with the original. Lyrically, it’s following a similar trend as the other singles from the album where the signature northern details are sparser, and the emotional aspect is accentuated instead, with a not unfamiliar lyrical theme of Fender being isolated and deteriorating his own personal relationships, leaving him feeling a sense of deathly numbness that may take him physically out of the North Shields pub he frequents but his “ghost” remains in the memories and experiences his former friends had, ones that he desperately wants to ignore and forget. It’s definitely an album cut and would not have made sense as a single, retreading a lot of content and sonic ideas, being in the latter half of the record, it’s not a particularly interesting Sam Fender song. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s got a uniquely baroque pop texture (or at least does until the guitars coalesce into a typical heartland twang), but it’s not the most flattering texture for his voice and at five and a half minutes, it runs too long to be this uninteresting, not a favourite from Fender at all and I wish he showed more restraint as the song hints towards or at least did something more significantly different with the song compared to much of his other work. Now, bring Olivia Dean onto the duet at a live show at the London Stadium (which Dean was already a support act for), premiere a studio version a week later, and maybe the song can expand on its ideas, introducing a second voice? To my surprise, that’s actually what happens – a lot of pop duets and remixes aren’t properly justified now, but Ms. Dean has a great response verse to Fender, essentially beckoning him home and reassuring Fender that he shouldn’t isolate himself and that he is loved. I wish she was a bit louder in the mix, but it’s a decent way of making the song feel more impactful, even if ultimately it’s just the second verse and there isn’t much in the way of chemistry after, or even a change in the chorus’ lyrics to reflect another perspective – maybe Fender is convinced by Dean, or Fender reacts more aggressively to the suggestion, not wanting to go back. I suppose a song about reining yourself in will naturally not go the extra mile, even if it means making the song worth its runtime, but yeah, this is nowhere near the other singles for me.

#4 – “Victory Lap” – Fred again.., Skepta and PlaqueBoyMax

Produced by Blake Cascoe, Dan Mayo, Darcy Lewis, Fred again.. and PlaqueBoyMax

I like Skepta keeping his eye to the youth and collaborating with a lot of younger, interesting artists so he can experiment, I really do, but sometimes I feel more out-of-touch than he is at 42 years old. I had only heard of “PlaqueBoyMax” from a friend who watches his live streams – apparently, he hosts music creation processes live on Twitch, where a song is made in a makeshift studio in real-time for fans to watch and, I assume, make suggestions, to artists who join him. According to NPR, PlaqueBoyMax – real name Mr. Maxwell Dent – was a member of the e-sports collective FaZe Clan before making these streams, the “In the Booth” videos, his main output, even officially releasing the products of those streams on streaming services. The same article makes a point about a rise in hip-hop streamers who barely count as journalists and barely counts as rappers, but more-so hyped-up middlemen who are strictly a part of the promotional aspect of the music, but Max here, presumably named after platinum-certified hits and not bad teeth hygiene, has branched extensively into the music-making world. I have not watched his streams myself but I think that’s a great thing to show kids who are interested in music production (Max even has a production credit)… doesn’t mean I had hopes for a livestream throwaway with two artists I like a lot but are somewhat inconsistent, especially when their hearts aren’t fully in it.

This song actually originates in Fred’s flip of Doechii’s grimy 2022 track “Swamp Bitches” with Rico Nasty which you should check out if you haven’t already. Both rappers are inconsistent for me, but the guitar-led boom bap morphing into frenetic, bratty sex-raps over a droning trap flicker, with maniacal laughter and hilarious dirty lyrics all the way through, it’s a brilliant track that really showcases their shared personality traits, even if Doechii does kind of wash Rico on it (she’s been pretty disappointing as of recent, unfortunately). Fred takes a mostly consecutive fragment from Doechii’s extended first verse, looping it into a short, simple hook. He noticed the catchy rhyme scheme as anyone would but outside of the stuttering “I need that”, it’s not actually that quotable of a hook, it sounds kind of slurred with all the effects, and out of all beats to lay it under, I wasn’t expecting a relatively straightforward grime track. I figured this be some Jersey club bullshit but no, it’s fully in Skepta’s familiar territory and whilst I wish there was slightly more to the instrumental so that “hook” could skip more faintly in the background, Skepta absolutely kills this, I mean, obviously. He can be a wild-card, but this is a grime track with a built-in lyrical motif that he can insert into his verse, so it’s a lay-up for him. The bassy rumble turns into a funky warble as his flexing – with a great third-person couplet – turns into drug talk, and the overwhelming alarm of a bass synth that follows his verse would be great… if it led to anything. Without the heavy bass in the mix, this song would feel so empty and whilst it’s a great bass, of course it is, and it would absolutely go off in a DJ set, but outside of that context, it’s kind of just a cool idea, which makes sense as that seems to be the idea of the streams: a cool idea developed on in a quick, light-hearted session. It doesn’t make for a top five hit though and for a guy who is famous presumably for his on-screen personality, I thought Max would also be rapping here but he leaves it all to Skepta (who admittedly runs out of juice in the second verse). Fred has been teasing a remix with Denzel Curry which could really be an opportunity for him to go off, but I don’t know, it’s just not there for me, especially when the original “Swamp Bitches” is not distant enough in vibe from “Victory Lap” for it to capture a more distinct energy. It’s still nice to see Fred and Skep having fun though.

Conclusion

For such a slew of new songs from varying artists, it’s really not an inspiring bunch, is it? As tired as I am, and as demotivated as I am after seeping through tons of shit for this episode, I am an optimist when it comes to art, I tend to enjoy most music I listen to on some level… so when there are 10 new songs and I like only about one and a half of those, that’s a problem. It’s still not a quick episode as I wanted it to be – whoops – but it could have been longer if these songs were any good. Best of the Week goes to Jossi. and Jazzy for “High on Me”, with a slight Honourable Mention to “Victory Lap” by Fred again.., Skepta and PlaqueBoyMax, though the worst… sheesh, there’s a lot to choose from. I actually think JADE’s “Plastic Box” just sounds the worst to me on a sonic level, the most unappealing to me personally, so I’ll give it Worst of the Week with a tied Dishonourable Mention to “GUILT TRIPPIN’” by Central Cee and Sexyy Red, as well as “Drive” by Ed Sheeran, though Boone just got off barely by at least giving me something to talk about, even if it’s sheer bubblegum. Hopefully we get some quality – or just less quantity – soon but for now, thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy, and I’ll see you next week.

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 21/06/2025 (j-hope & GloRilla, Twenty One Pilots, Mark Ronson & RAYE, Disco Lines & Tinashe, Coldplay)

Well, we had one week of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” at #1 on the UK Singles Chart, yet Alex Warren swings back with “Ordinary” for a 13th week at the top. Thirteen! Regardless, welcome back to this “nostalgic” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, brief discussions of assault and sex

Rundown

As always, we start with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting from the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks or a peak in the top 40. For this episode, we bid adieu to quite a few recent hits, namely: “Borderline” by Ely Oaks and LAVINIA, “Headphones On” by Addison Rae, “All I Ever Wanted” by Rachel Chinouriri, “No Bad Vibes” by Jazzy and KILIMANJARO, “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else” by Benson Boone, “NOKIA” by Drake (with uncredited vocals from Elkan) and finally, again, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan.

Then we have plenty of gains and returns filling up the gaps temporarily, with the latter including recent hits like “All I Know” by Rudimental and Khalid back at #71, “Somedays” by Sonny Fodera, Jazzy and D.O.D at #68 as well as, of all songs, “Rock that Body” by the Black Eyed Peas. Now, I couldn’t find an exact spark for the virality of the track on TikTok but you know how that app works – trends travel fast and all of a sudden, a song you haven’t thought about in years is at #35. As inexplicable as that era of Black Eyed Peas could be, I do think they’re not given as much credit for being genuinely weird and pulling it off, with “Rock that Body” co-produced by David Guetta being one of my favourite examples – Fergie spends pretty much the entire song in an Alvin and the Chipmunks voice for no reason, the Rob Base sample is looped over this plodding electro-house until it no longer resembles words, Taboo name-drops every genre that the song decidedly isn’t in his verse, it’s a brilliant song from their 2009 album THE E.N.D. (THE ENERGY NEVER DIES). “Rock that Body” originally peaked at #11 in 2010, whilst Lady Gaga and Beyoncé were at #1 with “Telephone”. If we haven’t already, maybe we should re-evaluate the electro-era Black Eyed Peas as a phenomenon that could never occur again – click here for an old chart blog that year on the BBC about the song if you’re in a nostalgic mood. Then our gains include boosts for “People Watching” by Sam Fender at #64, “The Way I Love You” by Jorja Smith at #59, “Back it Up” by Josh Baker and Omar+ at #58 and “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” by CMAT at #57, but nothing too high except for a switch-up in our top five.

Speaking of, this week, the top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with… “Dior” by MK featuring Chrystal off of the debut up to #5 (great), followed by “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #4, “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #3, and of course Ms. Carpenter and Mr. Warren switching places at the top. Now to dive into our new songs.

New Entries

#74 – “Dive” – Olivia Dean

Produced by Bastian Langebaek, Tre Jean-Marie and Matt Hales

As Olivia Dean continues to gain traction with newer material, her catalogue will benefit stream-wise and this is especially true for songs that had been bubbling under for a while but with new people discovering her, can finally reach the surface (no pun intended with that song title). This is its eighth week in the top 100 but its first in the top 75, coming from her debut album Messy back in 2023. Given all I’ve heard from her so far has been her charting material, I was interested in a slightly older song the fans liked to gauge a clearer idea on her unique sound. You definitely hear that here in “Dive”, which is a much lusher and full song than her newer single and soundtrack cut, thanks to shuffling, grainy drums and a horn section that keeps this weird balance between going all out and staying in the background, which is perfect for the song as lyrically, that restraint isn’t there, with the music filling in for emotions that she does not even want to consider outside of her “tidal wave of question marks” because that has the potential to ruin the moment of looseness, of utter submission to a lover who comes in a vulnerable moment. After years of heartbreak, Olivia Dean is fragile and the bar is low – being seen as capable and fine is enough for her to fall into this relationship headfirst, rejecting all concerns because she sees herself as understood, not beautiful but “beautified” which is a fascinating little detail because it indicates how much of the self-worth is attached to that partner and how they make her feel, that she would empty without it as the chorus hints towards (“every time I fall, I lose it all” – but she still repeatedly falls in love, or falls for it, depending on how pessimistic your approach is). The way the horns don’t explode but reach in and out amidst a more constant piano – a heartbeat, maybe – showing restraint at every turn even in the bridge where they could really blast, is a perfect way of reeling our narrator in subtly and without spelling out those underlying concerns. I adore the back-and-forth of the chorus, with the backing vocals already being lodged into my head, which don’t answer Olivia’s list of maybes but act as the present voice: the Olivia who’s there in the moment sipping wine and looking into their eyes, a version of herself that’s easy to ignore when she’s alone pondering on that moment from a perspective wearied and wised by bad relationships. There isn’t a post-chorus to the song, but the chorus so smoothly fades into the quick change-over of the verses (which are incredibly short) that it almost hints towards a switch-up, something to anticipate, especially when the track is surprisingly bare, mostly just Olivia (murmuring slightly in the haze of feeling) and the rhythm section, only for her to fall into love again, and love she seems to struggle to comprehend the realness of. It is a simple song lyrically, repeating a lot of the same ideas and returning to familiar motifs, but with the aim of reflecting a brief moment of overwhelming awe and love that has little time for trying not to sound like a broken record. Consider the bridge, one line repeated as the instrumental rises around her, but not having much effect on her delivery, still confident, like she’s on a train that won’t stop, in a life routine that won’t change, but still feeling the plunge of her heart reminding her of how much she felt seen, cared and loved for. She remains still in the gorgeous outro, having her vocal trail off into a set of subtle, almost music box-like keys, chords that slowly morph into spacey echoes, formerly empty night skies having stars fill up their dark expanse. This is an absolutely gorgeous song, probably one of my favourites to chart this year, and I may need to listen to that debut album in full if there’s anything as well thought-out and wistfully intentional, almost idyllic, like this on there. Perfect track, amazing way to start the episode off.

#55 – “Holy Blindfold” – Chris Brown

Produced by The Monsters & Strangerz, Jonathan Bellion and Tenroc

Chris Brown is pretty ignorable nowadays which is mostly a blessing but amidst his legal case in London about an alleged attack two years ago, he will still release singles and perform at concerts (in between attending court dates here in the UK). Breezy was actually made to stay at a UK residence while awaiting trial and only being allowed his passport when needing to travel for gigs, according to the BBC. I wonder if that ongoing mess will give any further credence to this new song which seems to be to some degree quite separate from his R&B sound when he enlists the big pop producers and songwriters, a stop I wouldn’t imagine CB pulling out nowadays unless he really wanted some kind of late-career smash… and wow, this is a misfire for Brown’s vocal texture. He’s nasal, he yelps like a child and has been drowned in increasingly cheap, liquidy Auto-Tune his entire career – either take away the processing, which makes his vibrato sound unrecognisable on the chorus, so I can take him a bit more seriously on a 90s UK street soul groove (probably not a coincidence that he attempts this sound whilst in England for the trial). I do think this dustier production, with a semi-choral backing, is better than most of his production, and Jon Bellion and Tenroc give the track a Soul II Soul shuffle that I honestly miss, the song isn’t bad purely on sounding really nice and sparkly outside of Brown himself. Lyrically, the idea of a woman being a “holy blindfold” is not worth even tearing into the logic of, especially if most of the lyrics are do-do-do’s and Breezy’s just going to resort to sex like he always does in the second verse, to little to no avail. This sound is warm and atmospheric but not in a way that is as smooth or sticky for that kind of content, especially not sold by the usually vulgar Chris Brown anyway. I’ll admit, it did grow on me, but I still have too many reservations to endorse this. It’s a step in the right direction for him, I’ll give him that, but it still clashes just a bit.

#40 – “Sparks” – Coldplay

Produced by Chris Martin, Guy Berryman, Jonny Buckland, Ken Nelson and Will Champion

Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell are Coldplay? No, just kidding, all of our new tracks are from pretty established acts this week, and this song is an extreme case of being established in that it’s two and a half decades old. “Sparks” is an album cut from Coldplay’s 2000 album Parachutes, when they were still vaguely a rock band, mostly in the post-Britpop tradition of slow builds, dreary tempos and string sections. Parachutes of course became the first of many #1 albums in the UK for Chris Martin and co., but of course, as an album cut, “Sparks” couldn’t chart until its digital release. A recent resurgence on – you guessed it – TikTok, potentially spurred on by Martin separating from his partner, actress Dakota Johnson, which isn’t of interest to me – though it makes some of their latest effort Moon Music quite bittersweet – but seemed like the last step to cause what was inevitable. Coldplay are a massive band, one of the biggest ever, and as younger fans discover the back catalogue, some random album cut that was already critically acclaimed was likely to enter the chart after a few clips get made of it. Now what is there to say about an old, slow Coldplay ballad from the turn of the century? Not much, though their recent songs do miss that guitar texture that felt bassier and smokier, it really fit Martin’s timbre in my opinion. The acoustic ballad is about needing someone to remember you, reminiscing on those sparks of a relationship, and Martin can sell that desperacy pretty easily with his default register but the lack of a specific lyric that drags me in, is particularly distinct or poetic, makes it difficult to resonate fully with the track, especially considering the lack of a real hook or build, where it somewhat follows the Coldplay formula but without the grandiosity that set them apart. It’s a murky, early-years song for a band that was remarkably quick to figure out how they wanted to sound, and it hasn’t particularly aged well for me, and that’s coming from someone who defends Coldplay more than most.

#37 – “No Broke Boys” – Disco Lines and Tinashe

Produced by Ricky Reed, Zack Sekoff, Phoelix and Disco Lines

As a Tinashe fan, I was pretty disappointed in her lukewarm BB/ANG3L follow-up, Quantum Baby, last year but maybe working with Colorado DJ Disco Lines will bring her back to that stronger, infectious structure or give her more flavourful production that hopefully inspired less dead-eyed performances. Well, I’m not too sure as this is actually a remix of a track from that very album and not one I liked. The song is far from bad, per se, it has some vintage-sounding keys and a fine enough groove, even if it is wavering and minimal in a way that doesn’t accentuate the vapid sing-songy chants of Tinashe’s vocal, doesn’t really drive it. It’s difficult to describe, but there is rarely a moment where the rhythm overpowers the almost melancholy sounding keys, and the mix is pretty empty, with the multi-tracked City Girls-esque hook really front-and-centre, so it just sounds… unfinished, not as saleable in the bratty fun it could be because it’s barely a song and more just a cool loop with some ratchet drums and hook ideas, which is clearly the vibe intended given the studio chatter but ends up just feeling useless, like a filler track included to pad out an underdeveloped tracklist shoved out to capitalise on “Nasty” being an actual hit. So, there are very few elements to this song that can very much be re-arranged and expanded on by a remix, it’s almost a deceptively simple song built for remixing given how catchy and simple it is. Disco Lines goes for a slow throwback house build-up with some echoey, futuristic atmosphere effects that don’t hurt the build-up but feel tacked-on to a song that is much more concerned with being… well, filler, this time just in a DJ mix instead of an album. It’s an easy chant to recognise and have the girls singing, so slap it on a four-on-the-floor, give an obnoxious synth lead a try, bam. I do respect the clear attempt to make the song more interesting and detailed sound design-wise, layering the backing vocals from Tinashe’s friends you hear in the studio chatter with her vocal, having pitch-shifted call-and-response (that barely works for me because of how unintelligible the pitched-down vocal is), adding an array of ribbiting sound effects in every angle of the mix, but it still feels empty and directionless, like painting pretty patterns on a basic figure-eight, it’s still a simple and honestly boring course, especially without new, original elements from Tinashe. It’s almost sad to say because I am a fan and would love for her to get more hits, especially if a pretty low-key song like this can land in the top 40 just with a remix, but it’s not there for me, sorry.

#34 – “Suzanne” – Mark Ronson and RAYE

Produced by Mark Ronson and Tommy Brenneck

It’s been a while since producer Mark Ronson has had a hit in his own name, enlisting RAYE for a track that is… an advertisement, basically. Swiss luxury watch brand Audemars Piguet have linked the two up to promote not an upcoming Mark Ronson album or follow-up from RAYE (though a new single helps the two prospects), but the “APxMusic” cross-promotional project, which strikes me as odd given RAYE’s success as an independent artist but get the bag, I guess, especially if the song is literally going to be about Audemars Piguet which this is. According to Wallpaper, it wasn’t an intentional reference initially to use the name Suzanne in the song but Suzanne Audemars was the mother of the children who started the brand, apparently encouraging them to go into watchmaking after her husband passed. AP – as if they don’t get mentioned in rap lyrics enough – have a partnership with the Montreaux Jazz Festival, which RAYE performed at last year, and Mark Ronson already collaborated with the brand before so I suppose the cheques – sorry, the stars – aligned for this collab.

As for the song itself, it’s only very loosely about Suzanne Audemars in reality, unless RAYE has a massive crush on her, that is, as there is an attention to detail to every description of this woman RAYE is infatuated with that I can only imagine comes from years of yearning. Combine that with some of the most organically-produced soul throwbacks of recent year – as you can expect from the mostly timeless Mark Ronson, with co-producer Thomas Brenneck on guitar and an incredible horn section that really should be even more prominent in the mix – and you’ve got an incredible love song, one that doesn’t entirely disclose just how requited it is. The years of admiration are evident in the playfulness of daring this Suzanne character to sit next to her, and even declaring that she’s been in this uncertain but definitely loving relationship since childhood, with the in-depth fantasies of the chorus reading like years of loving dreams and diary entries. Somehow, the unnecessarily wordy and specific request of “If you'd allow my left arm and my right arm to collide inside the small of your back, just like that” being too earnest to even come off as awkward in the meter, especially with layers of harmony vocals repeating her name behind her. The repeated line “Eyes are like the ocean, her nails are painted green” that starts the song and returns in a higher register in the second verse as RAYE paints the hypothetical scenario (clearly an overly perfect, but close to reality, version of what she dreams of going down) of how she’d approach Suzanne is such a nice way of connecting the earlier years of adoration into the moves she’s desperate to make now, and another little lyrical idea I love is how RAYE repeats the word “something” – not just “She blinks in slow motion just like something in the Looney Tunes” (which already gets a thumbs-up for the Looney Tunes reference) in the first verse but her request in the second for the waiter to get her something strong. It de-emphasises any detail that isn’t directly connected to Suzanne, framing the focus clearly on her and even points of comparison or drinks she will have aren’t nearly as important to get into as Suzanne herself, particularly because the comparisons are from RAYE herself, who repeatedly submits to her in a way that decentralises herself, even in the vocal delivery: take the mocking cadence of the second half of the second verse and her trailing into unclear, scat-like rhythms when her mind is on what she would like to say, what she wants to do, because it’s not Suzanne, it’s RAYE’s own fantasy scenario which isn’t as valuable to her as just Suzanne’s presence. It’s really a brilliantly-written song and sonically does a lot to help, with the instrumental break blurting out the horns amidst a winding synth that reflects the uncertainty of not just how Suzanne responds (which is the one thing she can’t fantasise, because she doesn’t know what that looks like), but to if this scenario is real or spoofed up by loving daydreams. I also love a good soulful drum fill, especially the immediacy of the shuffling moment that repeats here, it reminds me of “Midnight Sunshine” by The Soul Children… and I honestly don’t even have any nit-picks here. Unsurprisingly, I can’t find anything wrong with a sapphic love song produced by Mark Ronson. This show is starting to get real predictable, isn’t it?

#33 – “The Contract” – Twenty One Pilots

Produced by Tyler Joseph and Paul Meany

I’m pretty sure I do a spiel about how I can never really get into Twenty One Pilots every time they show up so just know I like a few songs but don’t understand the lore. Regardless, that fanbase will launch a lead single into the top 40 with ease, so here’s their newest single, coming just a year after Clancy and according to typically cryptic social media posts, will lead up to Breach – the final act in the narrative arc they have been weaving for a decade since Blurryface. I do not know if that means the end of Twenty One Pilots or just a closing of this avenue, but with how much of their time in the spotlight has been defined by the songs that play a role in that narrative with characters I don’t understand, it’ll be interesting to see where they go after this, if they do or even can. Now I’m not a fan, but they will occasionally swing and connect for me, with them doing so last year with one of my favourite songs of the decade so far, the acoustic ballad “The Craving” Tyler Joseph dedicated to his wife. One of my biggest obstacles in fully engaging with the eclectic duo is the front of a character arc that I’ve never bought into, so self-contained sentiments like that one end up being much more resonant for me. Unfortunately, lead TOP singles tend to be flashy and confusing, so I didn’t have my hopes up, though Tyler’s wordiness tends to at least slide in better to pop music structures than, say, Sleep Token.

“The Contract” is supposedly about “Nico” and “Clancy” but for normal people, it’s about insomnia and paranoia, with Tyler’s sarcastic high-register Auto-Tuned outbursts about not sleeping coming out of relative nowhere over a murky mix of dark, chasing pianos, splintering breakbeats under the mix and a slinkie of a stuttered synth that I really love. For an awkwardly-structured chorus, it resonates surprisingly well, as the backing instrumental barely changes despite Tyler’s awkward whining turning into ghostly harmonies, with that back-and-forth eventually clambering alongside guitars to a rollick that lets Tyler get off his typical fast-rap off, though this time with a lot of brevity. The one verse is distorted and stuttered, finishing abortively and barely reaching above Josh Dun’s drums before it turns into a restless yell that pans between left and right for each line, a cute detail for a song like this indebted to the voices in our narrator’s head, which is probably also the thematic reason for the pitch-shifted mantra of “sleep” in the post-chorus. The respite of the bridge with mostly the breakbeats under a rising synth and Tyler’s high vocals is a cool idea but it ends really quickly, bringing me to my main problem with the song – it has a lot of half-elements and half-ideas that it gives up on relatively swiftly. Sure, high turn-over is integral to a panicked, paranoid uptempo alt-rock song, that’s fair enough, but the lack of room to breathe damages the impact of certain parts when Joseph is itching to get back to the admittedly really strong pre-chorus. The one verse doesn’t grant much lyrical development, the bridge is disappointing, and there’s a pointless break between the final pre-chorus and chorus that seems just to stall and show off a cool vocal blip effect rather than actually make the song hit better. One of the chorus is half-future bass for no reason, the lyrics on the outro are really basic, and that side-winding synth I love never gets turned into something special like a guitar solo which would be so satisfying. Maybe a song about an unfulfilled contract shouldn’t be satisfying, but I can see that running off as an excuse when the song sours on repeated listens: there are aspects of this song I love and I’ll probably listen to it regardless of my hang-ups, but when the album comes, if it’s not justified by the context, will it not just end up a bit of a waste of great ideas?

#30 – “Killin’ it Girl” – j-hope featuring GloRilla

Produced by Cirkut, inverness and Blake Slatkin

And speaking of fanbases who can push a song effectively, our highest debut this week is the latest solo single from BTS star j-hope, this one with a guest spot from Memphis rapper GloRilla, who I do generally like a lot for her distinct voice and not-taking-any-shit attitude but these aren’t exactly traits that will mesh you in well with shiny K-pop stars so I had my concerns, especially given we’ve got some pretty generic pop producers here like Cirkut and Slatkin – I was anticipating a Kid LAROI song, basically.

Well, if you select the right version of the at least 10 available, including but not limited to a “West Coast remix”, a “Brazilian Phonk remix”, a version with a full band and a version listed as the “Soul remix” (indicating the lack of any in the original), you’ll get a 2000s throwback beat I couldn’t imagine LAROI on or j-hope, really, who is unnecessarily Auto-Tuned in his verse. I could imagine Pharrell on it, hence why j-hope does the typical 2000s Skateboard P whisper on the hook, with a BTEC Jazze Pha introducing the track over what sounds like The Neptunes or even Bangladesh (the producer, not country) if someone came in and took out all of the interesting sounds. Now, I’m a sucker for Neptunes-style production and with someone who actually fits over it – out of newer-generation artists, Lil Tecca comes to mind, especially with the introduction of some slicker guitars and harmony vocals in the second chorus onwards – this song could hit for me as the slightly unconventional groove and heavily percussive beat is definitely good, even if uninteresting. GloRilla thankfully sounds excellent on this, even if the combination of this beat and her voice accentuates the slight DJ Mustard-ness of it all. The self-declared “Mike Glo Myers” sells the bad girl image and much more literally than j-hope expected, I’m sure, as she includes so many lines about metaphorically killing it in her verse that don’t always line up with something you could turn into a flex about wealth or attitude – if you’re not doing anything shady or violent, why are lawyers getting hired? As funny as it is to hear Glo hashtag-rap “blood on the scene – period” on a song by a BTS member, there isn’t much interplay here at all which is a damn shame when you could get really interesting with it and I know just who would: Tyler, the Creator. With a history of both worshipping Pharrell and having earlier horrorcore lyrics (as well as working with Glo last year on “Sticky”), he would have fit perfectly on here, expanded the track beyond its empty state. Get a third verse that ends with either of them being shot or something, tell a story, maybe it’s a Bonnie and Clyde, whatever, just get interesting and creative with it. Glo’s nearly there but the song seems scared to take this already silly idea into a much more exciting and ridiculous direction when it would really be worthwhile in my opinion, especially when in the 2000s, these songs weren’t afraid to get ludicrous… or to get Ludacris, for that matter, he would have killed this too (both puns intended). As it is, it’s just fine, with a particularly bad first verse, but the potential being there makes it a frustrating listen and no, I’m not rating or even considering the now typical flood of remixes because that forces me to acknowledge the Brazilian phonk remix of this song as anything but a stream troll.

Conclusion

What a quality week overall – even the songs that aren’t spectacular gave me a lot to run through which is honestly a nice feeling to just have a lot there to chew at. Worst of the Week to Disco Lines and Tinashe, unfortunately, for “No Broke Boys”, with Best of the Week – and a very emphatic one at that – to Olivia Dean’s “Dive”, with RAYE and Mark Ronson not to be sniffed at with “Suzanne” as the Honourable Mention, I love both songs. As for what’s on the horizon, we have some male-female duets lined up from two different extremes – Sam Fender and Olivia Dean vs. Central Cee and Sexyy Red – that both could land pretty high, as well as YUNGBLUD, JADE, HAIM, Lola Young, Cardi B, Lorde, Ed Sheeran… it could be stuffy. For now, thank you for reading, rest in peace to John Reid of Nightcrawlers, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 14/09/2025 (Sabrina Carpenter, Ed Sheeran, MK & Chrystal)

Finally, Mr. Alex Warren has been dethroned. Sabrina Carpenter debuts at #1 on the UK Singles Chart with her new lead single “Manchild” – welcome back to this “unusual” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, discussions of depression, misogyny, ageism, body-shaming, sexual discrimination, drugs, suicide - it's one of those episodes

Rundown

As always, we start with our notable dropouts which, if you’ve forgotten or you’re new here or you just love catchphrases, are songs leaving the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid farewell to: “All I Know” by Rudimental and Khalid, “Dark Thoughts” by Lil Tecca (could be back next week), “Anxiety” by Doechii, “Here in Your Arms” by Nathan Dawe and Abi Flynn, “Busy Woman” by Sabrina Carpenter (three-song rule victim) and finally, “Timeless” by The Weeknd featuring Playboi Carti, allegedly.

Those tracks of course make way for our re-entries, like “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan at #75, “People Watching” by Sam Fender at #73 and “Gnarly” by KATSEYE at #62 (presumably thanks to an Ice Spice remix – seriously). Then we have some gains for “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls at #65, “Illegal” by PinkPantheress at #60, “Sultans of Swing” by the Dire Straits at #59, “Beautiful People” by David Guetta featuring Sia at #55, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #53 (one of those weeks), “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter at #46 thanks to residue streams from the new track (“Taste” got a small boost too, more on her later), “Cops & Robbers” by Sammy Virji and Skepta at #41 off of the debut, “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims at #40 (this will never go away), “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan at #38, “The Glen” by Levi Heron at #26 (yes, really), “Headphones On” and “Fame is a Gun” by Addison Rae at #44 and #23 respectively thanks to the debut album (more on that later), and finally, “Nice to Each Other” by Olivia Dean at #18.

As for our top five, we have “undressed” by sombr at #5 (unfortunate), “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #4 (undeterred), “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #3 (uncertain), “Ordinary” by Alex Warren at #2 (unwarranted) and of course, “Manchild” at #1 (unsurprising). Now to check out our handful of unheard tracks arriving at the top 75 this week.

New Entries

#72 – “Nope your too late i already died” – wifiskeleton and i wanna be a jack-o-lantern

Produced by i wanna be a jack-o-lantern

Sigh, well, firstly, *“you’re”. Secondly, I really do not want to talk about this song. wifiskeleton was Jeremiah Simms, a young singer-songwriter who was pretty typical within this kind of SoundCloud bedroom pop niche: blending plenty of genres (mostly emo, rap and indie pop), being a part of large, wide-ranging collectives, going by more aliases than is ever necessary, having songs taken down and reuploaded to streaming services seemingly at random, with ironic cover art and self-deprecating emo lyrics that read like teenage diaries. This is not a particularly unique type of artist and you see some mild viral successes or cult followings from these kinds of people, who also tend to be chronically online and have run-ins with confusing drama confined to Discord servers because of unchecked mental illness and teens being teens. Just from reading song titles and his biography info, describing the kind of producer tag soundbites he would include (“You’re a creepy loser” is a tag placed on the song titled “let the credits roll for the end of my miserable life” – this is what we’re dealing with here), I can tell this is clearly not the kind of artist who has any interest in subtlety or mainstream recognition, but the Internet’s always a platform for people who should not gather attention for whatever reason, and the same applies here.

wifiskeleton had this song go viral from his debut album but would not see the peak of its success as on May 5th this year, he died from an overdose in Miami. Naturally, this gave the song a continued boost and it’s finally in the top 75, though there is not much to the song itself at all and I don’t see it lasting. Sure, its surprisingly upbeat, jangly acoustic guitar riff could be catchy especially when put against the depressive lyrics as some kind of comedic juxtaposition, but it seems just tasteless to take that as the appeal for a song by a dead man. The song goes nowhere without a hook or any progression, just a loop playing for a minute and a half, and whilst wifiskeleton’s mumbly, almost Kid Cudi-esque sing-rap has some appeal, UK-based shoegaze act “i wanna be a jack-o-lantern” has a pathetic performance here on the second verse. Both were probably recorded in bedrooms on podcast microphones, so I probably shouldn’t criticise the mixing, but I can barely make out a word from these guys. This is clearly not a guy who had much self-worth or appreciation for his own art; he named an EP “horrible bullshit” and used a screenshot of a cartoon for its cover art. This is someone who wasn’t just using SoundCloud as a platform but lived and breathed the kind of careless posting of whatever demo that gets recorded with little hope that it will go nowhere. wifiskeleton was only 21 years old and the jack-o-lantern guy appears to still be active, releasing a song with “six days after christmas” (these emo band names are just sentences and stage directions) a few days ago as of this writing. I hope that wifiskeleton’s friends and family can live peacefully with the newfound virality of this song and that royalties are granted appropriately. That’s all I can really say.

#68 – “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” – CMAT

Produced by CMAT and Oli Deakin

Well, I’m not a professional photographer, but I can try. CMAT is Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, an Irish singer-songwriter from Dublin active since at least 2017 who has had some streaming success with her tongue-in-cheek folk songs but has only now charted in the UK, after both of her albums going #1 in her home country. Produced with Oli Deakin, who was behind the boards for her 2022 debut, “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” is the second single to be released from Euro-Country, set to be out this August and containing such titles as “Lord, Let that Tesla Crash”. Ms. Thompson stated on BBC Radio 1 that the song was inspired by the body-shaming she received from Internet commenters on the video for her performance at the BBC’s Big Weekend (according to the NME, the BBC did disable those comments after the flood of harassment came in).

Released in May to coincide with the papal conclave (which she says on TikTok was an intentional statement against Catholic treatment of women), the song touches on the unhealthy views surrounding female beauty, with the most damning line being the chorus ending with “Take a sexy picture of me, and make me look 16”, which turns into 15, then 14, etc. until she wants to be seen as a baby, with that supposed innocence and lack of power being something that is unfortunately considered attractive to certain male standards, in part because it can lead to the woman being more easily seen as an object of potential abuse, and also in part because youth or at least appearing young is something chased as if it is a cornerstone of being attractive and seeing yourself as such. CMAT explains in her behind-the-scenes video that the second verse is all about phases of womanhood, from “schoolgirl fantasies” to the “single woman banter” that she deems harmful to female self-image because it villainises the act of existing without connection to men. I love the lyric about the fog lifting in the chorus as it acknowledges how very real the issue of unfair societal expectations of women are but also how easily we can be distracted from that or dismissed on the grounds of it not seeming like a big problem, which resonates since CMAT herself is just 29 and whilst the self-doubt and pressuring standards have been there since she was a little girl (and long before), she’s still young enough to be not be taken seriously about it. The song is not afraid to touch on the ickier side of these expectations, with a distinct performance from CMAT full of character over vintage Nashville-sounding pianos and guitars that give it a countrypolitan feel, especially with how the vocal mix replicates that slight distortion (a few singers are looking for a smooth, country-tinged vintage pop sound but this is the closest I’ve heard to actually fitting themselves in that mould). The need to feel “sexy” is the need to feel valued, and the bridge does a beautiful job at demonstrating the reluctant necessity for women to find value in experience rather than appearance, offering herself as being here for the “party girls dragged out by their ankles” even if she’s no longer considered attractive due to her age. It’s a sad position to play, especially at that young of an age, and there’s a justified hesitancy in CMAT to accept that role as an almost agony aunt-type advisor to the younger and sexier with her scouring forums for cures to aging. It’s definitely an intriguing and fascinatingly-written song though in my opinion, despite the nice, vintage sound and great performance from Ms. Thompson, the song does little sonically to show the advancement of age or even deliver on a progression or role reversal that the narrative clearly allows for, with an abrupt ending that makes me wish for more to have been explored, even at the risk of dumbing down or overshadowing the vulnerable lyrics. Overall, this is still a remarkable song, I’m not exactly surprised it’s charting given both the sound and relatability factor, as well as connection to an unfortunate viral moment. I suppose time will tell if this song ends up lasting on the chart but I definitely think it’s worth listening to and I will be checking out Euro-Country to see where this writing leads her. Great stuff.

#61 – “New York” – Addison Rae

Produced by Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd

Social media star turned alt-pop singer Addison Rae has debuted at #2 on the albums chart with her full-length debut, Addison. I’ve yet to hear the full record but this song proved popular enough to end up charting alongside the pre-release singles so does this convince me to take a listen? Well, I never know exactly what to expect from Rae, Kloser and Elvira at this point as they’ve proved a pretty eclectic trio… but I definitely was not expecting this. Now, to be clear, this is Charli xcx worship, down to the distorted claps, familiar melodies, repetitive Auto-Tuned sing-speaking that at times even slips into a faux-British accent and a lot of the lyrical tropes about freedom in the city. If Charli hadn’t called herself a “dance whore” yet, it was inevitable but Addison has swooped in to claim that title in what is also a pretty great song. We start with Addison inviting us to “take a bite of the big apple” (which really does not help the Charli comparisons, exactly), followed by a stuttered vocoder “New York” that sounds like it could been from a 90s Microsoft text-to-speech device. Clippy and Bonzi Buddy ghost-wrote this one, I hear. Then we get the mantra of Rae loving New York because of the freedom its nightlife supposedly brings, over a really subtle synth that warms its initial chilling sound over time as Rae’s breathy verse vocal lends it a comfort that you don’t hear when the instrumental abruptly cuts out entirely at the start (seemingly just for the bit – again, something Charli and A.G. Cook would do). Once the percussion soft-launches the slow house build, we’re treated to an ugly, echoed kick taking up a weird space in the mix and an incessant shake that refuses to leave even when the kick has, only succumbing once Rae’s vocal has been flattened by EQ, and immediately settling back in once a slightly more egregious clap can steal your focus. With a few rhythmic breaths, the minimal cultish mantra of “I love New York” becomes a buzzy multi-tracked child “na-na-na”-ing like she has the lollipop and you don’t, before we just clip out suddenly and without fanfare. That really is the point of the song: for Rae to be on the sugar rush of fame and debauchery that you, the listener, can only wish for, waving the lifestyle in your face and taking it away just when you’re able to start living vicariously through the four-on-the-floor. One thing I didn’t realise until after listening was that this is the opener, which is… bold, and definitely lights a spark of interest I didn’t really have before in listening to this full-length album. It might be something more than the sum of its obvious influences if this and “Fame is a Gun” are anything to go by. If she ends up charting another deep cut, I’ll update on how that went.

#17 – “Dior” – MK featuring Chrystal

Produced by MK, Emily Nash and Larry Latenight

I didn’t mind Chrystal’s “The Days”. A basic, empty, minimal demo, sure, but there was a thematic reason – it’s a song about reminiscing simpler, lazier times and it seemed very intentional to keep it as basic as possible, especially with the series of successive remixes. This follow-up single with career DJ Marc Kinchen – a producer who has made some great contributions to house music since the early 90s – is a huge miss for me, however, because it does not feel nearly as purposeful. Despite sticking in the same lane as “The Days”, this one can’t justify itself as easily. Firstly, Chrystal tries to build interest in both a romantic relationship  and a from rags to riches origin story here, with the two arcs kind of fusing into each other without much detail or logical narrative, but most of the song is meaningless references to luxury fashion sung deadpan through robotic levels of vocal manipulation so, who cares? Secondly, this song has an eerie, unwavering synth in the back, a build-up with a factorial racket of breakbeats and copy-paste snares splattering into each other, this is making the song grander but with little pay-off. Once we finally get the drop, it sounds disappointing and awkward because of the late drop leading into just “The Days” lite, with plastic synth tones briefly popping in but not spending too much time visiting because that would just be a bit too much going on at once. The best moment here is probably the vocal chop in the second drop but right after that, the song’s over. When done purposefully and effectively, minimalism can leave you wanting more and accentuate certain aspects to really drill a certain message through or leave an artist’s intention barer and rawer. This kind of minimalism just seems stumbled upon and lazy, collating contributions from its producers into a product that lacks much of a goal, with the lyrics not exactly committing to a topic except for the vapid drone of “Christian Dior”. It’s a disappointing follow-up in my opinion but I definitely think it will stick around, for whatever that’s worth. It’ll probably get five million remixes anyway.

#9 – “Sapphire” – Ed Sheeran

Produced by Ed Sheeran, ILYA, Johnny McDaid and Savan Kotecha

There’s a certain gall to Ed Sheeran for not crediting Arijit Singh as a featured artist on this new single from his upcoming record Play. Singh may not be known to UK pop listeners but he is the most followed artist on global Spotify! Initially a reality TV star in the 2000s, he is now an award-winning, government-decorated Hindi “playback” singer – this is a type of star not regularly seen in modern western cinema but still commonplace in India, wherein singers who do not appear in films themselves record the singing parts for the film’s star actors. In India, the soundtracks featuring the playback singers can be immensely popular and often, they reach the same levels of success and recognition as the actors miming their performance. The most-streamed Indian artist of the last five years, Singh co-wrote the song and appears on the bridge singing in Punjabi alongside Ed himself, marking what I believe to be his first appearance on the UK Singles Chart, though I could be missing another uncredited appearance. He’s been making the Asian music chart since 2012.

As for the song itself, it’s honestly great. In the same vein as how “Azizam” fused a more typical dance-pop track with Persian music, we have Singh on sitar here alongside lute and tabla players, but Punjabi influence runs a lot deeper in this track than just adding the instruments to your typical brand of synths. Sure, those are still there – though they sound particularly sparkly here, especially in the intro – but the rhythm section is straight out of Punjabi tradition and is the foundation for the track, which does have plenty of western pop tropes, but the chorus integrates Punjabi so seamlessly because Ed’s English lyrics emulate the rhythm of the words in the Punjabi section (I actually didn’t notice him switch at first). Lyrically, it’s about intimately dancing with your partner and wishing the moment could last forever, which isn’t exactly new for Ed, but he does include references to karma and fireworks to still centre the culture he’s influenced by (quite subtly) into the thematic aspect of the song. I love how he strips off some of his signature multi-tracking for the verses to get a more organic performance, piling them all into a chant of the title in the chorus that sounds grand, especially after Singh’s bridge which is brilliant in how it builds. I already love Ed’s layers of manipulated vocal loops in much of the rest of the song, but the way Singh’s vocal wraps around Ed’s, which still takes centre stage in the mix for the break section, as the kick plods in, is a fantastic moment of just being astonished by how his partner glows in his eyes, it’s beautiful, and to bring Singh’s vocal to the front of the mix solely on the bassline for a brief, fully Punjabi rendition of the chorus is just a great touch (it sounds built for a highly-choreographed music video). Perhaps that final rendition of the chorus goes on for a tad too long, but the outro it evolves into has some really dramatic choir vocals and intense percussion that sweetens the slight droll the hook starts to bring by that time in the song (though a smoother transition that lifts the choir in through the final chorus would make it an even more special moment). Regardless of some nit-picks, this is a detailed interweaving of Punjabi music within a more typical dance-pop that appears effortless purely through how tightly the song is written not to conform to certain standards or quotas but to fully involve the culture. This is absolutely one of Ed’s best upbeat tracks, which don’t tend to hit as well for me as his ballads, and I am interested to see how much global travelling he ends up taking into account on this new album. Excellent song.

#1 – “Manchild” – Sabrina Carpenter

Produced by Jack Antonoff and Sabrina Carpenter

Ignoring the discourse surrounding Ms. Carpenter’s cover art and music video – regardless of how she chooses to present herself and gender roles in her art, it’s certainly not feminism to police that simply because of her gender and the gender of her audience – I am personally interested in seeing how this new Sabrina Carpenter album ends up sounding and performing. This is her first album that has been made during true megastar status she’s achieved in the past year and the turnaround has been remarkably swift (which makes me think it could all be leftovers in the same vein and/or sessions as Short n’ Sweet, but time will tell).

This lead single has immediately caught attention with its video and launched at #1 thanks to a vinyl push, though I’m not sure the song stands without the star power. Sabrina brings her now typical lighthearted sensuality with Antonoff’s also now typical 80s synths and slight country elements like the guitars though here, they’re clearly for decoration as the focus is on the shiny production and hook, which is oddly flailing on here. You’d think a chorus that debuts at #1 wouldn’t just trail off exasperatedly and let the main vocalist get basically cut off with how overwhelmed they are by instrumental admonishments. The second verse similarly just keeps going in a sing-songy fashion that screams unfinished. The first verse and pre-chorus do click, I like the beat-down of this annoying guy who Sabrina somehow dealt with, but she loses me pretty soon by just not introducing new elements to the table and letting weird, weaker melodies sit and be steamrolled by 80s radio-rock pastiche. Some parts are just bizarre choices to me: where’d the pre-chorus go, Jack? It was catchy, funny, had a bit of call-and-response – it’s only there once when it could be a great structural device for this kind of song. The song fades out tepidly just as you can start to hear it turn to a real hoedown, but the fade out is so slow that it’s almost just teasing the listener with what fun you could be having. I suppose that makes sense for how the song is written and who it’s directed to but the listener is not supposed to be the manchild, they’re supposed to relate to or laugh with Sabrina’s position… unless you’re into humiliation kinks, I suppose? Is that a large subsection of the Sabrina Carpenter fanbase? That survey can wait, I’m still interested in this album even if this single definitely sounds like a song carried over from the last – I think the more direct and fed-up lyrics here could go a long way with the right structure and production. I’m still not complaining about a new #1 either, after, over 10 weeks of Alex Warren, I just don’t prefer its replacement.

Conclusion

Despite only six new songs, this was still a relatively expanded episode – there was a lot to these songs, and it pleasantly surprised me. Best of the Week goes to Ed Sheeran – I am so sorry – for “Sapphire”. Trust me, I really wanted to give it to my ladies but the tied Honourable Mentions are Addison Rae’s “New York” and CMAT’s “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”, because the two songs are up there sonically and lyrically respectively but don’t take the further step ahead in either direction to be perfect, which they very easily could. I suppose the worst song here in my opinion is “Nope your too late i already died” but out of respect and just wish to avoid all of… that, I’ll grant Worst of the Week instead to MK and Chrystal for “Dior”, with a Dishonourable Mention to “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter (that was really disappointing). As for what’s on the horizon, AJ Tracey and Lil Tecca have albums whilst RAYE, j-hope and Joel Corry all have star-duo team-ups that could land on the chart. And, hey, maybe Digital Nas can bring his arts and crafts along too (unlikely). For now, thank you for reading, rest in peace to the music legends Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 07/08/2025 (Tate McRae, Addison Rae, Olivia Dean)

Alex Warren is at #1 for yet another week on the UK Singles Chart, with “Ordinary” spending its twelfth week at the top. Welcome back to this “pestilent” series REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: brief discussions of trauma, gender dysphoria and jerkin' it

Rundown

As always, we start our episode with the notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 – that’s what I cover – after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. For this week, we bid adieu to quite a few hits: Eurovision says au revoir as both “Espresso Macchiato” by Tommy Cash and “Baller” by Abor & Tynna leave, as do “twilight zone” by Ariana Grande, “Feel It” by d4vd, “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga, “Somedays” by Sonny Fodera, Jazzy and D.O.D and finally, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan… again.

As for what fills in those blanks, we do have plenty of new songs, but also returning tracks like “All I Know” by Rudimental and Khalid at #75, “Illegal” by PinkPantheress at #74 and… “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #63. There are also a scattering of boosts for “All I Ever Wanted” by Rachel Chinouriri at #54 (commendable), “The Glen” by Levi Heron at #37 (barely defendable) and “Can’t Decide” by Locky and the Deans at #13 (questionable). Of course, we would be amiss without mentioning sombr of all people getting a second top 10 with “back to friends” at #9 joining “undressed”. Speaking of…

Our UK Singles Chart top five this week consists of “Family Matters” by Skye Newman at #5, “undressed” by sombr at #4, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #3, “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #2 and of course, Mr. Warren at the very top. That felt like a uniquely short rundown, mostly because the new entries are the primary stories this week, so let’s dive into them.

New Entries

#73 – “Zombie” – YUNGBLUD

Produced by Matt Schwartz

YUNGBLUD – Dominic Harrison – is a singer from Yorkshire who is essentially the British inductee into the weird commercial pop punk revival led by Travis Barker and mgk, though typically less successful given his highest-charting song is a KSI feature. Thanks to a video with famous actress Florence Pugh, YUNGBLUD’s single for his upcoming album Idols has landed on the chart and it’s pretty far separated from his punk efforts, being a ballad backed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra about the feeling of ugliness – not necessarily appearing unattractive but the idea of deteriorating and shutting yourself away from your loved ones to not be a burden. Mr. Harrison explained that the song was initially influenced by his grandmother, whose serious injury left her a different person than she was before, presumably unable to live how she had been doing, tying into the themes of deteriorating, aging and just wanting some level of comfort for the future. “Zombie” is a post-Britpop throwback with a simple mix of acoustic and electric guita riffs, an admittedly full-sounding mix thanks mostly due to the strings and a performance from YUNGBLUD that is hit-and-miss. I have always personally found his voice obnoxious but he does his best to keep into a less nasal, more low-key register for the verses, going more full force into his typical delivery for the chorus, which together with repetitive lyrics, becomes quite difficult for me to enjoy. It is a shame too, since I enjoy the lyrical content. The main conceit of feeling like a zombie is interesting and the slow burn of the ridged instrumentation that keeps just consistent enough to feel slightly dreary is a pretty excellent way of building in that dread, especially with the significantly loud crashes. I even like a lot of the vocal melodies, it is a good song on paper and I would probably enjoy it with a different vocalist, which is more than I’ve been able to say for other YUNGBLUD songs so that is something. I would honestly love Grant Nicholas of Feeder to sing this – the song it immediately reminded me of was their 1999 hit “Yesterday Went Too Soon” and given their duller new material, Feeder would benefit from a memorably written song like this, especially given that the lyrics might hit even harder – potentially with more, somewhat meta layers – from an older legacy act. Being as personal as it is to YUNGBLUD, however, cutting it himself was probably the best choice and even if I don’t like track, I hope it is a hit for him. He may make music I find mostly terrible but he seems like a nice enough guy and I’ll always wish success by default for the artists who appear on the charts unless they have a damn good reason for me not to endorse them. Selling your art is hard.

#68 – “Back it Up” – Josh Baker and Omar+

Produced by Josh Baker and Aaron Dhadra

Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell are Josh Baker and Omar+? Well, Baker is a DJ from Manchester whilst Omar+ (pronounced “Omar Plus”) is from London, describing his music as “R&B for the Ravers”. Given how connected R&B has always been with UK garage music, it could seem a bit redundant but artists like PinkPantheress have found much success in fusing more typical pop structures and aesthetics with UK-based EDM genres recently, so maybe he means something in that vein. Only way to find out is to listen to the breakout single “Back it Up”. Originally released in March under indie label Three Six Zero Recordings and Baker’s own imprint Baker’s Dozen, this is a garage house track but with not much in the way of exciting back-and-forth build-up outside of brief risers integrated into the beat (both white noise and flashy, cheesy synth effects) that hardly distract from the chill pads and great bass synth groove. I suppose that’s the “R&B” – outside of Omar’s vocals frankly not worth noting – the relaxed, consistent vibe that isn’t built entirely on drops, even if they are there. Hell, the extended build with the slow strings and spare kicks that leads into the only real major drop of the song might actually be what makes the track, especially with Omar’s feathery vocal played without any accompaniment before being driven back into the beat. The looped “back it up” vocal sample adds a lot of affectionately corny flavour, alongside wavey electro synths at the back-end, that make this almost like a late-80s house cut but with a mostly 2010s approach to the sound design. It’s not exactly a momentous track, but it’s a very easy listen with a sound different enough from mainstream house cuts to be worth a listen (but very much finding common ground with ongoing trends in stutter house and Afro-house). An extended mix came this April, but May saw two other DJs have their hand in the track: MK’s dub mix has a unique vocal chop and emphasis on droning 80s synths and more present percussion, whilst James Poole completely reworks the track into a dark, bassy haunt that I might actually prefer on a sonical level. Either mix you take, it’ll be a nice listen.

#64 – “Easy Lover” – Miley Cyrus

Produced by Miley Cyrus, Michael Pollack, Jonathan Rado and Shawn Everett

Miley Cyrus’ visual album Something Beautiful has been met with a #3 debut on the albums chart and mixed critical reviews but fan adoration out of the gate, with this dreamier pivot being her most appreciated album by music fans (not necessarily just her fans) yet. I’ve yet to hear the album – it seems ambitious and unique, but I was not interested in lead single “End of the World” and this one doesn’t spark much intrigue either, unfortunately. Unlike the Philip Bailey and Phil Collins cut it shares a title with, and thankfully does not interpolate, the track is about someone who decidedly isn’t an easy lover. With smooth keys and an admittedly nice and smoky bassline and vocal chant, it echoes a cowboy aesthetic whilst not including many country elements in an otherwise typical 80s pop rock throwback, just with a little more dirt and funk peppered in, that the strings somewhat detract from. I think their inclusion in this mix is pretty weird at times, especially in the chorus, where they sound cheap and like they’re constantly phased in and out – maybe this was a thematic choice given that the song’s about a lover hard to leave but painful to love, but it doesn’t work well for me, especially without a stronger hook and so much empty space in some areas, even if Ms. Cyrus does her best to fill them with echoes and ad-libs (one of which indicates this was once intended as a reference track for Beyoncé’s COWBOY CARTER). I really don’t like how her raspy vocals are laid down here, they feel a bit lost, sounding like they were recorded on a remarkably different track, especially with the mix that muddies pretty much everything but especially sticks out for her vocals (and an underlying vocal loop that is occasionally just distracting). The song is ultimately fine – the lyrics are serviceable, the vocal performance itself would have been good before it was placed in the project file, and the separate instrumental elements aren’t dead on arrival. It just piles up into a song that is, to me at least, not interesting enough to justify a flatter sound. I know I’m definitely going against popular opinion here, but I don’t think this strikes me as reason to check out that latest album, or that it’d be any different from her mediocre Endless Summer Vacation output. Sorry.

#62 – “Man of the Year” – Lorde

Produced by Lorde and Jim-E Stack

I am very excited for Lorde’s Virgin. I have seen some scepticism regarding the authenticity and publicity surrounding the album, with some comments they made in the press regarding Pamela Anderson’s sex tape doing them any favours, and sure: they’re not exactly being subtle or clever, but “Man of the Year” serves in part as an explanation to why. As an exploration of masculine elements of Lorde’s identity, the single is largely about freedom – a freedom to be unproductive and careless. In their recent interview with Rolling Stone, Lorde touched upon having been an intense lover who gives their all into relationships, with this new song celebrating several forms of self-love, though none of them all too peaceful or delicate. Compare 2017’s “Hard Feelings” – “I light all the candles, cut flowers for all my rooms / I care for myself the way I used to care about you” – with the second verse here, a reckless, masculine equivalent: “Now I go about my day, riding it like a wave / Playing it any way I want – swish mouthwash, jerk off”. This new self-love, including their experience with psychedelics and cycling around New York, is even destructive of their previous, more conventional and idealised connection to femininity, becoming unrecognisable from how they used to appear. The name itself was sparked by their attendance at GQ’s “Man of the Year” ceremony in 2023, wherein they ironically wore a dress that they felt was totally at odds with their then-ongoing detachment from femininity, with the song first drafted the day after. Despite that destructive, careless element, the tone is celebratory, much like an award ceremony, as Lorde can finally see the “Man of the Year” appear in the mirror.

“Man of the Year” is a very minimal, dead-eyed semi-ballad for much of its runtime with Jim-E Stack’s subtle, grey guitars sounding as cold as the bare video set for the song’s accompanying visuals. I love how the scratchy acoustic slide and looming metallic synth right before the more staccato, double-tracked delivery of the almost unfinished-sounding second verse, that concludes with some scattered, quiet mouth sounds instead of flowing at all into the chorus (a thematically appropriate detail). Lorde’s own performance is unfocused, with the feathery high register of “now I’m broken open” in the empty first chorus transforming into a similar but more distorted, half-yell over overwhelming synth bass in the second. After building the chrome ball Lorde lays inside, Stack and co. demolish it with a stop-and-start industrial crash at the climax full of drums that sound exhausted and wiry synths that are suffocating, embodying the constrictions of feminine identity that are bursting at the seams. If I have any problems with the track, they’re tiny nitpicks: I would make the drums louder, some of the first verse is hard to slurry and hard to make out. I adore this second single and I’m very much intrigued for the mess that Virgin will be – I really wouldn’t be surprised if this album confuses critics by being torn in two different directions, I’m just hoping it lives up to these first two singles.

#46 – “Cops & Robbers” – Sammy Virji and Skepta

Produced by Sammy Virji

To pile onto the ongoing bassline revival in the UK mainstream, we have English DJ Sammy Virji, who’s been active since at least 2015 and charted below the top 75 last year with “If U Need It”, but a feature from UK rap legend Skepta definitely helped with this new single “Cops & Robbers”, which seems to just be plucked straight from my imagination because this is the most obvious way to make something I like. We’ve got a pitched-up female R&B vocal sample under bassy UK garage production and a simple string loop both commanding the track and twirling off in one measure, that gets chopped into a menacing fervour for the verses, creating a nice back-and-forth between them and the chorus that lets loose a little more. Skepta plays with this effortlessly too, going from a smooth hyped-up delivery that emulates a classic garage MJ and has an incredibly playful rhyme scheme on the second half to a tenser, staccato and seemingly Auto-Tuned murmur. Despite Virji’s history in bassline, this deviates from that sound extensively, with the track not led by a warping bass but the recurring aforementioned back-and-forth structure of the strings (with some slick keys accompaniment), Skepta’s constant energy and the vocal sample straight from Brandy Norwood’s debut “I Wanna Be Down”, which peaked at #36 in 1995 whilst Robson & Jerome were #1. According to a press release from Trench, the track also samples Kid Cudi’s “Day ‘n’ Nite” but I think if anything it’s a looser interpolation of the synths since I didn’t catch on anything directly and none of those songs’ writers are even credited as writers so nothing’s official anyway. What I did notice was KSI wordplay that Skepta tried to sneak in. You’re not that slick, Skeppy… though subtlety’s never exactly been the man’s specialty.

#28 – “Nice to Each Other” – Olivia Dean

Produced by Zach Nahome

Bridget Jones broke the gates wide open for English R&B singer Olivia Dean, whose mild success with soundtrack cut “It Isn’t Perfect but it Might Be” (also produced by Mr. Nahome) has laid the carpet for a follow-up hit presumably connected to her next album, The Art of Loving. This song feels very much on a similar emotive note to her last hit, with the song being quite literal in its meaning about being nice to each other: a light, acoustic guitar-led pop bop about enjoying each other’s time in the present day and not thinking about the past or future, just enjoying the time spent. That is, however, with a backdrop of a rougher relationship that is hinted at by some lyrics about them being wrong for each other and having fought, with a pretty bleak reference in the verses to crashing his car and the chorus operating on the message of: expressing lovey-dovey platitudes (the “classic stuff”) doesn’t actually fix those relationships, but showing that love, slowly developing a relationship, does help. Dean even references water and sunlight, quite literally growing a connection, to take the relationship back to the root of things: mutual enjoyment of each other’s company. It’s a real sweet, light song with great backing harmonies and a series of catchy refrains – I can imagine this being inescapable soon enough.

#27 – “Fame is a Gun” – Addison Rae

Produced by Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd

The latest single from Addison Rae’s full-length Addison is here, and so is the album, released the day of writing. Over the past few singles, she’s been having very gradual moments of interest to me, and thankfully, she’s finally leapt all the way to making a song I really like. Ms. Rae, or at least the character she assumes in the track, is confident and cocky about the impact of her fame here but not without a trembling anxiety about it all: fame can be as powerful as a gun but it also involves plenty of shots, mostly in the dark, in regards to how the public will feel about every move she makes, a lot of which is publicised and could swing or miss dramatically. Fittingly, the song sounds like it’s straight out of Perez Hilton’s blog with the trancey synth pads and heavily Auto-Tuned vocals that digitalise and dehumanise her higher register significantly, not dissimilar to Britney Spears from that late 2000s time period. Kloser and Elvira do add significant modernising touches to the electropop sound, however, namely in not making it a buzzy club fest, replacing the more gratuitous synths with airier sounds and stray 80s synth jingles alongside stuttering vocals both leading into and tailing off the chorus. I do think this leads to the song at times sounding a bit rawer and emptier than it should for a song with this content or especially the heavily-affected vocals, but that in itself is a great way of stripping the luxury away from the “glamorous life” she’s supposedly enjoying, with the final chorus and the looming synth in the back adding some sinister edge, indicating a darker side to that life that I can only assume is explored further on the album tracks. Hell, I’d like the song to go further with that, start slowing down gradually like a toy running out of battery, but as it is, I’m still (surprisingly) very much on board – great song.

#6 – “Just Keep Watching” (from F1 the Movie) – Tate McRae

Produced by Ryan Tedder and Tyler Spry

I have no idea what this has to do with cars, but what’s more important for the remit of this blog is that it’s a new soundtrack single from Ms. McRae, who is cementing her spot as a major pop girl by debuting a random throwaway for a movie straight into the top 10. With main collaborator Tedder once again at the helm, “Just Keep Watching” is the culmination of many demos and unfinished tracks eventually evolving into this one, which is at least somewhat more interesting than her earlier work considering the distorted vocal that leads it off and the clattering Afrobeats rhythm bouncing off a dark, looming synth that, alongside a screechy vocal chop, made me see the appeal in a Tate McRae that is more willing to drift further into odd, futuristic soundscapes – sadly a Tate McRae that doesn’t yet exist, but this is a good first step. Tyla was apparently originally intended to feature on the song, with her version leaking, but this version is busy enough, especially in that final chorus that may end abruptly and barely but is mostly an inhuman concoction of elements that all vaguely function as percussion. I don’t think the song is particularly good – Tate’s vocals aren’t impressive when they’re not borderline alien, the lyrics are underwritten and the hook is weak enough to go in one ear, out the other (I’m honestly surprised it landed this high a debut) – but there is something special to it that could be explored, not dissimilar to what I saw in “Revolving door” from her album earlier this year. For someone who has never really been convinced by McRae, often finding her music very uninspired, that is promising.

Conclusion

This was actually a pretty great week in terms of our new arrivals being consistently of quality or at least okay, which is a fantastic end result considering how the new tracks are the only thing going on in this week’s chart – it’s otherwise all quite, ahem, ordinary. Best of the Week goes to Lorde for “Man of the Year” – it wasn’t particularly close – but our tied Honourable Mentions, “Cops & Robbers” by Sammy Virji and Skepta as well as “Fame is a Gun” by Addison Rae, are definitely worth checking out. I suppose Worst of the Week will be “Easy Lover” by Miley Cyrus, though the song is far from bad. For what we should expect next time, Ed Sheeran and Sabrina Carpenter are likely to compete for #1. For now, thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 31/05/2025 (Alex Warren, Jelly Roll, Max Dean, Luke Dean, Locky, mgk, Myles Smith)

For an 11th week straight, Alex Warren straddles the top of the UK Singles Chart with “Ordinary”. Welcome back to the “fruit-flavoured” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: brief discussion of generational trauma

Rundown

As always, we start our episode with the notable dropouts, those being songs that exited the UK Top 75 (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid adieu to: “What the Hell Just Happened?” by Remember Monday, “Caramel” by Sleep Token, “MUTT” by Leon Thomas (with a remix assist from Chris Brown) and “Running Around” by Ely Oaks featuring vocals from AMANZI.

Naturally, we see the fallout of our last week, which was very eventful with geopolitical catastrophes like Eurovision and Morgan Wallen, so we have plenty of returns, namely “Bluest Flame” by Selena Gomez and benny blanco at #73, “PASSO BEM SOLTO” by ATLXS at #72, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan at #71, “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls at #68, as well as gains for songs new and old (mostly old): “Feel It” by d4vd at #66, “All I Ever Asked” by Rachel Chinouriri at #64, “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers at #61, “Too Sweet” by Hozier at #60, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey at #54, “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez at #53, “Don’t Wake Me Up” by James Hype at #52, “No Bad Vibes” by KILIMANJARO and Jazzy at #50, “The Glen” by Levi Heron at #47, “Taste” by Sabrina Carpenter at #46, “Stargazing” by Myles Smith at #42 and “Die with a Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars at #37.

As for our top five on the UK Singles Chart, we have the usual suspects: “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey at #5, “undressed” by sombr at #4, “Show Me Love” by Ravyn Lenae at #3, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #2 and of course, Mr. Warren at the top though it’s not the last we’ll hear from him this week.

New Entries

#69 – “Leave Me Alone” – Reneé Rapp

Produced by Omer Fedi, Julian Bunetta and Alexander 23

I’m not entirely sure where Reneé Rapp’s priorities fall: pop stardom or celebrity actress. Of course, you can do both – many have – but her career seems oddly stunted in both right now when she has the personality to do a lot better. I did enjoy her a lot in the Mean Girls musical movie from last year, though she must have done something wrong as she lost “Best Villain” in the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. Judas! “Who to?” I hear you ask. King Bowser. Okay, maybe that was a valid pick. How’s the new single? Well, it’s not what I expected, but probably what I should have been expecting from the star of Mean Girls: a percussive new rave track with a great full guitar fuzz and bratty, cheerleader-type lyrics about making sure her lipstick colour lines up with her nipples. It’s a little less P!nk than it is Kesha, whose delivery you can really hear as an influence particularly in that second verse, the stuttering chorus and some of the meta lines about management calling up for a single and her ignoring them (I suppose that answers my opening confusion). There’s not much to this song considering just how repetitive and basic it is, but the youthful energy and content that fits perfectly into the gossip corners of 2006 is sold as authentically as it could be, especially with that cute synth twirl in the final chorus that they totally would have added during this time. Hell, it’s almost too accurate to the point where I wonder if she brings anything new to this sound other than her own personality, which always echoed this kind of image anyway. She stated to Zane Lowe that she thought this song was not great until she started listening to pop music – namely “APT.” by ROSÉ and Bruno Mars, which shares a lot of DNA with this track – and decided this song would be worthy of a single release, though I think marketing plays into that too. The song is bold, for better or for worse, and that’s important for a pop star still trying to figure out the image they want to sell – I’m curious to if the album will go down this style of sound even more. For now, I do like the song but it is pretty flagrantly one-dimensional and will wear off with time, I somewhat doubt it ends up a hit but I’m usually wrong about that.

#63 – “Over You” – Nathan Dawe and Shayan

Produced by Nathan Dawe, Bobby Harvey and Punctual

English DJ Nathan Dawe is back again – in fact, much of this week consists of familiar faces just going on as usual. This time, he’s brought Shayan with him, a singer from London who is supposedly known for “creating” the hit song “Glad U Came”, according to her Spotify bio. That song is performed by Liilz and ZieZie, produced by Fangio and written by the writers of its sample, The Wanted’s “Glad You Came” – none of the three are Shayan. This becomes especially suspect when you consider the bio credits her with simply “creating” the track (even though most of the work was already done by The Wanted and Steve Mac a decade prior) – the real answer here is that she either re-sung “Glad You Came” or chopped up the vocals of whoever re-sung “Glad You Came” for the instrumental, with her posting on Instagram that she is responsible for the “cheeky vocal chop”. I suppose backing vocals aren’t as impressive as having worked to “create” the song, right? Given her bio then claims that Paul Woodford and LF SYSTEM “feature” on a Shayan track that she is actually the feature on, then states that said track was named the “Hottest Record” not just by BBC Radio 1, but by Capital Radio (who only give an award by that name out once a year) and Kiss FM (who don’t have a “hottest record” title at all really), whilst repeating the buzz phrases “vocal versatility” and “pen game”, I have to assume this was AI-written and hence contains slight hallucinations as well as just generally sounding like a robot. If it’s not, then I stand corrected, and instead, I come to the conclusion that Shayan and her team lied on their CV (who hasn’t?). No, I have not contacted her representatives for comment. “Over You” is a completely serviceable house jam with some admittedly really nice keys and breaks in the pre-chorus, but a completely forgettable vocal from Shayan (Abi Flynn of Dawe’s “Here in Your Arms” co-wrote this and I don’t think I would notice much of a difference if it was her). There’s a typical pump-up piano house chorus that leaves little to be even discussed. I definitely think there is a higher level of detail here than other similar songs thanks to the moments I pointed out and I think the mix is great, but without a really strong hook or a distinct drop, it just finds itself in the slosh of DJ-led dance-pop we get every week. It could grow on me in the future though, it seems like that kind of song.

#32 – “Gold” – Myles Smith

Produced by Peter Fenn

Myles Smith is back and he is stomping and clapping as usual. “Gold” is the newest from the folk-pop fellow and it’s pretty sickly with its fake claps and summery, acoustic guitars as well as a “whoa-oh-oh” hook in the verse that will be in my head for longer than I want it to be. I’m personally just glad that Mr. Smith has finally released a song with a bit of personality – the pre-chorus has him talk-singing a bit of a chant about not wanting to fall in love but seeing this girl and just being astounded. It’s a cute addition or at least would be if it didn’t sound like he actually hated doing that, it’s delivered quite blankly and unsure of himself compared to the rest of the song. A similar moment happens with a spoken interlude as the second verse ends, with studio chatter – allegedly – of Smith saying it would be cool if the song stopped and came back in. There’s even an acoustic outro with the guys in the studio singing the chorus and Smith laughing a bit. Is this potentially orchestrated to make me feel like a guy who otherwise personifies focus groups has a personality? Very likely, but it is still refreshing compared to a sea of Myles Smith songs that haven’t been injected with the soul or passion this one at least tries to go for, especially with it being a pretty simple lovestruck track that needed a bit of sprucing up to be interesting. Alas, despite his… worst efforts, the song is still not interesting but really inoffensive and probably the best I’ve heard from him so far: no embarrassing or confusing lyrics, the production isn’t as blocky and compressed, and there is some sense of Pinocchio being a real boy in this one.

#31 – “cliché” – mgk

Produced by mgk, SlimXX, BazeXX, Nick Long and No Love for the Middle Child

I was listening to this song, kind of enjoying the energy and catchiness of it, then in the second verse, the artist* formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly delivered the most deadpan, fed-up “uhh-uhh” I’ve ever heard… and I listen to plenty of cloud rap and plugg so lazy, melodic murmuring is nothing new to me. The specific delivery of this space-filling non-lyric, tacked in between the verse and pre-chorus, really confirmed the idea I had going into a new mgk single: this guy is not really trying about anything he tries to do anymore. I fully believe he loves rap and punk music, and genuinely made attempts to be respected in those genres, but was fairly maligned for brash lyrics, mediocre albums and iffy genre-mixing. Like Logic, he seems jaded about that Internet hate and is just doing whatever he thinks could be a money-maker with less passion, whilst half-acknowledging the notoriety in a tongue-in-cheek-but-hands-in-ears kind of way. I’m not saying mgk has a Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in him, mostly because his discography has always been as obnoxious as that album, but playing too hard into the image he caught himself in has just made him seem sad and pathetic. At least with uptempo pop rock tracks, he can play it off as just having fun, but the song is called “cliché” because it knows what it is, the same way his EP with Trippie Redd, genre : sadboy, was titled that because it knows what realm it serves. He seems so astutely aware of his limitations yet completely unable to escape them. I would feel bad, I really would, but it’s mgk. The song is very catchy and isn’t trying to be in the least “punk” (no Travis Barker to be found), so I’ll let this one off, but anything this guy does post-“RAP DEVIL” and pop punk pivot has just reeked of a man who is frustrated that he doesn’t know what everyone wants from him, when the real answer might be that people don’t think about it too hard and just want catchy tunes. With “cliché”, he shut up, took the simple route and wrote an infectious track, but it sounds dead. He sounds dead.

#19 – “Can’t Decide” – Max Dean, Luke Dean and Locky

Produced by Max Dean, Luke Dean, Locky and Mark Ralph

This is a real “HUH and WhoNow featuring whatsername” moment, a full trio of people whom I will deem worthy of this opening question: okay, I’ll bite, who the Hell are Locky and the Deans? And are they related? Well, Max Dean is a DJ and producer from London who also serves as the boss for the label NeXup (the logo of which is on this single’s cover art), though this track was re-released by Warner. He and his cousin Luke share very similarly-written Spotify bios – I’m imagining that the old habit of copying your cousin’s homework in school and changing up a few words to sound like your own dies hard. The two have teamed up with Locky for two tracks in the past month, the first being the driving electro banger “Curveball” which is incredibly fun but didn’t chart. Instead, we have the later track “Can’t Decide”, released just last week and already ending up in the top 20 despite these artists being relatively unknown. The song heavily samples “2 Much”, a smooth R&B track from last year by singer Qendresa, mashing it up with the alt-rap group The Pharcyde’s pitched-up hook from “Citrus Nioxide” earlier this month (or at least using the same sample). It’s definitely an interesting choice and a blend you not expect in a UK top 20 house track, but isn’t that far off from, say, PAWSA who sampled Nate Dogg and placed him over a very bassy, minimal house track. This is quite similar, with a lowkey tech house groove, some watery – borderline slimey – bass synths and vocal chops from both Qendresa and The Pharcyde, sometimes playing together but mostly in separate sections. It is actually an interesting structure to place these two entirely unrelated tracks against each other over a new instrumental, and while there’s not much to it (partly as a result of that, partly just because the track does not have many elements at all), that simplicity is what makes the song stand out. I like how a different part of the Qendresa sample is brought in for an airier bridge, I even think the two samples work together thematically, with the carefree Pharcyde hook being the exact kind of dismissive response you’d expect Qendresa to get from the guy she originally sang about on “2 Much”. I’m honestly a tad surprised by how much I enjoyed this, even if I’m more into the idea than its actual execution.

#9 – “Bloodline” – Alex Warren and Jelly Roll

Produced by Adam Yaron

Jelly Roll once threatened to leave X (Twitter) because it was an unhealthy, toxic platform. He was correct, though I believe he is still active on there and has an insane history of Xeets for you to go down if that rabbit hole is your thing. Ever since then, I’ve been saying “X just isn’t X without Jelly Roll”, and that’s true for not just Nazi porn-ridden Hell apps but also society as a whole. Where would we be without white rapper turned country rock singer Jelly Roll? Jokes aside, the man has a good voice and has been wildly successful in the US for the past couple years, thanks in part to his willingness to just show up on basically anything with everyone. This collab is perfectly in line with the two, however, as Warren has a massive, pretty Christian rock hit right now and Jelly Roll himself had a fairly recent return to faith. It is not yet known if that renewed devotion to his Christian faith has anything to do with his contribution to the soundtrack of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. As for their new track together, it’s basically following the same vein as his tracks with Shaboozey and Brandon Lake from the past couple months, where Jelly Roll is a distinct voice but basically just there for the sake of being there. This is a very typical acoustic guitar rollick from Mr. Warren, but focuses lyrically on a kind of generational trauma that may not fit the upbeat motivational anthem – I do understand what it’s going for, though. It’s fair to have an approach to this kind of content that isn’t purely cynical and looks forward to making something different and successful for yourself, with this song even being directed towards a “brother” (who really could be anyone, but the familial term used here makes sense) who shouldn’t be bogged-down by the failures of the family before him. I actually like the message, it’s somewhat surprising to hear that sentiment from Alex Warren in this genre, though redemption is a constant theme in Jelly Roll’s work. Sadly, it’s lacking in detail or a climactic bridge – there is a bridge, but a short, malformed one seemingly only there to push a reference to God – and its chorus isn’t exactly as sticky or dramatic as it could be. Instead, it’s in the very chirpy brand of stomp-clap that barely ever resonates with me, it’s just too sugary. At least Jelly Roll has a top 10 now, that tickles me.

Conclusion

Well, not much of interest to really sift through here. Worst of the Week goes to “Gold” by Myles Smith but even that’s a marked improvement. I’ll give Best of the Week to Reneé Rapp for “Leave Me Alone” but it was really a toss-up between that and the Honourable Mention, “Can’t Decide” by Locky and the Deans (which is what I shall be calling them from now on). As for what’s on the horizon, the pop girls are out in full force with Addison Rae, Miley Cyrus, Tate McRae, Lorde and erm, KSI, so that could be an exciting change of pace from this dryer week. For now, thank you reading, long live Cola Boyy, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: EUROVISION SPECIAL 2025 (24/05/2025) - also feat. Morgan Wallen's I'm the Problem, Skye Newman, Lola Young & more

Ladies, gentlemen, the rest, welcome to the Eurovision Song Contest grand finale 2025. I’m your host, Cactus, coming live from… well, Birmingham, and I’m also the only judge. On the UK Singles Chart, “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey is at #5, “undressed” by sombr is at #4, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan is at #3, “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae is at #2 and Alex Warren spends a 10th week straight at #1 with “Ordinary”. Welcome to this “multinational” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

content warning: language, discussions of family trauma, sex, substance abuse, Italian stereotyping, Morgan Wallen and the Smurfs

EUROVISION

As always, the international song contest, wherein most of Europe plus Australia and Israel are engaged in a unique, mysterious form of audiovisual combat known as “singing and dancing one after the other”, has impacted the UK Singles Chart, and as I’ve done before, I’m switching the format up a tad to make sure the songs are approached in the same section and more appropriately for their role in the charts – much like in the contest, they represent their country and leave. We have five songs from the contest’s grand finale, which took place in the Swiss city of Basel last Saturday the 17th, debuting on this week’s chart. This does not include my personal favourite – Greece – nor any of my least favourites – Armenia – but in general, the songs this year were of a higher quality than usual yet mostly did not strike me as all that interesting or unusual. Probably because of how generally above average the songs were, nothing of outstanding quality really stood out amongst the rest, and thankfully, nothing astonishingly bad either though there were some distinct choices lyrically and with set design that raised a couple eyebrows. I don’t review television though, so onto our set of five countries representing their nation in this week’s chart, as we humorously start with the person who won the whole thing.

#53 – “Wasted Love” – JJ

REPRESENTING: Austria (1st)

Representing Austria, hailing from the capital Vienna, we have Johannes Pietsch, or JJ, reigning over the competition with his debut single! Spending most of his childhood in Dubai, JJ is of Filipino descent, a first for a Eurovision winner, and already has carved out a distinct style mixing pop with opera. He first appeared on British screens in 2020, where he auditioned for The Voice UK and was coached by none other than will.i.am, though one can assume that he didn’t press his buzzer on accident while drawing on it for JJ. “Wasted Love” is entirely in English, written by JJ, co-producer Thomas Thurner and Teya, who represented Austria in 2023 with “Who the Hell is Edgar?”, which peaked at #48 and sounds like what I say when an unknown artist charts. Pele Loriano and Wojciech Kostrzewa joined for the production here with Thurner and it turned out fine enough. I’m glad JJ won for obvious reasons but I’m not a big fan of his voice, whether in his cooing over the lighter pianos or his high operatic belt, a vocal style I rarely enjoy outside of backing vocals to be honest. The lyrics are pretty straightforward in their unrequited love, the drums that come in the second verse are the kind you’d hear in a trailer for a fantasy epic, it’s just a tad too melodramatic to really work for me – I understand the frustration of wasting your time and effort on a relationship, but I’m not convinced that needs an overlong cinematic intro. I also understand why the juries favoured it – the drop into hardcore kicks is pretty satisfying and he’s clearly a talented singer – but it’s personally not for me at all. He seems like a principled, nice enough guy though, which is better than the alternative this year. A certain douze points receiver is absent from the chart and currently under investigation, so I’m glad we got a seemingly legitimate winner chart here, even if I more respect the song than actually enjoy it.

#48 – “Bara Badu Bastu” – KAJ

REPRESENTING: Sweden (4th)

Representing Sweden but hailing from Vörå, a Swedish-speaking town in western Finland, we have Kevin, Axel and Jacob, or KAJ for short, or if you follow their comedy sketches: Big Kev, Mr. International and Schakob. The trio met when they attended school and have been active since 2009, with this song representing Finland more aptly than Sweden, in line with the bizarre Finnish entries of the past two years and representing how Swedes view Finnish culture. Performed in their local Ostrobothnian dialect of Swedish (and partly in Finnish), “Bara Badu Bastu” was written by KAJ alongside Robert Skowronski and producers Kristofer Strandberg and Anderz Wrethov, who has previously written Eurovision entries for Sweden, Cyprus and Azerbaijan. Wrethov has notably charted before as a songwriter, not just with Cypriot runner-up Eleni Foureira’s “Fuego” in 2018 (it peaked at #64), but with the infamous Swedish slice of Eurodance novelty cheese, “Ding Dong Song” – which you may recognise as “ooh, you touched my tra-la-la” – by Günther, which peaked at #14 in 2004, with no relation to Eurovision at all. Just pure unadulterated “talent”. I suppose KAJ picked the right guy for their comedy song then. “Bara Badu Bastu” is an epadunk song, a style of crude, humorous EDM that has been a bit of a meme in Sweden this decade thanks to a viral association with a certain kind of tractor the youth like driving around. That does feel very European to have a youth-oriented tractor meme becoming a viral chart-topping electropop sensation. As much as the specific cultural jokes are somewhat lost on me (I’m from Northamptonshire, we don’t have culture), Schakob is a delightful presence as are the accordions, even if the cinematic swooshing you hear in a lot of Eurovision songs is here in a slightly unfitting full force. The accordion breakdowns in the post-chorus over what I can only describe as a DJ Mustard type beat are pretty fun, the little accordion fills are cute, the bridge is a bit overdone, but it’s difficult to get no enjoyment out of something this silly and lighthearted. It’s a song about saunas with a key change, I’m honestly surprised it didn’t go even further than fourth place. It was the bookies’ favourite after all, though part of that could be heavier than usual coverage from the UK, with newsreaders predicting they would be the new ABBA or something ridiculous like that. I think Eurovision group secretly wants to be the new ABBA, or at least the new Buck Fizz, but it’s difficult to discern how these jokesters fit into that mould. They probably broke some new ground even – what other #1 hit is about saunas? And no, I’m not accepting Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” as an acceptable answer.

#40 – “Espresso Macchiato” – Tommy Cash

REPRESENTING: Italy Estonia (3rd)

Representing Estonia, hailing from a Russian-speaking family in the capital of Tallinn, we have rapper Tomas Tammemets, better known as Tommy Cash. Active since 2012, Mr. Cash was one of two Eurovision final entrants this year that I knew of prior (the other being San Marino’s Gabry Ponte), though I’m not incredibly familiar, mainly just recognising him as the guy whose verses I skip on Charli xcx albums. The self-declared “Kanye East” has a distinct surreal, satirical and often vulgar style that has him often join forces with hyperpop acts like A.G. Cook and 100 gecs, but in his Eurovision song, he takes aim not at his Eastern European culture but at Italians. Described by Luca Arnaù of Italian news outlet LaC News 24 as “an ode to the Italian caricature, seasoned with a text that seems to have come out of a Google Translate on acid”, which is a better description than I could have ever come up with, Cash’s song proved a tad controversial in Italy because it parodies Italian culture, though in a way that clearly spins the mirror onto Cash as someone who is painfully ignorant and performing a gross, stereotyped version of Italian identity. A mix of broken Italian, English and even Spanglish, the song is written and produced by Cash with Johannes Naukkarinen. It’s Naukkarinen’s second time being behind the boards for a successful Eurovision track, as “Kiro” (as he’s better known) also co-wrote Finnish runner-up Käärijä’s “Cha Cha Cha” in 2023 (it peaked at #6 in the UK). Honestly, despite “Espresso Macchiato” standing out as one of the outright novelty songs in the contest this year, it might be my second favourite. Its delightfully silly chorus drowns Cash in Auto-Tune over the acoustic guitar and cinematic strings, with all the epic trailer sound effects you’d expect from the contest but definitely with a camp, parodic approach (the song is about a busy, wealthy and out-of-touch lifestyle, the flashiness fits right in), particularly when it splashes into Eurodance not too far from old Günther. What I like most about the song, though, may be its verses, where the production takes a somewhat Cocktail Nation approach with great keys and horns, infectious claps and Cash using an almost Boratic character trying to motivate you with coffee, using a deadpan sing-songy delivery reminiscent of his prior collaborator bbno$. He sings “Life is like spaghetti, it’s hard until you make it” in the second pre-chorus, it’s hard to dislike. Hell, there’s even a trap-infused remix with Italian rapper Tony Effe so no hard feelings between the two nations, right? To quote a pioneer of Britain’s recent history of catastrophic losers, peace in our time?

#34 – “Baller” – Abor & Tynna

REPRESENTING: Germany (15th)

Representing Germany but hailing from Vienna, brother-and-sister duo Abor & Tynna come from a Hungarian family of artists and had been classically trained in flute and cello in their childhood. Active professionally since 2016, the duo turned down being Austria’s entrant in 2020 because of their inexperience but came back swinging for a… 15th placement (our two highest Euro-debuts did not actually do that well in the competition itself). This electropop song has a Hungarian version that turns it into an acoustic ballad (that’s Hungary for you, I guess – given their government, I understand why you wouldn’t want to lighten up), but the version sent to Eurovision is in German and written by Abor & Tynna (not their real names) alongside producer Alexander Hauer. The title here does not refer to Dipset’s Jim Jones but rather translates to “Shoot” or “Pop”, with the chorus roughly summed up as “shoot for the stars”, as Tynna responds to a breakup by drawing a clear line between her and her ex and just living her life indulgently without him. The very typically Eurovision genre mixture here has some trancey synths, Charli xcx-esque stuttering vocal delivery, pop punk guitars and airy production which ends up really seamless, not taking the dramatic shifts that plenty of Eurovision songs do, including this year (looking at Cash, JJ and, well, we’ll see another example soon), but that stuttering hook is strong enough to help the song stand on its own – never has an Austrian woman glitching out sounded so catchy. It’s on their most recent album and I’m sure it would fit well, it doesn’t sound as Eurovision-trained as other, more dramatic entrants so I’m not surprised it didn’t catch on, but it’s still a great pop song.

#31 – “What the Hell Just Happened?” – Remember Monday

REPRESENTING: United Kingdom (19th)

Representing the glorious Great Britannia, we have a country pop trio of girls who met at sixth form in Hampshire who got zero points in the televote. Oh, wait, I skipped forward – like JJ, Remember Monday also appeared on The Voice UK, though in 2019, when Jennifer Hudson threw a shoe at them. Member Holly-Anne Hull has been active even longer, having performed for the late Queen in 2006 as part of a youth choir (good ol’ Lizzy was confused to where her shoes went) and being signed to Disney Channel for a brief period thanks to a talent competition before being dropped from her deal as a teenager. Speaking of losing things, not only did the group lose their chance at winning Eurovision (not that it was high to begin with), but Ms. Hull lost her wedding ring at the final. Oh, no! Why is that on BBC News? Jokes aside, the song was written by the trio alongside Julie Aagaard, Kes Kamara, Thomas Stengaard and producers Billen Ted, who you’ll be familiar with if you’ve read this series. They even had a UK #1 with their remix of Nathan Evans’ cover of “Wellerman” with 220 KID so Remember Monday definitely had promise that they sadly didn’t live up to in Basel last weekend. It’s a shame, because this is our best entry in years. We’ve got Beatlesque baroque flutes and harmonies, horns blasting behind massive drums and a sharp twist into 80s synthpop that keeps the song dynamic, mostly led by disorienting drum fills transitioning from piece to piece. The lyrics are just about being a messy woman post-breakup, really quite similar to “Baller”, and aren’t great but also don’t lack in cute details, which is enough to keep some interest in the thematics of a song that mostly overwhelms you with harmonies, driving drums, quieter guitars and overall sounding as “big” as possible. Ironically, it starts with “Someone lost a shoe”. I’m convinced that we purposefully chose a group of losers who have lost, did lose and continue to lose, performing a song about losing, in some sneaky attempt to win. No offense to these ladies, of course, the biggest loss in a group of losers is the person in their room writing about how the loser lost. And at least we’re not San Marino.

Now, all good things must come to an end. Unlike the real show, I’m not crowning a winner and they won’t recite their winning track as a sort of victory lap. Instead, I’ll unceremoniously declare my Best and Worst of the Week at the end of the episode as always, with eight extra competitors soon to be reviewed. Firstly, let’s look at our notable dropouts, those being songs that exited the UK Top 75, which is what I cover, after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we give nil points to (take a deep breath): “Look to Windward” and “Even in Arcadia” by Sleep Token, “Tonight” by PinkPantheress, “All I Know” by Rudimental and Khalid, “Bluest Flame” by Selena Gomez and benny blanco, “Girl, so confusing” by that song’s co-writer Charli xcx (with the remix featuring Lorde, of course), “The Giver” by Chappell Roan, “like JENNIE” by who else but JENNIE, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and FINALLY, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan.

As far as what fills in those blanks, we have our gains and returns, which is a small smattering of tracks this week thanks to all the chaos entering the chart. Despite everything, we do see small gains for “Beautiful People” by David Guetta and Sia at #60 (possibly thanks to a THEMBA remix), “No Bad Vibes” by Jazzy and KILIMANJARO at #55 (which has a Denon Reed remix as of last month – speaking of the GOAT…), “I need to know” by Denon Reed of Cru2 at #50 (again, thank a remix, this time by Tom Zanetti), “party 4 u” by Charli xcx at #19 (the new music video is probably helping this one out) and “Hairdresser” by Skye Newman at #16 which will make sense eight reviews from now. I’ve already billed you in on the top five, so with no further ado, let’s take a look at the plenty other songs that debuted this week.

New Entries

#75 – “Just in Case” – Morgan Wallen

Produced by Joey Moi and Charlie Handsome

So… Morgan Wallen has a #1 album in the UK. It’s 37 tracks (36 songs and an interlude to be exact), and as you’d expect, it’s full of filler. The Nashville megastar honks his way through some basic and unmemorable country-pop, sometimes bringing in guest stars who disappoint or awkward trap drums and rap flows, only occasionally landing on a catchy hook. We have two debuts from I’m the Problem this week, and they both are far from great. I don’t mind “Just in Case” – he’s clearly taking from R&B in the verse’s vocal melodies but they are decently catchy even if a bit clunky, and this is a surprisingly smooth implementation of hip hop drums, mostly because it barely functions as a country song in the first place. It’s closer to a catchy pop-rap hit by Post Malone than… well, Post Malone’s country album, as Wallen’s twang and some acoustic guitars (closer to Maroon 5 than Eric Church – who is on this album!) are its tightest connections to Nashville. Charlie Handsome, a pop producer Morgan has been working with heavily for this album, is probably behind this, and it’s honestly a bad fit for Morgan, I just wish that he fired Joey Moi because his vocal mix across the entire album is kind of buzzy and distracting. It’s subtle so I feel insane pointing it out, but it’s tuned to a weird extent where it’s not an obvious, artistic use of Auto-Tune but more a clutch that makes him sound slightly robotic, even though country calls for rougher, human vocal performances. Given the 36 full songs on this album, my assumption is that Morgan and his team really like making songs. They like playing guitar, they like singing, they like programming, but after the sessions, which I’m sure produce hundreds of tracks, these songs don’t appear to get developed from their basic necessities. They’re cleaned up the best as possible but it doesn’t sound like Morgan’s crew like re-takes or retooling – every track on the album is like this with the basic structure, empty instrumentals (the outro on this is particularly egregious), barely-there bridge and obvious draft vocal takes. For an album that’s as pop as it is country, I want that fine-tuning and manufacturing – make a Maroon 5 record if you have to, if it means keeping it to a slick, souped-up 13 tracks of undeniable pop hits. The overlong albums are a staple of Wallen’s strategy though – it farms streams and means that fans won’t be sick of the late-album singles when they can pushed by Nashville radio years down the line. They were already track 23 of a bloated playlist of an album. For example, his casual fans probably never heard the terrible “Cowgirls”, track 33 of 36 on 2023’s One Thing at a Time, which let it have a long run the year after as a smash hit single, despite having been out for a year. That carelessness is part of Morgan’s image and appeal: yeah, he can drop a two-hour album with barely-finished tracks. His fans will buy the double-disc, he’ll rack up millions of sales, and when it’s all done and dusted, he has like 20 tracks to pick from for the next single, and meanwhile, the album’s still selling like gangbusters. He can perform at Saturday Night Live, leave during the credits and post that he’s going back to “God’s country”. That’s just the kind of guy he is. That’s just the kind of rug they’re pulling. With that said, after writing all that with the song on loop, I kind of like it now. Damn it, Morgan, you win again. So many times. 37 to be exact.

#72 – “Friend of Mine” (from the Smurfs Movie Soundtrack) – Rihanna

Produced by Jon Bellion, f a l l e n and Pete Nappi

I watched the music video for this song late at night at the behest of people who were discussing it and I was so utterly confused. The Smurfs jerkily dancing slightly off-beat, on what appear to be those cheap green screen backgrounds, to what sounds like a Fred again.. remix of a years-old demo… it’s borderline avant-garde cinema, especially considering the context of its release: Rihanna releases her first lead artist single in nearly three years and it’s the theme song for an upcoming Smurfs film (simply titled Smurfs) starring Rihanna as Smurfette opposite James Corden and John Goodman. Jimmy Kimmel and Marshmello are in this film. I hope they play characters connected to Gargamel because I can’t root for Unfunny Racist Smurf or Washed DJ Smurf. Oh, it’s a musical by the way, with an original song by DJ Khaled and Cardi B. This feels like a film that should have came out in 2014 (which makes sense, the last live-action-animation hybrid Smurfs film was 2013), and has been retooled slightly but is still ultimately stuck in 2018 at the very latest. As far as its lead soundtrack single goes, well, it’s a barebones track, but definitely a unique one. I have no idea what Bellion and co. were going for, but to open your Smurfs song with a nearly minute-long instrumental of chugging factorial breakbeats and indecipherable vocal loop (that could be sampled from Elkan, famous for Drake’s “NOKIA” but credited as a writer on this track, it sounds like it could be manipulated from his nasal drawl)… that’s a bold choice. Rihanna must have recorded a nonsensical demo track at some point that they’ve craggled together for a “hook” as they are about three unique lines in the entire song, and even then, the delivery is sloppy, unclear and heavily manipulated with tuning, echoes and pitch-shifting that makes it barely sound like Rihanna, let alone a Rihanna-led single. I would assume it was some bootleg remix of a leaked demo done by some bored future garage producer. The glitchy vocal sample I mentioned earlier is played with so extensively in the instrumental breakdown, but for no reason. Rihanna provides some, well, “harmony” backing vocals in the final “chorus” but they also sound like throwaway riffing they just added in there for decoration. It takes a similar approach to a lot of Afro-house that has charted recently where there’s barely a drop or build but takes it to a further extreme by not even really trying to replicate a pop structure like those songs. I would say that it embraces not even having a semblance of structure, but that would indicate that the song is trying to be anything, when the lackadaisical, barely-finished progression seems to be ambivalent to its very existence. It’s like the EDM equivalent to a child playing with a Stretch Armstrong for a while and getting bored, but it has Smurfette on the Goddamn cover art. This is why I love pop culture. That Smurfs film better be kino.

#65 – “Bloom Baby Bloom” – Wolf Alice

Produced by Greg Kurstin

Wolf Alice are an alt-rock band from London active since 2010. I’ve never been a fan – I remember finding their Blue Weekend album from 2021 really dull (it topped the album charts, they must have been doing something right) – but frontwoman Ellie Roswell and co. have finally made it to the top 75 with the lead single for their next LP, The Clearing, coming this August, recruiting tried-and-true producer Greg Kurstin along the way. For what it’s worth, even if I still don’t like this, it’s definitely more confrontational and interesting than I expected. The opening piano lead will be stuck in my head forever, it’s got a unique feel that is one part jaunty cabaret and another part menacing alleyway. Roswell’s lyrics here are about not having the space to grow and be herself in the relationship she was in, seemingly in part because of how weak and useless the guy was, with the distorted pre-chorus being the lead-up to her leaving him, her getting exasperated with trying to “play it hard” (the way the drums come in there is really smooth, it’s a shame that groove doesn’t carry on for the wispy chorus). Wolf Alice definitely embrace the eclectic, jerky new wave sound but more often than not, it doesn’t feel necessary for the song’s thematic progression, which is aggressive and deserves a more human approach, with parts of this song feeling more like sound effect collection than genuine frustration. I do love the lyric in the chorus “every flower needs to neighbour in the dirt”, but the squeaky guitar wankery surrounding it just doesn’t fit – I understand its purpose, the song is in part a defiance of a useless ex-boyfriend not letting her show off, embrace the best, most confident version of herself. I just wish that led to something more: an effective climax like a solo, key change, sonic shift, something that can make an already dynamic song take on something ridiculous amidst all its wacky ambition. The song does not go the full five yards with that though so the character and narrative doesn’t feel resolved in the groovy little bow it hints at being wrapped in by the emotive final chorus and jaunty outro. I do like this plenty more than what I’ve heard from Wolf Alice thus far, but they’ve still yet to click with me. Maybe the next single will be a more focused song that can show more clearly their progression as a band, we’ll just have to see.

#63 – “The Glen” – Levi Heron

Produced by Levi Heron

Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell is Levi Heron and why is the Levi Heron track produced by Levi Heron designated a “Levi Heron edit” on streaming services by Levi Heron? Could you be any more Levi Heron? Heron is easier to explain – he’s a Scottish DJ – but “The Glen” refers to a house (a very big house in the country) owned by Scottish aristocrats, the Tennant family, which is nowadays used for film shoots and climate seminars. It’s also a pub in Southampton, but I’m assuming he means the estate. Our story starts in 2019 with Beluga Lagoon, a Scottish film and music production company founded by Andrew O'Donnell that seem to mostly specialise in nature documentaries but released “The Glen” as part of their 2019 album, The Caledonian Fig Tree. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Heron heard it and remixed it, hence why it’s a “Levi Heron edit” even though Heron is the only credited artist. I know Beluga Lagoon is a production company but they probably still deserve a nod there. The original track, written and seemingly performed by O’Donnell himself, is a rollicking traditional Scottish folk track with some rough and rowdy vocals. It’s not my thing exactly, especially when O’Donnell isn’t the most convincing singer in the world, and the structure is mainly unchanging across its runtime apart from some swooshing string swell (you can tell they make documentaries), but that chorus about feeling alive again, there is something to that. It could be turned into something with pop promise, and lo and behold, Levi Heron saw what I did and made a massive trance tune with it. He clearly used some kind of AI-stemming programme to isolate the vocals, which sound terrible filtered like this over pressing synth bass and four-on-the-floor rhythms, but the derivative Euro-trance festival tune is a lot of fun, especially with that cheap, gross lead synth. It’s very basic sound design-wise – I’d prefer for at least some of the original Scottish folk elements to be left in, á la “Cotton-Eyed Joe” using bluegrass instruments – but I could definitely imagine the school disco where this plays after Scatman John and before Vengaboys take us to Ibiza. Idea: get Cascada’s Natalie Horler to re-sing the sample, add a final build that has a key change or fake-out drop, make a timeless smash. As it is right now, good proof-of-concept of the kind of tune that could be formed from the remnants of a much less commercial track.

#58 – “Don’t Say You Love Me” – Jin

Produced by Wyatt Sanders and Tiggs

BTS’ members are still rolling out the solo catalogues, with Jin’s EP Echo ironically being drowned out in the flood of new music this week, debuting at #63 on the albums chart with a mid-sized single debut. Jin is probably one of the least memorable so far of the BTS solo acts – I remember his last top 40 “Running Wild” mostly because Gary Barlow wrote it, not because I remember how it sounds. Sadly, this is not a cover of the M2M classic that soundtracked the first Pokémon movie back in 2000, but yet another retro synthpop track with plastic production and over-manufactured, oversold vocals from Jin. “Running Wild” at least had that anime theme song energy, this is just a slog, with rough falsetto vocals about a breakup that include a chorus where Jin suspects the ex wants to kill him, it really gets that dramatic. If you’re going to lean into a ridiculous melodrama, add some soaring guitars or orchestras, something at least – instead, it renders like a stand-up comedian telling a story about being robbed at gunpoint but in the most deadpan tone of voice possible. Like many K-pop singles, there are countless remixes, but the genres and approaches they take still have soft, plastic sheens, even the full band version which could add some grit with guitars and real drums but ends up sounding like adult alternative (which feels like an insult to the integrity of adult alternative radio). I suppose it is a listenable, inoffensive song, but there should be way more to it – if Jin is going to sing about heartbreak, I want something that tugs, not just mindlessly carries.

#32 – “What I Want” – Morgan Wallen featuring Tate McRae

Produced by Joey Moi and Charlie Handsome

Recruiting Tate McRae of all people for the crossover hit, a potential US Billboard #1 next week, we have Morgan Wallen once again delivering a bland and unmemorable country track that could have been by anyone, with added bro-country tropes to ensure that it’s a Certified Joey Moi Original. The song is about a toxic relationship with some frolicking acoustic guitar loops, a very annoying post-chorus and some of Wallen’s oddest vocal choices (that pre-chorus is two steps away from being a Kid Cudi hum), all over gross trap drums courtesy of Charlie Handsome. Tate McRae does her typical slurry whisper-singing, though she’s so heavily produced that she sounds not only better than Wallen but completely out of place. They have no chemistry, barely sound like they’re singing to each other, and McRae sticks out like a sore thumb by laying her vocals (which sound like they took actual effort) over Wallen’s careless demo track. Whatever “harmony” you could find out of these two… it’s not here, they clash horrifically, so much so that Moi has literally placed them on opposite sides of the mix. It’s such an awful team-up that it’s kind of hilarious. I should mention the few tracks I did like from this album – other than the pre-release tracks “Smile” and “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” with Post (which both got reviews in the past few months), I enjoyed the lyrics for the more neo-traditional “Skoal, Chevy and Browning”, I found “TN” and “Where’d that Girl Go” impossibly catchy despite… everything else about them, and I think the so-bad-it’s-good HARDY duet “Come Back as a Redneck” needs to be heard to be believed. The rest is exhausting and difficult, but I don’t even think he or his label wanted me – or anyone – to listen to all 37 in a row. I did, though, and I don’t regret it because I do feel I understand part of Morgan Wallen’s strategy and album sequencing that I didn’t see the purpose for before. You’ve opened my eyes, Mr. Wallen, and unfortunately closed my mind in terms of ever listening to their records in full again. Yeesh.

#25 – “One Thing” – Lola Young

Produced by Solomonophonic, Carter Lang and manuka

I had assumed Lola Young’s team were pushing “Conceited” as the sleeper hit follow-up to “Messy” but given the song’s age, it does make sense to push a brand new track as her sophomore single, especially as Young’s team of producers are behind the boards for this one too, with Solomonophonic, manuka and particularly R&B hitmaker Carter Lang all having been behind “Messy”. There was a decent amount of semi-ironic buzz about this one on whatever confusing hole of X I’ve travelled down since Elon took over, so I’ve seen the music video clipped and muted whilst doomscrolling but I’d yet to hear the song until this episode. It actually does follow the funkier groove of “Conceited”, with Lola’s very English sing-rapped delivery now going from her subject matter of toxic relationships to a down-and-dirty sex jam. I now understand why it went semi-viral on ironic X circles given those verses, but her Kali Uchis impression on the pre-chorus leaves much to be desired (even if I like the hint towards larger body sizes still enjoying intimacy, it’s a cute touch). The main appeal to me of this song is that chorus, which is – as is common with most songs this week, honestly – insanely catchy. The instrumental boils down to the groove and a slick, cascading guitar slide (I love when they pan in alongside the keys in the following verse), for an outright dismissal of anything more than a simple, hot-and-heavy hook-up. I don’t think this is outstanding or anything, but it’s a confident choice for a follow-up and one I think will pay off – I love how the song’s outro derails into a squealing jam session with vocal takes layered on each other and a myriad of spacey bass warps. Even with a mediocre pre-chorus and kind of jerky, maybe too upfront verses, there are great elements to this song that I think will help it, and Lola Young herself, stick around. I’m interested to hear if the next album is as upbeat and raunchy as this indicates.

#8 – “Family Matters” – Skye Newman

Produced by Boo and Luis Navidad

The biggest global music competition of the year, engaging damn near an entire continent and a ravenous group of super-fans for a million-dollar extravaganza held annually attracting thousands of spectators, many among them journalists covering every inch of the contest. The biggest country star on the planet releasing a 37-track album, already home to several top 40 hits, that was the biggest of its genre this year after only half a day’s worth of streams. The follow-up single to a four-week #1 that has dominated the charts for months. The first Rihanna song in years, a solo single from K-pop megastars BTS, none of what I’ve mentioned can even come toe-to-toe with… London singer-songwriter Skye Newman, who charted a few weeks ago with the decent enough “Hairdresser” and is now immediately debuting in the top 10, without even a Wikipedia page to her name. The song seems to have such a low-key presence despite its chart success that the obvious grammatical mistakes in its Genius lyrics page have yet to be fixed as of writing. If I were a more righteous humanitarian, I might have fixed them myself, but alas, we’ll have to make do with shoddy formatting.

Newman sings about her dysfunctional family in her follow-up single, but seems to wrap up her trauma with a “bigger person” angle: no-one will see the problems she faces by just looking at the surface, she doesn’t lose sleep and she’s above all the problems. So why the belting, soulful delivery, the almost menacing way the bass groove comes in, the backing harmonies, the echoed vocal mix? It’s a thematic confusion, summarised in the song’s primary conceit that it’s not trauma, just “family matters”. Her brother’s substance abuse doesn’t make him a victim or worthy of rehabilitation, but a “stupid bastard”. The opening lines is “You’ve never worn these shoes, don’t mean my new Balances in Blue”. The song settles into a chiller R&B groove with some nice drums, but the vocals appear to have been one raw take – Hell, maybe the lyrics were improvised too – and the song just… goes nowhere after. I understand that it could be relatable (TikTok virality about the song or its lyrics likely contributed) but as far as a hook goes, it’s basic and unmemorable and as far as its sound, it’s awkwardly mixed, kind of a dingy wreck. Makes sense for the family it’s describing, but it’s framed as simultaneously confrontational and very dismissive, but never in defence of her family, just a pure acceptance of loathing your closest family for reasons she contributed to but pays little mind to (the second verse elaborates that she used drugs which led to stronger drug abuse from her brother), all wrapped in an aggressive fashion that seems to indicate more of a self-hatred she’s nastily (and hastily) deflecting. It’s about as tonally lost as Drake’s diss of the same name, which I listened to after this one because it remained in the search results (even when I specified I wanted Skye Newman’s song) and I wanted a good laugh. Drop, drop, drop…

Conclusion

Well, there’s definitely a lot to choose from. Best of the Week goes to – screw it – Smurfette (the artist formerly known as Rihanna) for “Friend of Mine”, with Tommy Cash taking the Honourable Mention for “Espresso Macchiato”. As for the Worst of the Week, it should not be surprising that Morgan Wallen and Tate McRae take it for “What I Want”, but Skye Newman was not too far behind with “Family Matters” as the Dishonourable Mention. Plenty of this will vanish by next Friday – seeing which of their debuts actually last into the Summer will be interesting. Thank you for reading my dissertation and/or TED Talk and/or remake of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, long live Cola Boyy – his posthumous album Quit to Play Chess was released today and I implore you to listen. See you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 17/05/2025 (Sleep Token's Even in Arcadia, Calvin Harris & Clementine Douglas)

Well, Sleep Token may not have to keep it brief to sell records, but I’ll try. Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” lives up to its name with an ninth(!) week at #1 on the UK Singles Chart, and welcome back to this “sleepy” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: references to drug misuse and death

Rundown

As always, we start our week with the notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid adieu to: “End of the World” by Miley Cyrus, “Kisses” by BL3SS and CamrinWatsin featuring bbyclose, “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen, “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls and after only two weeks, “Damocles” by Sleep Token. Don’t fret, Sleep fans. Or Sleep Token fans, I’m a sleep fan and I don’t want to be confused for a fan of this band.

Two new album releases – Sleep Token’s chart-topping Even in Arcadia and PinkPantheress’ Fancy That mixtape at #3, both new peaks for them on the album chart – show their impact on the chart, with PinkPantheress’ “Tonight” returning to #68 (it peaked at #35 earlier this year) and Sleep Token’s “Caramel” surging back onto the chart at #33. Otherwise, “Girl, so confusing” by Charli xcx (with a remix featuring Lorde that the Official Charts Company is still not crediting) is back to #73 and an unnecessary Doechii remix brings the still terrible “Timeless” by The Weeknd allegedly featuring Playboi Carti back to #30. The former peaked at #28 last year, whilst the latter somehow reached #7 earlier this year. Our notable gains see boosts for “I need to know” by Denon Reed of Cru2 at #57 for some reason (expect another gain next week thanks to another “all star rap remix” adding Tom Zanetti), “All I Know” by Rudimental and Khalid at #56, “Borderline” by Ely Oaks and LAVINIA at #35, “Revolving door” by Tate McRae at #16 and “Shake it to the Max (FLY)” by MOLIY and Silent Addy at #15 (this one also had a remix released this week, courtesy of Major Lazer and Ape Drums).

Our top five is nearly the exact same as last week, aside from sombr reaching a new peak for “undressed” at #5, which isn’t exactly a positive, but otherwise: “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey at #4, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #3 and “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #2, with “Ordinary” sitting comfortably at the top. There is a top 10 debut this week so hopefully things will shake up soon but before we get to that, we’ve got a Sleep Token double feature and some nice little bonuses. We even start with a song as desperate for sleep as I am.

New Entries

#59 – “Don’t Wake Me Up” – James Hype

Produced by James Hype

Until around five minutes before this episode was uploaded, I had accidentally left the placeholder “Produced by Producer” in, and that feels somewhat mean to point out but also after reading his Spotify bio, claiming that Mr. James Hype is one of the UK’s most important artists, and asking right after listing all his achievements, “Who does this?”, no, I don’t feel mean at all. Who makes EDM songs and sells millions of record? I’ll challenge you to name… 40… thousand. James Hype appears on the UK charts every few years, it seems – this is his first time as a solo act, though there is an uncredited female vocalist (I can’t find confirmation on who it is, but it is possibly his fiancé Tita Lau) – and given his latest track was 2022’s mega-hit “Ferrari” (peaking at #6), and if you follow his UK Singles Chart history, every other hit is a top 10, I don’t have high hopes for this lasting very long. Hey, if he can brag about his achievements in his Spotify bio, I can use his achievements to calculate his chart success. Who does this? Jokes aside, the song is completely fine: the vocals are about as anonymous as, well, they actually are, and they’ve been crushed in different filters, but that makes sense for the kind of cheap, bleep-bloop 2000s trance throwback he’s going for. The lyrics are Euro-cheese about dreaming and being in bliss, the drop is predictable, but the rave synth hook is addicting – that’s all it needs to be, but it’s far from, say, a DJ Sammy’s “Heaven”. This song was released in March, but as with many EDM sleeper hits, there are remixes, though thankfully not as much as those Cru2 rascals. Australia’s Jesse Bloch makes it an even more convincing dated festival track with those hardcore kicks but apart from fine-tuning the mix into something Scooter should hop on and an admittedly cool vocal chop towards the end, it feels a bit predictable. Thankfully, there’s an unholy Vibe Chemistry remix that tries to turn it into something resembling drum and bass which, if that synth fart on the drop is anything to go by, was a mistake. South Africa’s Shimza brings that new, atmospheric Afro-house blend that slows the tempo down a tad and focuses less on climactic drops than building soundscapes, but this one actually does have a pretty exciting build – I like this version a lot, mostly because of its unique percussive elements. As far as the original goes, it ends up less interesting than every other take. It goes for vanilla and succeeds. Fair enough, James. Who does this?

#48 – “Illegal” – PinkPantheress

Produced by PinkPantheress and aksel arvid

I loved PinkPantheress’ new mixtape Fancy That – it is a bubbly 20-minute set of Y2K nostalgia, oftentimes directly sampling the very hits it reminisces upon, with a dazed PinkPantheress delivering addictive hooks with such stylistically focused production that still throws you for a couple of loops on first listen (Nardo Wick? Huh?). Now, as you may expect, our story actually starts in 1994, with the release of “Dark & Long” by Cardiff dance act Underworld, the “Dark Train” mix of which famously featured in the controversial but acclaimed 90s film Trainspotting. This is a 10-minute groovy techno build with some pretty trance and ambient synths that keep the song from getting too monotonous, and it peaked at #57 in 1994 (whilst Wet Wet Wet’s cover of “Love is All Around” was #1, like it was damn near half the year). “Dark & Long” was even played at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, despite its relatively low chart position, so I understand that when celebrating 90s and 2000s UK pop in their production, PinkPantheress and aksel arvid would turn to this sample in an honestly quite egregious way, but they bring their own drums that hit a little harder than the original in my opinion, and those high-register sing-song-y hooks we’ve come to expect from her.

Using a slightly dark sample that still has a lot of flashy synth glaze is perfect for a song about a vague secret relationship that feels risky to continue for whatever reason. A lot of the album acts as an allegory for drug use, and this one is hardly subtle, with the bridge having a panicked PinkPantheress admit to smoking too much weed and rhythmically breathing after her vocals slip out of the melodies. The instrumental build that follows de-emphasises most of the drums, adds a screaming effect, has PinkPantheress breathing across the mix – the only lead vocal is a sarcastic-sounding “Wow!” – until most of the melodic elements fade out as the high runs out and she’s back to reality. A lot of the lovestruck fawning over this record ends up sounding more like spaced-out confusion and carelessness with the added context of the drug themes being placed right as the opening track. It may not be the most unique or clever trick in the book to “be about drugs, actually”, but it adds depth to songs that are structured around that narrative, allowing PinkPantheress to make longer, worthwhile songs than she has been, so I’d say it’s a positive (and helps out the cultural link to Trainspotting, for sure). I love most of the tape but my personal favourites are the singles, “Nice to Know You”, “Romeo” and, primarily because of a Basement Jaxx sample bringing me back, “Girl Like Me”. I highly implore you to listen if you have yet to do so.

#38 – “Look to Windward” – Sleep Token

Produced by Carl Bown

So, Sleep Token, Even in Arcadia. I listened to it yesterday with a friend. I’m not a fan, as you’d expect from reading any of my prior reviews on Sleep Token or even just my takes on metal in general: an album with such a cloying lead vocalist in Vessel, such abrupt shifts from mostly grey alt-pop and R&B to overdone djent sections, and overlong faux-“progressive” structures will not be something I enjoy and I was more surprised that I made it through the whole thing with two tracks I liked. This is not included. Sure, there is more swell in the rising strings but they arise from a pathetic synth pluck and much of the intro is Vessel begging for the “eclipse in [him]” to be halted, to have some reprieve from when a vague darkness inevitably overwhelms him. What that is, I don’t know, but the “Will you halt this eclipse in me?” mantra is annoying and is neither a smooth enough cadence or powerful enough lyric to warrant that much repetition. In fact, it’s a somewhat awkward phrase that drones on, perhaps fittingly for that kind of content but if I were designing a track based on that, I’m not sure if I would go for cinematic swell and backing harmony vocals, probably a darker approach that gradually distorts instead of just doing the absolutely predictable “gotcha! It’s djent now!” Sleep Token go for at the end of this introductory passage. Apparently, Vessel could be reaching out to Sleep – I did not know Sleep was a character but I’m reaching out to him too by the time we get to the trap bridge. You may think this is a short, dismissive review for a song that nears eight minute in length, but consider this: this 56-minute album ends with a fade-out. Not just a song or two, the album itself closes by just fading out instead of finding a theatrical finish like you’d expect a band like Sleep Token to. Who does this? The closing song has Vessel find peace amidst chaos, but there are surely musical ways to express that, that don’t include turning down the volume button gradually for 30 seconds until you get to zero. That tiny little detail made me realise that they may just care as much as I do about their music.

#31 – “Even in Arcadia” – Sleep Token

Produced by Carl Bown

It was by this time in the album listening, around track six, that I started to think Sleep Token are a positive force in pop music. They’re fuelled by a cult fanbase’s sales and streams so it’s difficult to say if they really permeate the general audience but they must be having some impact that I can respect for a band that is so entrenched in lore and makes a pseudo-eclectic mix of metalcore, pop balladry, electronic semi-rap… okay, when I describe it, it sounds horrible, but it’s still something. The execution is where it gets sloppy for me and I’m definitely not personally a fan but this is dynamic and often heavy music that’s selling well, even if gimmicks are attached like with Ghost. Sleep Token’s recent success took me slightly by surprise but if there’s a void for longer, more adventurous songs, especially in rock and metal, to actually be radio hits, Hell, I’m all for it. I’ll even give it to them: I like this song.

The title track is in reference to a phrase common in classical antiquity, best displayed by Classical painter Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, depicting a pastoral scene with shepherds gathered around a tomb that reads “et in Arcadia ego” – “even in Arcadia, there am I”. Many of Vessel’s lyrics in this album cycle have revolved around newfound fame and struggles to adapt, so the idea of death and loss still being ever-present even in paradise rings close to his metallic Drakery across the project. Vessel’s lyricism, especially the second verse, is still clunky and very self-indulgent as he details his own ascendance, but the first verse is much more grounded and the piano melody the entire song is founded on is one of the few moments in this album that actually touched me. As a pure ballad that does not ever do the djent bait-and-switch, but still builds through an array of sound ideas, such as a subtle beeping sound way in the back of the mix, a metallic clackering that pans across the airy mix, and my personal favourite touch, the wiry synths that lead into an anthemic synth replaying the piano. This is one of the few places on the album where Vessel’s tuned and layered vocal mix doesn’t just make sense but adds to a song thematically, though I don’t love his belting at all (his yelling and rough vocals need some work in general). The instrumental outro with the string section is gorgeous and having Vessel absent for it as the song peters out into low-quality recordings of what sounds like rainfall is a great way to end a track at peace meaningfully. If you wanted to keep a motif going, maybe you could make your closer worth listening to with that trick but sure, a studio fade-out works too. See, Sleep Token fans? I can be nice. I see value in the band’s work, I’m not just dismally rejecting the music based on preconceived notions of what they are… except occasionally, I am because it really is hard to take the “DYWTYLM” guy seriously sometimes. Do you roll with the waves?

#8 – “Blessings” – Calvin Harris and Clementine Douglas

Produced by Calvin Harris

Some Brits woke up to Snapchat messages from Scotland’s very own Calvin Harris this week, who is desperate to ask if you like his new song, regardless of how many times you tell him to piss off. “You like it?” Thankfully, I do. After the trainwreck genre-fusion of “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY”, Calvin Harris does what he always does after an experiment and digs further into his increasingly wider comfort zone, I feel like he has a strong handle on plenty of dance genres by now. His vocalist of choice is, as credited on the cover art, “The One & Only” Clementine Douglas of “Asking” and “Tell Me” fame, who I generally like on these pop-EDM cuts, and the production here is also pleasant. It’s absolutely another 2000s trance throwback, this time harking back to the Ibiza sound, with a shimmering lead synth and tropical guitars as Ms. Douglas shows a… surprising level of depth for this kind of song. Sure, the lyrics aren’t too detailed but it’s nice to hear a house breakup song, especially one that’s almost a kiss-off, where her partner didn’t deserve the love she gave them but she takes a sarcastic “bigger person” and wishes them all the blessings because… well, she couldn’t care less, she’s not looking back. You can hear elements of modern Fred again..-style stutter house in how the vocals are treated in the drop, and the generally shaky atmosphere thanks to lyrics referencing anxious and tense moments in the relationships against some great details in that second verse, such as a subtle, contemplative synth and a hesitant string swell that has the door shut down on it by the punchy build. It’s nothing too new or original from Calvin Harris but it does work, mostly thanks to Clementine Douglas and not exactly the strength of its drop – that lead is still way too loud in the mix, this is a consistent problem with him recently – but also thanks to a more unique set-up that gives way to a charming, more wistful take on a very overdone genre. You like it?

Conclusion

Yes. But it’s not getting Best of the Week, that goes to PinkPantheress for “Illegal” and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Sleep Token take the Honourable Mention for “Even in Arcadia”. Just when you thought this series would start getting less predictable, they also get Worst of the Week for “Look to Windward”, don’t get too excited. I wouldn’t usually give out a Dishonourable Mention when the rest of the songs are just okay, but James Hype really bugged me with that egotistical Spotify description so take that, “Don’t Wake Me Up”. Who does this? As for next week, it’s the Eurovision final, that’ll likely drown out whatever else releases, so prepare for every year’s most annoying week, the Eurovision episode. For now, thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy, and I’ll see you next week! Now to get some sleep.

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 10/05/2025 (Ed Sheeran, Jorja Smith)

For yet another week – now eight, consecutively – “Ordinary” by Alex Warren stays on top of the UK Singles Chart. It’s a fittingly dry week, so welcome back to this “dehydrated” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, references to bigotry, death, body image and Maroon 5

Rundown

As always, we start the episode with our notable dropouts, those being songs exiting the UK Top 75 (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid adieu to two singles (both lasting four weeks) from albums that released today so could just enter back next week anyway, namely “Caramel” by Sleep Token and “Tonight” by PinkPantheress, as well as “Some Might Say” by Oasis off of the anniversary reissue re-release last week, “Juno” by Sabrina Carpenter, “Call Me When You Break Up” by Selena Gomez, benny blanco and Gracie Abrams, “It Isn’t Perfect but it Might Be” by Olivia Dean and finally, once again, “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” by Dasha.

As for what fills those spots, it will mainly be our new entries, but “Kisses” by BLSS and CamrinWatsin featuring bbyclose is back at #71 and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #70 because why not? Outside of the other re-entry for Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” at #44, we see gains for… “Mr. Brightside” at #63, dear God. Other than the bottom-feeders, we do have “Stargazing” by Myles Smith at #47, “Hairdresser” by Skye Newman at #30, “party 4 u” by Charli xcx at #28 and a big week for sombr, as “back to friends” is at #15, “undressed” at #6. Just delightful.

As for the top five on the UK Singles Chart, we have the usual suspects with “Azizam” by Ed Sheeran at #5, “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey at #4, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #3, “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #2 and of course, Mr. Warren at #1. Now for our small batch of new entries of wildly varying quality.

New Entries

#69 – “Priceless” – Maroon 5 featuring LISA

Produced by Federico Vindver and Jacob Kasher

This is just a flagrant, low-effort hop at chancing a hit, Adam Levine. Unfortunately, that is what Maroon 5 has been about since V, but when it was successful, it never seemed as desperate, mostly because it looked easy for them to just snab radio hits. Once they started bringing a lot of guest features into the ring, it felt even more soulless. You can point to Red Pill Blues and its singles for fully convincing him to hop on that train, though Christina Aguilera’s “Moves Like Jagger” remix was the first push, and now that Maroon 5 are more of a Nickelback-esque punchline than hitmaking pop group, why not just throw money and songwriters at a last-ditch K-pop collab? Oh, and forget to credit the producers on Spotify while you’re at it, for some reason. That’s probably the only presentational puncture in the perfect plastic pop packaging of “Priceless”, apart from the fact the song is not nearly exciting enough for all that alliteration. In fact, it’s really… dated. I don’t like making that a major criticism because artists can’t control time, but it’s dated to a specific and very recent period of time that Maroon 5 flourished in: mid-to-late-2010s funk-pop. We have the basic, watery guitars, stock drums and some really unchallenging, uninteresting vocal melodies. Hell, Levine even lays low on the falsetto a bit. It sounds like Charlie Puth could be all over this, but he would have probably have added more detail or gimmickry, something that makes the song striking for better or for worse. This is just… nothing. Now a detail I left out is that I really like Maroon 5. I’ve probably said to the contrary in the past but I do like his voice, I think they’ve written earworms on earworms, and the laidback tone of this song is closer to their funk rock days than they’ve been in a while. The limited, easier vocals are easy on Levine’s aging, Auto-Tuned voice and LISA’s sing-songy semi-rapping, the chorus isn’t notable in nearly any way apart from Levine singing “Take my money, don’t want it” – he means the love is priceless but it’s just funny to hear him so passively give up money in the chorus to his big comeback. Hell, given the lack of reception (despite the big narrative video, guest star and… balding), he may as well be signalling to the audience that it’s time to give up. And I wouldn’t blame him – even the typography on the cover art is selling something very clearly of the mid-2010s, and I don’t think the “M5” rebrand will take off, Mr. Levine, especially if the content is far from a rebrand. It’s more of the same, it’s stuck in the same rut this band has been in for years… but it’s a pleasant nothing, isn’t it? I wouldn’t mind hearing this on the radio. I’d like to hear it in the back of a video of a wedding video (the party, not the ceremony – “take my money, don’t want it” wouldn’t be the greatest of vows). Producer Mr. Vindver knows weddings, of course, he had a hand in The Big Day, and I think that album’s really overhated. Maybe I’m becoming a milquetoast pop consoomer as I grow older. Maybe the future for me is adult contemporary radio. It really makes you wonder.

#57 – “Borderline” – Ely Oaks and LAVINIA

Produced by Ely Oaks and Sebastian Bliem

Straight off the success of “Running Around”, Austrian DJ Ely Oaks is back with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it single now crediting its vocalist, LAVINIA, a songwriter born in Italy, raised in the UK and based in Germany. Originally a songwriter for EDM acts, she’s been releasing music of her own since at least 2022. Currently, a Google for “Lavinia singer” splits the results between LAVINIA (the singer) and the author, Lavinia Singer, which is completely unrelated but hey, search engine optimisation is somewhat important in the streaming era. This newer track doesn’t even reach two minutes but does it spend its time wisely? Well, “wisely” – no, the song is a stupid “hypertechno” track with chipmunk vocals from LAVINIA covering Swedish singer Tove Styrke’s 2014 song “Borderline”. So firstly, the original song is similarly silly but instead has a reggae fusion rhythm for some reason and despite supposedly being about “smashing the patriarchy” (I guess I can see it – “I used to be blind and I still can’t see”), this upbeat techno reimagining makes it seem like more just living your life recklessly and being on-edge all the time, hence the repetition of “borderline” in a… well, borderline nursery rhyme melody. I prefer Ely Oaks’ version because there is not even an attempt to take itself seriously – even if it is about the patriarchy, there is a new punk energy to singing about being an unabashedly messy woman over basic rave production. I also like the very typically buzzy synths, and how Mr. Oaks and co-producer Mr. Bliem do surprisingly more with the drums than you’d expect for a song that doesn’t hit the two-minute mark, I like the breakbeat interludes and how choppy the hardcore sections are. Not a song with too much going on, or really much of anything at all, but for a follow-up for your first big hit… it’s not the direction I’d go in, but he probably already had this lying around to play in sets. Wonder if this’ll be a hit too.

#52 – “Gnarly” – KATSEYE

Produced by Pink Slip, Tim Randolph, “hitman” bang and Slow Rabbit

Sigh, so this may need some explanation. Giant K-pop conglomerate HYBE, intending to expand its western market, held an international competition show with Geffen Records and the end product is KATSEYE, a “global girl group” styled and managed like K-pop but with members from all around the world. They had some mild success in 2024 with their debut EP but this is their breakout and it’s immediately obvious why: a tasteless and unfortunately successful attempt at virality.

The song is co-written by Chinese hyperpop act Alice Longyu Gao (who I know for her bold Alice Glass collab “LEGEND” but never kept up with – any excuse to bring Ms. Glass up though), and you can tell. It’s got bassy, minimal hyperpop verses that feature snares taken straight from Dylan Brady of 100 gecs and name-dropping of pointedly American symbols, a distorted chorus and bait-and-switch pre-chorus that makes you think it might be doing something actually interesting like a throwback house switch-up. Alas, it has a classic K-pop structure in spite of all the, ahem, “weirdness”, in that its transitions are abrupt, its parts are unrelated and it sounds built for music videos and choreography than being listenable. The obnoxious vocals clearly take from bratty, teenager kitsch that hyperpop also displays, whilst having a “polarising” (but thanks to years of hyperpop being mainstream, pretty normal) sound you could easily see replacing “money machine” in one of those X posts asking how people “really listen to this shit”. As for the lyrics, they desperately try to make “gnarly” a thing. You could say it’s ironic, and it definitely is considering how it’s outdated 80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles slang, but the singers are still absolutely trying to sell it, with the vocal engineering drowning them in effects to sell it even further, and the sheer repetition drilling it into your brain. Once you’re putting that much effort to make your supposedly cool thing cool, it just ends up pathetic and flagrantly corporate, especially with the fact that a clean edit exists, because anything actually transgressive wouldn’t have a radio edit on week of release (okay, except “WAP”). Sure, the group is diverse, but its writers probably shouldn’t get away with their inclusion of harmful black stereotypes in their modern Hollywood imagery – the fried chicken lyric, the trap beat, I took it as a fluke until the second verse started repeating “gang gang” incessantly – if this isn’t the most borderline racist song you could get away with in modern pop, I’m not sure what is, but that probably didn’t even cross their minds because to them, it’s equivalent to boba tea and Tesla, who clearly share a demographic…

Once I found out that this was originally cut as a demo by Alice Longyu Gao with the fucking Chainsmokers in 2023, just reworked for official release, I almost regretted writing anything else about it. Explaining that this is an old Chainsmokers song in the vein of “#SELFIE” repackaged as a TikTok-viral “post-ironic” pile of shit by a K-pop business worth more than several countries, with a borderline anonymous girl group supposedly at the forefront, really defeats the need for any sort of review or analysis of this, and that’s to assume it held any value in the first place. Why bother with this kind of thing?

#39 – “The Way I Love You” – Jorja Smith

Produced by Ed Thomas, Maverick Sabre and Shayk

For her upcoming album, Jorja Smith has been working mostly with eclectic Irish musician Maverick Sabre, who broke out to great chart success in 2011 – his debut “Let Me Go” peaked at #16 – but has mostly settled for critical acclaim since, though will often pop up with collaborators as a guest artist. Their duet, “Loving You”, from last year failed to chart but the two have been working together since she was 16, and together with Smith’s common collaborator Ed Thomas, he’s been providing songwriting, production and even vocals on many of the tracks released from this upcoming record. Given the press release for this single and her BBC Radio 1 interview regarding “Loving You” mentioning youth and nostalgia, these could be prevalent themes on the album, though it’s subtler here as whilst the UK garage sound is nostalgic, the lyrics are more about an ongoing relationship deteriorating not out of conflict but out of not feeling too special anymore, that expression of love not being as frequent or effective, her partner’s not as talkative with her anymore and things like that make her question what life would even be like without this person in her life anymore. It seems like a relatively long-term relationship – this may just be a sign of how the initial, lovestruck phase is over and things are more “regular” – but that real confusion about where you stand with someone is represented through the inner cycle of questions that make up the verses.

It’s a unique position than a love or breakup song to write about, especially with this kind of garage production that emphasises a tense atmosphere and lets her vocals just drip out onto the jerky bass and string stabs very reminiscent of bassline house (maybe that revival is coming after all – it’s the day of Cru2’s Birmingham shutdown tomorrow after all). The vocal chop in the pre-chorus are against what sounds like MIDI flutes and a constant, rapid fluttering of garage percussion, as the stuttering blends her lyrics together to sound like “when you look at my body”, echoing that pertinent issue of a relationship harming her self-image, adding that train of thought into the emotional confusion. It’s not got as many impactful moments, perhaps, but for a chugging bassline song, it’s surprisingly emotionally resonant and absolutely worth checking out. I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being a decently-sized hit too, a mix of R&B and bassline garage this driving and this concerned with self-worth feels like it could really have some motion on the charts. Knowing the success of my predictions, this will be in the notable dropouts next week. Regardless of how it ends up, I love this song and I’m looking forward to hear more from Jorja and Maverick soon – he brings a confrontational feel I don’t hear her end up in too often. Great stuff.

#17 – “Old Phone” – Ed Sheeran

Produced by Blake Slatkin, Ed Sheeran and ILYA

Our biggest debut this week is Ed Sheeran sifting through his old phone. Riveting stuff. Full disclosure: I like Ed Sheeran’s ballads, often way more than I want to, and he touches upon death and nostalgia in ways I’ve felt before (I count “F64” and “Visiting Hours” among his best track). Even with that, I did laugh bizarrely hard at the song opening with acoustic chords you wouldn’t think out of place in a ukulele-laden YouTube apology video and the out-of-the-gate admission that Ed Sheeran just… went through his old phone today. He sells that with passion. On a serious note, I do like this song – he’s in a place where he’s reminiscing on times and people that are so far in the past that he isn’t the same person, and neither are those old people he has messages with. His dead friends, exes and family members that grew apart wouldn’t really recognise him in the same way that he can easily recognise and remember the names, faces and messages on that old phone. He ends up saying in the chorus that he probably should have kept this in the box, because it doesn’t belong to him anymore, it belongs to the past.

Despite the relatively upbeat folksy tune – I really wish there wasn’t any percussion, or that the little stomp-clap affects he adds weren’t here, to make it a barer track – the lyrics are honest and depressing, they paint a picture of Ed you don’t really see. He’s always had the image of a normal, down-to-Earth “bloke”-type – to hear him being much more open about how far he is from the person he used to be, from the character and façade he displays, and regretting how his confused response to fame pushed everyone away from him, is genuinely compelling to me and definitely pretty new all things considered. I wonder if the album’s title Play, or his recent public pontifications about what his posthumous compilation album will be titled (Eject, by the way), have anything to do with the Ed we see on this track, because that’s not an Ed we’ve seen in much detail before. I do like the vocal layering, I’ve always loved how Ed does that, but I wish the contrast of that was felt much more by emptying the mix a tad, emphasising the honesty of the track whilst still masking his voice in some ways. Maybe there’ll be some stripped-down version I prefer in the future but for now, I’m more interested in this lyrically than as a full package. Still, colour me intrigued.

Conclusion

Well, KATSEYE gets Worst of the Week for “Gnarly”, obviously, and Best of the Week goes to Jorja Smith, also obviously, for “The Way I Love You”, but the rest was just in this grey, middling expanse of listenability, I don’t think I can name an Honourable or Dishonourable Mention. As for what’s on the horizon – it could be a big week. Albums from PinkPantheress and Sleep Token, singles from Stormzy, Tyla, Miley Cyrus, Calvin Harris and more – we’ll see what happens. For now, thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 03/05/2025 (Lorde, Benson Boone, Sleep Token)

It’s getting quite “Ordinary” for Alex Warren at the top of the UK Singles Chart for a seventh week, as I welcome you back to this “extraneous” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, references to stalking and drugs, Benson Boone sexing you up

Rundown

As always, we start the episode with our notable dropouts, those being songs that exit the UK Top 75 (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid adieu to: “Garden of Eden” by Lady Gaga, “Hometown Glory” by Adele, “Burning Down” by Alex Warren, “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar, “Close to You” by Gracie Abrams and FINALLY, Disturbed’s cover of “The Sound of Silence” – yes, that was still charting, and it was a blight on each week. Oh, and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac is gone again but it’ll be back, it’s always back.

In terms of what fills up those spots, it’s actually an incredibly slow week, with our re-entries – those being current bottom-dweller “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” by Dasha at #75 and “Some Might Say” by Oasis at #55 – being exemplary of that. “Some Might Say” debuted atop of the chart in 1995 and charted until 1998, with this return being thanks to a 30th anniversary physical reissue. In 1996, opportunistic dance renditions by Supernova and De-Code charted at #55 and #69 respectively. Our gains are similarly scarce: “Somedays” by Sonny Fodera, Jazzy and D.O.D at #61, “Caramel” by Sleep Token at #52 (more on them later), “Hairdresser” by Skye Newman at #38, “party 4 u” by Charli xcx at #34 and Jack Black getting his first top 10 with “Steve’s Lava Chicken” at #9.

Now for the UK Singles Chart top five, which is all very familiar outside of Ravyn Lenae’s “Show Me Love” up to #5. The rest is “Azizam” by Ed Sheeran at #4, “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey at #3, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #2 and of course, Mr. Warren at #1. Now to cover our much more interesting section: the debuts.

New Entries

#72 – “I need to know” – Denon Reed and Cru2

Produced by Denon Reed

This is an interesting one: Birmingham DJ Denon Reed who has self-declared himself as leading the revival of bassline, a UK garage spin-off native to Sheffield popular in the 2000s. Cru2 is his record label and promotional event company, they’re doing a “Birmingham Shutdown” on the 10th and I’m in the city currently so I suppose if I really like this song, I could go (not happening). Reed released “I need to know” in September 2024 and it is a pretty typical bassline flip of a female acapella, presumably a stem sold on Splice or some other marketplace – couldn’t identify the vocalist but through searching lyrics, I know that’s it’s been in circulation since at least 2016 with Pascal Letoublon using it in 2017 for “Be with Me” and, through Shazam, I discovered that “HasenChat Music”, with some random stock image of a woman I presume isn’t the vocalist, used it the year before on “Need to Know”. You can’t say I don’t do my research. From the handful of songs I found that use the track over the years, I’ve found that the producers don’t tend to be particularly innovative with their flips, and Reed’s is similarly straightforward. The original release does not credit a producer, but I’ve reasonably assumed Reed makes his own stuff – if he didn’t, it would be a bit ridiculous considering how simple this is: some choppy strings, a characteristically zoinked-out bass as is typical with the genre, and four-on-the-floor drums with a female vocal on top. I basically could have read you the genre description for bassline from Wikipedia.

Since then, Reed and his folks at Cru2 have continued to release alternate versions of the song, starting in November 2024 with Leeds’ own KAV, who raps over the original instrumental repeating a bunch of chanted hooks and MCing in his slightly fun accent. He doesn’t say anything of note – he doesn’t need to, he just needs to rock the party – but I don’t think he needs to be here for the song to work. The next mix, released in February 2025, removes him but adds production from London house producer Majestic, who adds some cute throwback details that don’t mesh perfectly but definitely add a tiny bit of his flavour to the song. Majestic has charted before, of course, first in 2017 and up until last year, with even more remixes, the most notable of which is of “Rasputin” by Boney M. – his remix was a #11 hit in 2021. The same day, Reed released a VIP mix which has some more bounce to the percussion particularly, it sounds like flies are being swatted and 8-bit sprites of buildings are being destroyed. The Majestic remix was distributed by Relentless Records, a label under Sony known for its success with UK garage acts, so still crediting “Cru2” is a bit funny. The same label published a remix by CLIPZ, a Bristol DJ also known as Redlight (he had a top five hit under his name in 2012 with “Lost in Your Love”), who revamped the song a lot more with pitch-shifting the vocals and constructing a long and somewhat menacing build into a gnarlier drum and bass drop. It’s not great – the metallic percussion is awesome but the drop doesn’t impact as well as it should – but the bridge wherein the vocals have been filtered, echoed and overlapped into a pretty chaotic moment is really cool. Relentless then released a VIP mix by Lewi White, best known for producing a 2011 grime posse cut with Ed Sheeran on it (it peaked at #86). White’s rendition also released just a week after the CLIPZ cut, which was two weeks after the Majestic mix (we’re still in February), also adds a Denon Reed producer tag despite every other version thus far lacking it… and him not producing it.

Switch Disco, a duo who charted before in 2023 with “REACT” (it peaked at #4 and was my favourite hit of that year), flipped it in their “bassline edit” in March – bit redundant, but the bassline in this one is fuzzy and the way the vocals are pitched and re-arranged over it is great, it’s one of my favourite versions, especially with the cinematic effects they add. Then the next week, a guy called Ryan Arnold popped up with a complete bassy overhaul that takes the PAWSA approach to minimal throwback house production. I got a bit sick of it by this point, but no worries – here comes 2005 one-hit wonder Big Ang (“It’s Over Now” peaked at #29), swooping in to save the day with her similarly minimal remix just a week after. This one has a kind of funny, glitched-out stutter of the main vocal that made me laugh but it mostly made me realise how ridiculous this was – weekly remixes for two months? Is this a TV show? I drove myself insane listening to all of these and hearing just how little they’d shake up that vocal line. Even California DJ Jauz’s remix, which has basically no other resemblance to any other version thanks to its trap breakdown (airhorns included), just plays the vocal, which I suppose with this many versions is the only remaining part of the song that can be identified before it just gets classified as an entirely new one (though that vocal, of course, is far from unique to this song and has been used for nearly a decade!). Jauz charted once for one week at #82 in 2016, by the way, if that matters, ironically with a song titled “Higher”. Jauz’s remix was the last for a month before the version that probably gave it one final stretch to pick it up in the top 75, a version that credits Cru2 as a featured artist, bizarrely, despite Cru2 being not only not a person, but also the lead artist’s company, and also not the featured artists, as that would actually be MCs KAV (once again), Silky (who casts Harry Potter spells) and more familiar names, MIST and Dizzee Rascal (who is absolutely lovely to hear on the charts again, last time he appeared was 2018), referencing his classic “Bassline Junkie”. Silky‘s highest-charting song is a 2020 Tom Zanetti collab, “Flight Mode”, at #78 but the other two don’t need backstory – Dizzee has five #1s after all and MIST used to be a semi-regular on this show (hasn’t charted since 2022, unfortunately).

I hope you enjoyed that rundown of each remix of the song because it was much more interesting than I expected it to be, but the sheer quantity of versions is somewhat ludicrous for a song that is not yet a year old. I do actually like the original fair enough because it is so simplistic that it becomes almost hypnotic, though the VIP mix and Switch Disco edit are my personal favourites. It does help lengthen what would have been a miniscule review and maybe flesh out a pretty dull week overall.

#66 – “Stateside” – PinkPantheress

Produced by PinkPantheress, The Dare and aksel arvid

Alt-pop princess PinkPantheress has released the second single from her upcoming sophomore mixtape, Fancy That, this time with Brooklyn’s sleazy alt-dance producer The Dare, who she teams up with for a bit of a re-imagining of “American Boy” content-wise. The difference here being is that PinkPantheress doesn’t have anyone to work off of outside of The Dare’s production – she apparently was deceived by his looks into thinking he was actually British anyway – and also that she’s basically stalking the guy, though this is mostly because this American guy treats her much sweeter than any Brit has, with the novelty of her being his British girlfriend and him being her American boy making the relationship feel fresh and dreamlike. The Dare brings a warbled synth bass and breakbeats that don’t start off too exciting – the most interesting element of this mix at first is probably the breathing in the chorus – but a pattering of vocal samples splattered all over this mix as it floats and swells with new swooshing pads makes this a very immersive soundscape. I’m not entirely sure how much sense it makes for the content, it sounds like a French festival for most of the middle part, but it’s absolutely a refined and detailed production, with that fun French filter house stab, turntables and even a synth ripped from Groove Armada’s “Paper Romance”. Speaking of samples, I immediately recognised the melody of the post-chorus being an interpolation of Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me”, a 90s R&B hit (#33 in 1995, on the exact same week that “Some Might Say” was #1, in a lovely, trivial coincidence that makes me happy) that PinkPantheress knows from the Gary Numan-sampling, Richard X-produced, UK chart-topping Sugababes cover that blocked “One Step Closer” by the S Club Juniors off the top spot (Judas!). The Dare did not know who the Sugababes were, according to an interview with Jack Saunders, which just fuels the song’s narrative. Can a Sugababe love a Backstreet Boy?

#57 – “Laho” – Shallipopi

Produced by Progrex

Okay, I’ll bite: who’s Shallipopi? Well, he’s a Nigerian singer whose breakout hit is named after Elon Musk. Moving on swiftly, this song from March is somewhat unique in the Afrobeats lane and not just because of the immense amount of tags that start the song, one of which claims that “Shalli-fuckin’-Popi” is “the President of Pluto”. The dramatic strings in the back as well as the off-beat feel to Shallipopi’s vocals give this a somewhat cavernous feel, especially since the group harmony vocals sit there with Shallipopi more talking over them than anything. It’s slightly off-kilter, with the hook pleading with God and his fans not to let him fall from grace and his position, as well as referencing how he’s just drank Don Julio and doesn’t want to literally fall over. “Laho” means please and having a echoed group vocal chant “Don’t let me fall, please” amidst some clicky, minimal percussion adds an isolated desperateness to the track that I find haunting. It fades out, however, and doesn’t ultimately feel like too complete of a track, but Burna Boy is here to save the day with a remix released last week that sadly adds a pretty good verse from him but isn’t sufficiently longer to add any more parts that could really flesh the song out, like an extended outro or switch-up in the beat. This is definitely still interesting but sounds more like a proof of concept. Also, New York drill rapper-producer Cash Cobain is teasing a remix in which he delivers what sounds like a run-on sentence over the Progrex beat so prepare for that, I suppose.

#25 – “Damocles” – Sleep Token

Produced by Carl Bown

Okay, Sleep Token, let’s try another single, why not? The semi-anonymous alternative “metal” band approaches Greek mythology with this third single and though I still do not like Vessel’s vocal, this one is at least less of a dirge, even if it is a ballad. Here, Vessel uses the story of a nobleman who keeps his sword above his throne as an analogy for his position in the music industry and his fear of falling out of favour with his fans, hence the chorus referencing his empire falling. The song is not too dissimilar from Lewis Capaldi considering the basic piano backing, wordy verses and distinctly annoying whining, but aside from some cringeworthy lyrics (“I can’t always be killing the game” – okay, man), this is one of their most listenable songs yet. It takes very few risks, going into straight-up Daniel Powter piano-rock in the second verse but the sweeter sound has plenty of flourishes that distract from Vessel’s voice and then they ruin it all by adding a gross chug metal section that just kind of drops into the mix for no reason and then taps out, without an effective build. It’s a shame that second chorus ended up like that, because the bridge’s approach to the same idea is great! The mix isn’t as overwhelmed by guitars because of the stop-and-start structure that fits perfectly with Vessel’s more dynamic vocal melody, it sounds great and it shows an example that they could easily do their gimmick in less egregious ways, especially with some pretty great drumming and the respite of the final chorus’ pleasant harmony vocals… until the metal comes back in, but this time, not only does it feel warranted thematically with all the ancient empire stakes, but there’s an epic drum fill that leads it in and a lot of awesome, technical drumming after the chorus peters out, with a lullaby piano outro. The stakes are there, they’re not undermined and don’t get me wrong, they are overwrought, but embracingly so – it reminds me of Avenged Sevenfold’s 2023 record, which I’ve always held in positive companion to Sleep Token’s from the same year. If they kept the Vanessa Carlton adult contemporary vibe for that second chorus so the bridge actually hit like it should with no pointless interruptions to an otherwise decently-constructed song (relative for Sleep Token standards), maybe this would actually be a decent song. In my opinion, at least, I know these guys have a big fanbase that are propelling these songs to chart and I respect that – the less I see the vision, the more I understand that it’s being adored by a lot of people. Hopefully Even in Arcadia has something for me hidden somewhere in there.

#17 – “Mystical Magical” – Benson Boone

Produced by Evan Blair

Sigh… the late Australian-English singer and pop idol Olivia Newton-John released “Physical” in 1981. It peaked at #7 in the UK that same year and you know where I’m going with this. “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie was #1 that week and yes, Benson Boone interpolated “Physical” because it hasn’t been done enough by pop stars in the past five years. When I was first told that the chorus was basically just “Physical”, I assumed they just sounded similar but no, writers Steve Kipner and Terry Shaddick are credited on what might be Boone’s first miss in a while for me (and yet another miss in a pile of garbage for many others). He had already gone the 80s synthpop pastiche with his latest single “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else”, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but this actually tones down the synths for a funk bass and doo-wop vocals as he pleads that this girl will know how good of a lover he is if she just gives him a chance. I’ve always found that song idea kind of gross, at least when it’s this obsessive, but when he’s crooning about “moonbeam ice cream” in both his falsetto and a theatrical voice that sounds like a joke (and also kind of like the fucking Sleep Token guy…), I’m left scratching my head to why this exists. Boone isn’t the kind of personality who can sell this, he’s a whiny asshole (not him personally, I’m sure) who yells over pop rock about God, pissy breakups and awkward situations at restaurants. He’s not fit to be a sex symbol and his utterly sexless rendition of a sex song should tell you exactly why. Also, on that lyrical note, Boone stated in a TikTok: “[I don’t know what the fuck] moonbeam ice cream is but it felt right. Leave me alone. I’m gonna make it a thing.” If that doesn’t speak to the image mismanagement this song is, I don’t know what does.

#11 – “What Was That” – Lorde

Produced by Lorde, Jim-E Stack and Daniel Nigro

New Zealand singer Lorde is back! After what some fans and critics deemed a disappointment with Solar Power, there is some pressure on Lorde to deliver especially with artists like Charli xcx and Chappell Roan bringing unabashed but still alternative pop to a higher position in 2024, with Lorde guest-starring on Charli’s remix for “Girl, so confusing”. This could be a hint towards a more electropop direction, but the album’s title Virgin and its cover art of her pelvic X-ray don’t exactly give any sonic hints, more so linking with her stating she attempted to make a document of her femininity with this album. When it comes to the lead single, she definitely is taking it back to the synthpop of Melodrama and by design as stated in her interview on BBC Radio 1. Lyrically, she’s singing about doing molly with her ex-partner and then comparing her lover to the cigarette they just smoked, saying that’s how she wants them. Maybe she has let that Charli remix influence her a tad. Jokes aside, it’s a breakup song that shares some parallels with Melodrama songs “Green Light” and “Perfect Places” given the embrace of drugs, lights, music and the dancefloor to wash over any form of insecurity and heartache.

The minimal approach is really intriguing to me – this kind of content seems like it could be attached to a rave song, but this is closer to future garage, with Lorde’s vocals being the loudest element over misty guitars and a synthetic bass that faces Lorde’s chorus directly as there is some very subtle rise. The drop filters its clipping, stray and tuneless synth in a distortion and panning that displays an ugliness over scraping, phasered bounce of the garage percussion which even includes some random actual scraping sounds. She’s yet to fully acknowledge the breakup, asking “baby, what was that?” as the relationship flickers past just like the initial molly high, it really works for the “lost weekend” experience she referenced having in London in that interview that inspired this album. The second pre-chorus is followed by a build – probably more accurately described as an interlude – that is really enveloping and then just scuppers away with a flutter before the final chorus, with the confusion that follows a brief moment of intense passion, love and euphoria being the song’s driving point. Overall, I think the track’s brilliant, it makes me want to revisit Melodrama for one because I remember really adoring that album, but it also has me excited for this new album that I feel could be more of a left-field swing that as being advertised. I love the lyric “I wear smoke like a wedding veil”, though the first verse as a whole I’m not too convinced on – there is a lack of sticky vocal melodies in the verses at least so far for me, and I’m still not too pleased with how the robotic vocal effects interact with Lorde’s voice. I had that problem on “Girl, so confusing”, but here the mix seems much more purposeful and I will be intrigued to see how that aspect of the album fits into the themes of femininity and that “lost weekend”. Completely on board here, which I haven’t been in a while for Lorde, will be intently waiting for whatever’s next.

Conclusion

Lorde gets the Best of the Week here for “What Was That”, though PinkPantheress is very close behind as you’d except with “Stateside”. As for the worst, it is damn right impressive that Sleep Token grab the Dishonourable Mention for the honestly not even bad “Damocles”, whilst Benson Boone blasts his best-of with a bumbling blunder like “Magical Mystical”. As for what’s on the horizon, Ed Sheeran, Mimi Webb, Don Toliver and LISA have new tracks but anything could happen, I’m always wrong about these things, watch Yung Lean debut at #1 or something ridiculous. For now, thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 26/04/2025 (Addison Rae, Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, Charli xcx)

For a sixth week, we have an ordinary week with Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” at the top of the UK Singles Chart. Welcome back to this “dubious” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, references to drugs, sex, divorce and generative AI

Rundown

As always, we start our week with the notable dropouts, those being songs exiting the UK Top 75 (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. Today, we unfortunately bid adieu to “Henry, come on” by Lana Del Rey immediately after the debut, in addition to “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY” by Calvin Harris, “We Hug Now” by Sydney Rose, “Crush” by AJ Tracey and Jorja Smith (hopefully the album gives that a second wind soon), “Kisses” by BL3SS and CamrinWatsin featuring bbyclose, “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” by Dasha and, both off of the Record Store Day returns last week, “Guess” by Charli xcx featuring Billie Eilish and “Fortnight” by Taylor Swift featuring Post Malone.

As for what’s coming to replace them, we have our gains and returns. Firstly, bottom-dwellers “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen (more on them later) and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac are floating back to shore at #73, #71 and #70, same with “Sultans of Swing” by the Dire Straits once again back at #65. Outside of those pretty insignificant re-entries, we see some boosts for “Conceited” by Lola Young at #63, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan at #60, “Too Sweet” by Hozier at #57, “Hairdresser” by Skye Newman at #51, “like JENNIE” by JENNIE at #48, “All I Ever Asked” by Rachel Chinouriri at #46, “Lose Control” and “The Door” by Teddy Swims at #40 and #37 respectively, “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga at #36, “Shake it to the Max (FLY)” by MOLIY and Silent Addy at #25, “undressed” by sombr at #13 and, sigh, “Steve’s Lava Chicken” by Jack Black at #11. There was a pre-release single from the Minecraft soundtrack with Dave Grohl and Mark Ronson on it, yet it’s this nonsense that gets the chart run – I don’t have a preference per se (who cares?) but it’s funny to see this just below 200 units away from the top 10.

The top five on the UK Singles Chart should be very familiar to you: “Anxiety” by Doechii down to #5, “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey up to #4 (kind of surprised that one’s doing as well as it is), “Azizam” by Ed Sheeran at #3, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #2 and of course, Mr. Warren at #1. Now to get through a pretty standard week but with at least some… unique debuts, mostly this first one.

New Entries

#72 – “PASSO BEM SOLTO” – ATLXS

Produced by ATLXS

The first thing you see on a release’s page on streaming services will probably be the cover art, so it’s best to start there: according to the Hive model of real-time artificial intelligent content detection that I placed the art through, the hideous album cover of an anime girl in what appears to be Brazilian football gear is 97% likely to have been generated with AI tools like Midjourney. What a start – the record label this release was distributed with is titled “broke” so I guess they didn’t have the cash to hire an artist. Now let’s look through the song’s alternate versions. It’s pretty normal nowadays for a hit song, especially one big on TikTok, to have officially slowed and sped-up versions – just a marketing tactic, not unusual. Is it normal to have “super slowed” and “super sped-up” versions? Probably less so but, hey, why not milk that big hit by making as many versions as possible? You have to pay for all the… well, I was about to say cover art designers. If you’re fiending for something even slower, of course, you can go for the “ultra slowed” version. Or the “mega slowed” version. “Extreme slowed”. What is this, fucking Digimon?

Okay, who’s the guy behind all this? Well, ATLXS (hopefully pronounced “atlas”) is a supposedly anonymous 18-year-old producer (his songwriting credit shows his name is probably Diego Basile) from Italy who prides himself in making “Internet music”, with his specific style being a form of Brazilian funk popular on TikTok that is known as either funk automotivo or Brazilian phonk depending on who you ask. This particular song features the typical Brazilian funk rhythms and drums with overwhelming, leering synths you’d hear in drift phonk and an annoying vocal sample that is allegedly from Brazilian singer Anitta, though I don’t have a good source from that apart from Genius and I am not familiar enough with her voice to know, though I do understand she’s a big deal in Latin America so it very well could be. If so, it’s probably unauthorised, and I can’t find the original Anitta track by searching the lyrics or sample databases like WhoSampled. For whatever reason, the slowed version is the most popular, though realistically, it’s the same structure nearly copy-pasted to barely make less than two minutes of music that could be relatively exciting but doesn’t really have much of a build. You know what does? “NEXT!” by NCTS, another “anonymous” producer (Max Goralczyk) on the same “broke” label who copped the same sample and uses it a tad more interestingly. His song, standing on more streams of the original than ATLXS’ at this writing, has much more developed melodic elements, a more interesting phonk lead and a manic stuttering of the could-be-Anitta-could-be-a-not-her sample and overall more distorted mixing that makes for a very unique build. It’s not a great song, but it’s something else that felt like it had more put into it, even if it sounds worse on a technical level. The slowed version – it seems like this label’s gimmick is the “super slowed” spam garbage – actually helps you sit with the melodic elements more, I probably prefer it. That’s not the song charting though, technically, though Mr. Goralczyk also labels himself as “Internet music” and uses AI-generated artwork:

I don’t know exactly what the kids call “brainrot” nowadays, but all this shit should fall right into that category. The songs are listenable but it really makes you question what the Hell is even going on across the Internet these days.

#69 – “party 4 u” – Charli xcx

Produced by A.G. Cook

Back to something I understand: Charli xcx. Thanks to a performance at Coachella, which I’m sure has boosted a lot of charting songs’ TikTok stats and can be cited for boosts this week, we have a much older Charli xcx song than her BRAT fare, though still recent as this track comes from how i’m feeling now, her 2020 pandemic-era effort executive-produced by PC Music’s A.G. Cook. I float between that album, Pop 2 and Charli in terms of my favourite full-length efforts from Ms. xcx, though “anthems” off of this tracklist is probably my favourite song, maybe tied with “Gone” from Charli. I also loved the artwork for the album, but that’s been replaced with shitpost text for around a year now. “party 4 u” was first played at a 2017 set and had been previewed by Charli and A.G. for years before 2020, with it being an unreleased fan favourite that never made the cut until a more homely, honest album like how i’m feeling now.

The song’s lyrical conceit about throwing a party for someone who can’t be there fits right into the quarantine timing of the release, featuring both home recordings and a sample of the crowd from her 2019 Brixton Academy show that further strengthen that distance between Charli and the intended recipient – probably her boyfriend at the time given the birthday references in the lyrics – in one of her most longing, melancholy tracks. Drizzled in Auto-Tune, A.G.’s sprinkling pads give Charli’s off-kilter moans some real drama, whilst the watered-down trap percussion keeps the emotion locked inside the home she’s sat all alone “celebrating”. Her devastated triplet-flow yelling in the second verse may be one of my favourite Charli performances, the promises of what she’s willing to give for just their attendance ringing out like the phone calls she never got a response to, with the layered backing vocal harmony of “Why [are] you treating me like someone that you never loved?” being one of my favourite moments. A similarly distant, alien vocal effects returns with the bait-and-switch following a sprawling bubblegum bass build that leaves the song blank, just Charli vocodered repeating the same meaningless phrases as a chasm builds around her of gnarly synth bass, distorted claps and layers of Charli vocal lines pleading that this person realises the hurt they’ve left behind. The elements drift away and leave only Charli’s most effected and inhuman-sounding vocal takes playing over the concert footage. The constant false build and the lyrical details make this one of Charli’s most effective ballads. “Birthday cake in August, but you were born 19th of June” is my favourite line because it implies that this “party” she’s throwing is an apology for missing that birthday, which makes the partner’s non-presence even more crushing. I don’t know exactly if this will last, but I damn sure hope it does, it’s one of her best songs.

#50 – “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” – Morgan Wallen featuring Post Malone

Produced by Joey Moi

“I ain’t comin’ back”, he says, two weeks before releasing an album with more than 30 tracks. I will give this newest duet from country bro Morgan Wallen and his face-tatted sidekick, former rapper Post Malone some credit, and not just for the buddy comedy potential if you starred the two in a stoner film together. Joey Moi seems to have taken from his co-producer Charlie Handsome and created something a bit more dreamy for the guys with the layers of guitar here, which do sound great sprawled over the otherwise typical, stiff drum beat that is very much a Joey Moi drum beat. Speaking of production issues Moi falls into, the vocal mix is also off, almost amateur-sounding, especially with the notable processing and Auto-Tune on Wallen that sounds horrible and fuzzy at times (it’s very obvious on the short bridge), which really doesn’t help the song’s wistful melodic decoration. Post fits in much better given the vocal layering and his rougher warbling tone being much more fit for atmospherics given his history in R&B. Lyrically, I think this song is an incredibly catchy piss-off, I actually love the country details and Wallen appropriating the cowboy image, especially with the incredibly corny but hilarious wham line of “There’s a lot of reasons I ain’t Jesus but the main one is that I ain’t comin’ back”. Honestly, if Post had sung the entire track and the vocal engineer was fired and replaced, this could be a pretty great country-pop throwback with some edge to it, especially with Post revealing some of the messier parts of this breakup that show they aren’t exactly the rebel cowboy travellin’ men they claim to be and that this ex-girlfriend doesn’t exactly want them to come back anyway. Why this is a duet, I have no idea, but gay cowboys are a trope… Hell, Morgan Wallen sings “half of this town has got a name for me and I can’t say I don’t agree”, hinting towards a sordid reputation in his small town, no Jason Aldean intended. It’s a bitter breakup with a woman with biblical imagery in which Morgan and Post prefer the road to this relationship, probably because they can spend more time at the bar with the guys given the references to whisky, tobacco, getting stoned. He also sings about being a gambler and getting “even in his ’97 Chevy”… yeah, my headcanon is that Morgan and Post leave their respective girlfriends to start a homosexual relationship in the truck they share. There are a lot of reasons they aren’t Jesus after all, “I ain’t comin’ back” is just the main one.

#24 – “Headphones On” – Addison Rae

Produced by Luka Kloser and Elvira Anderfjärd

I do see the appeal in Addison Rae, though not to the larger audience she has. Her music is a distilled form of everything the r/popheads subreddit would enjoy and that’s all good and fine but that does mean it lacks a grander sense of personality for the mass audience she’s somehow attracted, I assume through her TikTok following. Regardless, she seems poised to make a splash with her full-length debut Addison, this being yet another single from it. Given we’ve seen an example of hyperpop done really well still within a mainstream sphere just earlier this week, I doubt Ms. Rae and her signature producer duo of Mr. Kloser and Ms. ELVIRA will fare as well, but lyrically, there is something a bit more intriguing here. In the one verse, she compares herself to the “it girl” trope, acknowledging the mindless jealousy of constantly chasing up with trends and how wanting to be perfect and have her popularity last forever probably stems from her parents’ divorce. I find the clash of imagery in the chorus – which you can see aptly in the cover art, with her wearing a hoodie and flashy pink hair in a rough but beautiful scene of nature – very interesting. The kind of pop star who deals with pain by letting her hair down and taking a walk in the rain quietly listening to her favourite music isn’t always the same kind of pop star who deals with pain by playing up to her image, getting dolled up and smoking cigarettes – it’s a nice balance to have the chorus and post-chorus contrast so heavily in imagery but have them both stem from the same pain.

Sonically, there’s something more to this too – Addison Rae is still an incredibly uninspiring vocalist, but the instrumentation is closer to indie pop and soul, with a bizarre, low-pitch howling vocal loop used as an intro before abruptly moving into an empty groove that allegedly interpolates Edie Brickell’s iconic but terrible 1988 song “What I Am” – she’s not credited as a writer though, and I can’t really hear it too clearly. I do find the execution of the good ideas here lacking, frankly – the song’s mix is still very empty with much of its elements still as airy as her other dance-pop stuff. I do love the pre-chorus melody, it works brilliantly with the strings (which are a tad dry), but Rae’s delivery, especially the half-spoken cadences in the post-chorus, leaves a lot to be desired personality-wise and can be pretty clunky. It does remind me of how Madonna would have delivered this song back in the 90s with the trip hop-adjacent drum track and the spoken bridge, but she had much clearer texture to her voice, something richer and sensual that Rae for now is lacking. The fuzzy, distorted vocal in the outro that sounds extracted from another song and awkwardly placed in this one is a fascinating choice though, especially when it leads to what may as well be G-funk keys before the song does ends with a swoosh. I feel like they had no idea how to finish the song so smattered some elements together but that does help it stick out from her other, less interesting songs. I’m not exactly… “excited” for that debut album, but this single did help me see some light in regards to Addison Rae that I hadn’t seen before, a void she could potentially fill but just doesn’t have the voice for.

Conclusion

It was a slow but relatively interesting week here, with the Best of the Week following out incredibly easy with “party 4 u” by Charli xcx, though honestly I’ll give Morgan Wallen and Post Malone a tied Honourable Mention for “I Ain’t Comin’ Back” alongside Addison Rae’s “Headphones On”. They’re both just alright tracks that could be a lot better but are still pleasant and could grow on me. Worst of the Week goes to Italian-Brazilian funk TikTok mega-ultra-extreme-slowed brianrot shit, but next episode, we could have some more going on with with new music from Lorde, Zara Larsson, Myles Smith, Tom Odell, Sam Fender, PinkPantheress, Myles Smith, Megan Thee Stallion, Kali Uchis and God forbid, Ye. For now, however, thank you for reading, rest in peace to Roy Thomas Baker, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 19/04/2025 (Jack Black, Lana Del Rey)

For a fifth week, Alex Warren sits at #1 on the UK Singles Chart with “Ordinary”. Welcome back to this “suspicious” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, discussion of abusive relationships

Rundown

As always, we start off our week with the notable dropouts, songs exiting the UK Top 75 – which is what I cover – after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid adieu to a lot of basically brand new hits like “dandelion” and “intro (end of the world)” by Ariana Grande, “DILEMMA” by Nemzzz featuring Central Cee, “Emergence” by Sleep Token (not complaining), “RATHER LIE” (or “HALF AI”) by Playboi Carti and The Weeknd, as well as some much older tracks, namely “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits and “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac.

The biggest story this week, probably even including our debuts, would be Record Store Day landing within the sales week, with exclusive vinyl releases supporting re-entries for “Guess” by Charli xcx featuring Billie Eilish at #44 and “Fortnight” by Taylor Swift featuring Post Malone at #29 – this high sales week may give the tracks just a few more weeks here, but they’re plenty contemporary anyway, I’m just not a big fan of either. We also see gains for “No Bad Vibes” by Jazzy and KILIMANJARO at #65, “Hairdresser” by Skye Newman at #56, “like JENNIE” by JENNIE at #53, “Shake it to the Max (FLY)” by MOLIY and Silent Addy at #35, Morgan Seatree’s remix of “Say My Name” by Florence + the Machine at #25, “undressed” by sombr at #19 (more on him later), and finally, Ravyn Lenae grabbing her first ever UK top 10 with “Love Me Not” at #10.

As for our top five this week, we see many familiar faces – “Sports car” by Tate McRae is up to #5 and the rest are non-movers: “Anxiety” by Doechii at #4, last week’s big debut “Azizam” by Ed Sheeran at #3, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #2 and of course, Mr. Warren at the very top. Now to look through our manageable batch of new songs we have lined up for this week.

New Entries

#69 – “Conceited” – Lola Young

Produced by Solomonophonic

Well, it’s about time that Lola Young got a follow-up single for “Messy”, with this not being new but instead pushed from that same sophomore album, This Wasn’t Meant for You Anyway. Released as a single all the way back in 2023, it shares a producer with “Messy” in Solomonophonic so it could end up having a successful sleeper run though probably not to the same extent as I wouldn’t hazard that she gets another five-week #1 at any point soon. Is the song as good though? Well, it’s not what I expected, with a distorted bassline warbling alongside a noisy synth that, in the best way possible, sounds chirpy and horrible, before it’s splattered under boom-bap drums. Lola delivers a bitter, pissy recall about this guy who shit-talks her to his friends, smells awful and always comes back to her despite their relationship not meaning anything anymore – his kiss doesn’t “taste like anything” when she’s not had a drink, it’s kind of brutal. Midway through the first verse, this extra layer that sounds like a vocodered groan comes in, it’s great and adds a funky bounce to a purposefully stagnant and minimal song. Even the chorus doesn’t seem to want to be one, repeating “I don’t want to hear it” with Lola improvising furious inflections that take the catchiness out of the melody, it’s actually an interesting approach that is similar to “Messy” but ends up with a much different product, one that embraces a dirtier sound. In the second verse, she ends up gathering a lot of power from this pitiful relationship, becoming a toxic manipulator and enjoying seeing him lose composure in response to her non-answers, with a build-up of keys and multi-tracking soaring up with her until that second chorus comes out of nowhere with genuinely noisy rock grit I had no idea was coming. The drums are a massive clash that dominate the mix alongside stray guitars that leave a surprising amount of empty space for her vocals to doddle around between. Sure, I wish there was more of a bridge but unlike “Messy”, this solo is groovy as hell and doesn’t ruin the song’s momentum, by only kicking in at the end and sounding like a final middle finger to this guy after the revenge fantasy. With him gone, she’s better off strumming her own guitar, so to speak. I liked “Messy” fine enough, and I have my doubts that this will be a worthwhile follow-up commercially considering it’s kind of an anti-hit, but I think this is my favourite I’ve heard from her so far. I may need to check out that album eventually.

#58 – “All I Ever Asked” – Rachel Chinouriri

Produced by Daniel Hylton and Oli Bayston

This song appears on a Record Store Day vinyl record, a re-release pressing of London singer Rachel Chinouriri’s 2022 EP Better Off Without, which featured this track, already released as a single months prior. The song was then on their 2024 debut album, What a Devastating Turn of Events (peaked at #17 on the albums chart), with a bonus acoustic version on the deluxe. Later in 2024, she released a live version on her EP Live at KOKO, and in February of this year, she released a duet version with sombr (of all people)… then on this day of writing, she released a “Short n’ Sweet version” (which is actually marginally longer, the subtitle refers to Sabrina Carpenter’s tour that she opened for). All that is to say is that I respect the grind and dedication for this particular song, which has finally appeared in the top 75 after literally three years of promotion. The song did chart last week at #78 but it’s in my realm now and was it worth the promotion?

Well… it definitely makes sense for 2025, where this type of desaturated guitar-pop is having a big moment, especially the more low-key and honest singers in this lane that Chinouriri fits in well with thanks to her more unique, rawer tone she brings on the vocal front. It’s a shame that the drums feel pretty stock as they often do in this genre, but the synths in the chorus are pretty, I like the texture they bring since they match her higher register in sounding just a bit uncertain and cautious about asking her partner for the bare minimum. That content is sold well, it’s aptly melancholy and whilst it’s lacking in the kind of specific lyrical detail I tend to enjoy, but it still follows the song’s emotional conceit coherently and focuses on the partner specifically and the lack of time they gave her. I like to think that the lack of time Chinouriri gives to either her part in the relationship or any of the good times (if there were any) is her way of saying that when she’s exasperated with this lack of care, all she can think about is the response to what she does for them and not any of what actually happened – her brain is clouded with the bare minimum that she’s working so hard for and the relationship becomes transactional. On the Short n’ Sweet tour version, she tells the audience when the chorus comes in and ask them to sing it, prompting a back-and-forth that I think is actually quite cute, even if the acoustic guitars overall I find plucky and dull – there is a groovy moment in the second post-chorus that shines in this live version, however, and she sounds great, with those extra crowd voices lending more drama to the relationship, I do really enjoy that version. This also happens to be the only version that wasn’t out during the tracking week because of course, but the Live at KOKO version has a similar vibe even if without most of the audience interplay outside of the bridge, a louder crowd and some shout-outs at the end. Oh, and the sombr version tries to create a back-and-forth where he reassures Chinouriri that he did adore her… but something strikes me about this sombr guy that he can’t play this guy who had relationship issues without making it seem like it’s all the girl’s fault. “You gave up on me, I’d always try to make it right”, “You think I’m a liar”, just play the bad guy, sombr, your whiny emo voice would be good at it. At least it’s his best song on default of a talented singer being involved.

#48 – “Blink Twice” – Shaboozey and Myles Smiith

Produced by HAFFWAY, Sean Cook and Nevin Sastry

Shaboozey is releasing a deluxe version of his Where I’ve Been isn’t Where I’m Going album, with the bonus tracks having plenty of new collaborations, including one I wasn’t too excited for: Myles Smith. His work has mostly bored or annoyed me thus far, but I was pretty sure he’d still fit well with Shaboozey’s style, just not serving too much of a purpose, neither detracting or improving the song. Realistically, the two have similarly clean, echoed, pop-oriented, acoustic guitar-focused styles that revive stomp-clap rhythms, it’s just that Shaboozey’s more country and will sometimes go for rap cadences – that full album does have some cool, smokier moments on it, none of which are found on this “ending credits to a 2010s family film” type beat. The acoustics are once again really plucky and not as wistful as they should be amidst a lot of swooshing production you’d hear in any given Myles Smith song, and for Shaboozey, it has a lot less oomph and passion to it, even in that fiddle giving up on itself in the post-chorus. Lyrically, it's about being exhausted, becoming numb to the person you appear to be whilst your life goes faster than it ever has been, yet drinking up anyway and doing anything to feel alive, but it never actually lands on a compelling hook about that. The chorus incorporates how meaningless the fun is and the carpe diem themes, but not in a way that gives any extra depth to the verses that honestly end up sounding pretty confused, just full of phrases that you could place in this song’s theme without the connective tissue. Sonically, the track goes in the same direction, read: nowhere, after Myles Smith comes in, and I question why it needed to be a duet at all. It just feels… aborted, a rushed collaboration without good reason to exist, and that’s a shame. I hope the other tracks, some featuring Sierra Ferrell and Jelly Roll, are as “complete” as the album’s “complete edition” subtitle promises.

#30 – “Henry, come on” – Lana Del Rey

Produced by Lana Del Rey and Luke Laird

Lana’s tenth album, first titled Lasso, is out this summer… I think, at least, it’s had its title changed twice – the first time to The Right Person Will Stay and the second to whatever it will release as – and its release date is a mystery. Lana, who I assume I don’t have to introduce to you at this point, let spill that it was May 21st before acknowledging that it probably won’t come out “on time”. Regardless, she has at least provided a small look into how the album will sound with its lead single, “Henry, come on”.

Boy, if you were sick of rootsy, low-key acoustic guitar tracks this week, we’ve got another one headed up, though thanks to Lana being such a distinct vocal presence, with her signature sultriness dripped in the same reverb and echo it often is. The guitar is also laid barer here, with Lana using the character of “Henry” to signal the end of an on-and-off relationship that has overstayed its welcome, Lana being as exact and commanding as possible about it just being over, in a way that starts off sounding like Henry is a bit of a pathetic guy who latches on, fucks it up continually and Lana just stays with him out of pity, but as the song continues, more layers to Lana’s character seem to open, the song blossoming from its close, enwrapped domestic scene to a string-adorned listing of country iconography in the pre-chorus. There’s still the acknowledgement that the relationship was actually fun, and that initial bluntness, followed by a build-up of aesthetics, leads into a more inward-looking chorus where the lifestyle this guy lived is much clearer: a reckless cowboy, ambitious in his dreams and careless in his execution, yet Lana excuses him as not even being the reason she “turned out so dangerous” – no, it’s fate. God has communicated with her, designating her as the woman born to be the pacifier of the ambitious man, a role she can’t bring herself to fulfil.

Once that final line in the chorus is dropped, the excellently-produced strings courtesy of Drew Erickson really kick into gear, replacing her feathery register and adding a really ascendant touch that hilariously fades out for the second verse’s starting line admission of “I’ll still be nice to your mom”. That second verse in particular is quite devastating to me, it’s a complete put-on by Lana that would probably be healthier for her to follow and leave him, but she’s not putting much grit into that final goodbye. It’s spaced-out and quiet, reaching a cracked murmur in the line “They just fly away” which really hits. There’s a warmth and heart to this that makes me understand why that album may be delayed, especially with lightly comedic patches she adds to a tough, long-wrought decision that feels more overdue as the song passes through its five-minute runtime. It’s an old country slow dance, except you move further and further away from the partner you’re two-stepping with as the night goes on, not into the hands of anyone else but into a whole world of unknowns. Beautiful song, I don’t think it’ll last on the charts, she doesn’t tend to, but it deserves to – hope that album’s worth the wait.

#21 – “Steve’s Lava Chicken” – Jack Black

Produced by John Spiker

If this is not your first episode of the show and you think I’ve watched the Minecraft movie, you must have been reading a badly Google-translated version of REVIEWING THE CHARTS. I don’t even watch the films I am interested in seeing that chart songs, let alone a film about Minecraft starring Jack Black. Regardless, if you wanted to know what I think about “Steve’s Lava Chicken”, which at 34 seconds is now the shortest song to ever hit the top 40 (an extended version at 1:15 was released the day of writing)… that is too bad. You know what I really like, though? “Re-Rewind” by Artful Dodger featuring Craig David. Making moves, on the dancefloor, got our groove on dancing real hardcore. From the front to the back, that’s where I was at. You know Artful Dodger do it like that! With Craig David all over your BOINK! DJ, it’s all up to you. When the crowd goes wild, tell me what you’re going to do, because you’re definitely not playing “Steve’s Lava Chicken”. And that goes out to all the DJs.

Conclusion

There was a decent amount of quality to be found in this shorter week, but Lana Del Rey runs away with Best of the Week for “Henry, come on”, with Lola Young’s “Conceited” getting the Honourable Mention. I like Chinouriri’s song fine, I can see it growing on me, and the last song takes less time to listen to than it does to write this part of the episode anyway and – oh, it’s just finished. Worst of the Week goes to Shaboozey and Myles Smith for “Blink Twice”, we’ll probably end up with more Lana next week alongside Addison Rae, maybe Morgan Wallen and Fontaines, but time with tell. For now, thank you for reading, rest in peace to Colin Berry and Max Romeo, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 12/04/2025 (Ed Sheeran, Sleep Token, Miley Cyrus, PinkPantheress)

For a fourth week, Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” holds the #1 spot on the UK Singles Chart, though it’s a fascinating week outside of it. Welcome back to this “caffeinated” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, discussions of sex

Rundown

As always, we start our episode with the notable dropouts, those being songs that exit the UK Top 75 – which is what I cover – after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid fair adieu to plenty of mostly big hits, two of which I’ll cover in a later section (you’ll see why), but the others include many long-standing tracks like “People Watching” by Sam Fender, “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen and even the oft-recurring “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. There’s also some that bled their steam quickly like “EVIL J0RDAN” by Playboi Carti and “DIE TRYING” by PARTYNEXTDOOR, Drake and Yebba – man, I was just starting to like that one – but amidst that are two long-charting Kendrick Lamar and SZA duets, “All the Stars” from Black Panther and “luther” from gnx, which is likely to rebound next week thanks to a music video release anyway.

As for what’s filling in the roster, we have our re-entries, which includes a fun little switcheroo by Sabrina Carpenter. Thanks to specific rules put in place by the Official Charts Company, namely Accelerated Chart Ratio (ACR) and the three-song rule, sometimes nonsense like this occurs, and in this case, Sabrina’s “Taste” (#1 for nine weeks) and “Juno” (peak of #24) return to #37 and #34 respectively, replacing “Bed Chem” and “Please Please Please” (both were in the top 40 last week!). We also see “No Bad Vibes” by Jazzy and KILIMANJARO back at #73, possibly thanks to a bunch of remixes that came out last month but maybe not, it’s a good week for EDM in general with “Kisses” by BL3SS, CamrinWatsin and bbyclose also back at #70 and gains for “Beautiful People” by David Guetta and Sia at #57, “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY” by Calvin Harris at #46, “Here in Your Arms” by Nathan Dawe and Abi Flynn at #36, “Running Around” by Ely Oaks at #32, Morgan Seatree’s remix of “Say My Name” by Florence + the Machine at #31, “Tell Me” by Sonny Fodera and Clementine Douglass at #26 and even “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey at #8, landing their first top 10s all around – honestly wouldn’t have expected that one. We also have plenty boosts in other genres, namely “Bluest Flame” by Selena Gomez and benny blanco at #47 (this might actually end up a hit), “Shake it to the Max (Fly)” by MOLIY and Silent Addy at #44, the continuing break for sombr with “undressed” at #28 and “back to friends” at #25 and finally, “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else” by Benson Boone at #21.

Now for the UK top five, which starts with “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone at #5. I don’t berate the Booner Boy like plenty of others, but we’re bereft of a belated bye-bye for this track. Then we have “Anxiety” by Doechii at #4, a brand new debut from Ed Sheeran with “Azizam” at #3 – more on that later – but we return to the standard at #2 with “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan and of course, “Ordinary” now being an ordinary slot-in for the #1. Now we get to discuss what’s always the most interesting happenings on the chart: the new songs coming in this week, and we have an intriguing bunch for sure.

New Entries

#69 – “Hairdresser” – Skye Newman

Produced by Boo and Luis Navidad

I would bite and ask who Skye Newman is, but it was kind of written on the wall who this was going to be from the details: a young TikTok-popular “rising songwriter” with her breakout sleeper hit. The issue here is that she doesn’t have much biographical detail in, well, her bios, and “Hairdresser”, released just two weeks ago, is her only song available on Spotify and Apple Music. After looking through Instagram stories, which makes me feel old, I found out that she was “New Eltham’s finest” (a suburb in London) and was bombarded with TikTok videos about her “musical journey”, but the main crux is that she’s been teasing the song for a while and finally released the full song to much success, which is a tale now as old as time. The song itself is a bit different at least – sure, there’s a guitar and a smoky indie girl voice, but Newman takes that trope up to 11 with some echoey vocal mixing and backing “yeah!” ad-libs to boot, over a bass guitar that gets interestingly twisted into a leaky pipe of a lead melody, it’s a really intriguing choice from Luis Navidad and Boo… presumably not either the Super Mario enemy nor the guy from Young Money, but you never know nowadays.

The main conceit of this song is the hairdresser knowing all the juicy gossip about this relationship Newman’s in where she provides a lot of emotional labour and seemingly some physical benefits, like clothes and finances, to the relationship, whilst not getting enough back, and the hairdresser always says “Skye, you’re too nice”. I honestly don’t know if her voice fits the content but it definitely gives the impression of someone weathered by a high-maintenance relationship, even if the goal of the song’s chorus is a bit of a stretch. Once it gets into the sultry R&B groove, it does kick into something more solid, even if that drum beat feels a bit stagnant, I almost wish it kept to the minimalism of the first verse, even if the jazzy inflections are pretty, especially over the fuzzy synth bass they’ve added to the chorus. Still, in the outro, she can’t bring it to herself to leave the person because of how “easy” it is to just stick with an unhappy relationship, and doubly how “easy” she is, like a push-over just accepting the unsatisfying relationship for what it is. I wasn’t expecting to like this one much, but it’s actually a perfectly decent track, I’d check it out if this kind of pop-soul is your thing, I feel like it’s becoming a bit more commonplace on the charts now.

#58 – “All I Know” – Rudimental and Khalid

Produced by Rudimental, Jonny Coffer and Slim Typical

You know, UK EDM groupo Rudimental and US R&B singer Khalid feel in surprisingly similar places right now, both on their way out but capable of groundswell, long past their moment but still granted some level of industry support. Khalid in particular somewhat disappeared once COVID hit, or at least trailed off as his songs would chart for a while still. This is his first time charting in the top 75 since he came out as gay, but it’s not like a Rudimental collaboration is really going to shine more of a personal light… or does it? Well, probably not: lyrically, it’s another generic, non-gendered love song about leaving your troubles behind and placing all your faith in someone, with Khalid sounding particularly nasal and weirdly-engineered, with a distortion on his vocals that doesn’t fit him well, it makes him sound like a Shawn Mendes type. Khalid does work well on EDM sometimes too, and a particularly melodramatic sound too, but it's his voice that sticks out on Marshmello’s “Silence” or Martin Garrix’s “Ocean”, and his nondescript pleading here is far from personal. Sure, it’s still a dancefloor drum and bass song, even if it doesn’t go particularly hard as one, just echoing back to that 2014 time of piano-led big “pop” DNB, not doing much different with it because well, Rudimental were most successful during that era. You may as well just repeat a working template, with the string swell and chorus vocals, but slap some chipmunk Khalid on the hook too. Seriously, just a bizarrely bad vocal production job on this one: Khalid sounds both like a fuzzy teenager and a chipmunk at different times. So, in that way, I suppose it’s just Rudimental featuring Alvin, and much less interesting than that sounds like it would be.

#35 – “Tonight” – PinkPantheress

Produced by Count Baldor, PinkPantheress and aksel arvid

Now if there’s any new entry I’m most excited about this week, it will be the new single from PinkPantheress, one of few regularly charting artists I’m intrigued enough to be following semi-intently – not out of habit or necessity, like a certain Canadian, I just like her music. This track particularly is promising given it credits Count Baldor on production who’s worked with PinkPantheress on great songs before like “Capable of love” and “Another life”, though most of my familiarity comes with their hyperpop work for Dorian Electra and GFOTY – “KOOKS SONG” is probably my favourite production of theirs. We also see Norwegian producer aksel arvid on the boards, who’s finished up excellent songs for Aminé and Blxst and is apparently contributing prominently to this upcoming new PinkPantheress mixtape, Fancy That, coming next month.

So, hopes are high, how does it stack up? Firstly, we have to start with the sample – “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” from the best Panic! at the Disco album, 2008’s Pretty. Odd., their fan-favourite baroque pop record that deserves that love. I’m not a massive Panic! fan myself – it’s really hit-or-miss – but this is a great choice of era to derive from, even if it’s just the backing orchestral arrangements (which are sometimes brilliant on that album). The sample of course is pretty obfuscated behind a colourful bassline garage beat with alarm synths that may as well be a pager beeping and some chiller pads above, it really is a signature PinkPantheress production. The song, however, does step outside of her Y2K comfort zone in some regards, namely with the song length being… normal, and the lyrical content being an obsessed request for sex, delivered in the same deadpan talk-singing. She’s even got posters of this person on her bedroom wall, so part of me thinks it’s a more distant plea to a celebrity crush, fitting with the dreamlike instrumental, cascading synth rise and warping heartbeat bass, than it is a more intimate seduction. After all, there’s not much detail, and she’s willing to have her life ruined just to make the moment happen. Overall, it might be a bit of a grower rather than having the immediate effect a lot of her songs do for me, but if this mixtape has fuller, more lyrically nuanced songs with, for her, new horizons of subject matter, I’m all for it, this is still a great teaser for what’s to come.

#23 – “End of the World” – Miley Cyrus

Produced by Miley Cyrus, Maxx Morando, Michael Pollack, Shawn Everett, Jonathan Rado, Molly Rankin, Alec O’Hanley and Max Taylor-Sheppard

Holy production credits, Batman! Miley Cyrus is back with a new single for her upcoming record, Something Beautiful, and given we had the intro to the “(end of the world)” chart in the top 40 last week, it makes enough sense that the heat-death of the universe is finally upon us, and that Hannah Montana herself is who brings it to the people. Seriously, the lyrical matter here is pretty much a list of tropes regarding a California fast-loving lifestyle, a carpe diem ode to living your best life in Malibu or Paris with Picasso painting, reaching nirvana, drinking bottles of alcohol – the specific references to 4th of July and Mercedez-Benz, it all reaches into a certain, very stereotypical Americana. I’m actually all for that as well, it knocks the self-serious edge off a song that could easily be more annoying or melodramatic, and Lord knows we don’t need any more of those. After all, if the world was ending, I’d want to be next you and you’d come over, right? Would you cry or would you try to get me? And why are all four of these world-ending love songs from the past five years, are we okay? The answer is no.

On a musical level, it sounds like eight producers all going off the same reference, that’s for damn sure, the song just explodes with fizzy 80s synth goodness in a way that goes well beyond pastiche into genuine admiration for the sound. It starts with a VHS filter, before dropping immediately into the classic fuzzy sound, there’s a great tiny bass lick beforehand, and whilst Miley’s rasp doesn’t always mix perfectly, the reverb and echo they’ve drowned in it submerge her in the era, and the pianos are a nice touch that many others going for 80s nostalgia wouldn’t do, nor the saccharine guitar fills. The mix is so weightless and bubbly that it ends up weighing a ton, just of hefty nondescript musical blobs, and that’s exactly what it’s going for so I feel like I can’t even criticise it – Hell, when it adds even more rubbery synth in the second verse, or backing layered harmony vocals amidst the already heavily-produced lead in the second chorus, or goes for a bridge that you can’t always hear too clearly because Miley is succumbing under the Baywatch instrumental… the song sounds like it can’t handle that much more in the mix. It’s almost like that’s the song’s way of telling you that it’s pure fantasy. It honestly teeters more off into earlier 70s disco and psychedelia with just how hazy and summery it is, but keeps that airy, blocky 80s touch throughout – even though my favourite parts of 80s pop music include bleep-bloopy awkwardness, eclectic new wave experimentation and tight, bassier grooves, rather than this kind of saccharine, liquidy dream she’s playing with here, I can still appreciate a sound being done well, almost too damn well. Also, I like the line “throw a party like McCartney with some help from my friends” because it rolls off the tongue very well and the Paul McCartney house parties probably led to stories we won’t hear until after Ringo croaks.

#10 – “Caramel” – Sleep Token

Produced by Carl Bown

Sigh. Congrats on the top 10 hit, semi-anonymous alternative metal band Sleep Token. I don’t need to tell you how much I think this band fails, I gave you the diatribe when they first charted – I can’t let out a rant every time if this is going to be a regular occasion. Hell, there are bigger fish to fry – this song incorporates reggaeton, as well as blackgaze, djent, Afrobeats, apparently. If you don’t know what blackgaze or djent are, I’m not surprised – basically, they derive from progressive metal but I’m far from an expert so take a Google – but this isn’t the first time metal or hardcore punk bands have used a reggaeton or dembow rhythm, far from it. Hell, I heard Knocked Loose and Between the Buried and Me do it this decade, and apparently to a RateYourMusic list I found and liked about this specific phenomenon, an emoviolence band did it as early as 1997. How does dembow noisegrind sound? Horrible, but 1.) that may have been the point and 2.) it was a rhetorical question. Sleep Token are the latest to jump on that in their newest eclectic fusion of bullshit, so maybe this one at least has that frenetic energy Knocked Loose had with their dembow breakdown?

Well, firstly we have a Genius description that could probably replace one of the books in the Bible, starting with four long-winded rhetorical questions about fandom, ending with the Sword of Damocles, and in the process involving record labels, metal elitism, the members’ identities being doxed, internet trolls yelling at a fucking weatherman… it’s just all too much to keep up with on the lore front, and this one’s lyrics are particularly entrenched in that kind of thing to a really insufferable degree, especially since they’re not actually going too far out of the tried-and-true metaphors for music performance and industry. “I'm not going to be there tripping on the grapevine, they can sing the words while I cry into the bassline / Wear me out like Prada, Devil in my detail”, “I guess that's what I get for tryin’ to hide in the limelight / Guess that's what I get for having 20/20 hindsight”, “This stage is a prison, a beautiful nightmare” – the worn-out lyrics speak for themselves in all their amateur poetry and you can say I’m cherry-picking but realistically, it shouldn’t be that easy for such boring lines to be picked out from a band that’s supposedly all about the story, with a song specifically about their fandom and place in heavy metal… allegedly, it could still be about the fucking weather forecast for all I know. Musically, it doesn’t compare to the Blur song of the same name, of course, though it’s radically different – you can definitely tell how that opening melody could be used in a more conventional reggaeton beat, and it does for a while – Vessel’s whiny lead vocals don’t place him near any reggaetoneros or Afrobeats singers. Then the real rock drums come in eventually, of course, he does a weird sing-rap-talk flow that goes nowhere but makes room for plenty of annoying inflections, then we get the abrupt drop into vaguely atmospheric metal mush. But for the most part, this is whitewashed reggaeton garbage. No djent is going to make me forget the rest of your lazy, watery “tropical” instrumental. In typical Sleep Token fashion, they’ve taken the most tedious elements of the genres they incorporate to create the ultimate dirge. It’s not weird or unpredictable anymore, at least on a musical level, and it doesn’t even try to be.

#3 – “Azizam” – Ed Sheeran

Produced by Ed Sheeran, ILYA, Johnny McDaid and Savan Kotecha

Ed Sheeran is in an interesting place where he reached such undeniable starpower that even well on his way out in terms of major stardom, he can still lodge basically automatic top 10 hits, especially with a lead single, whether it’s due to genuine interest or just playing the game right. I’m usually nicer to Ed Sheeran than most, and I’ll admit I like the goofy vocal soundbite in the chorus, but that’s about as much as I care for on this, apart from Ed’s performance which is always surprisingly good at selling some nothingness. He sounds much more enthused than on his last, weedy performances from this decade, but that comes with a disco beat that uses vague Persian inflections to reflect its chorus – “Azizam” means “my darling” in Persian – but is still relatively non-descript, implementing basic ideas into a synthy nu-disco soundfont. Sure, it’s mixed very cleanly, the group vocals are layered brilliantly (I’ve always liked Ed’s sometimes unique vocal production) and the strings could work on a longer track where they have time to build swell, yet there’s something missing in the structure of the song, aborted too quickly without a bridge, with “Shape of You”-equivalent content (yet lacking the details). The co-producer, ILYA, was born in Iran, and the song was semi-celebratory of Persian New Year, so it may have been rushed in the writing phase to get there, but I also think he could have just been going for the short and easy hit. I respect him for reaching outside of his comfort zone to do so, but it’s not far enough and doesn’t lead to a product all too different, just a bit of a typical lead single from Ed. I always like his ballads more anyway.

Conclusion

I mean, it all falls out pretty damn easily, doesn’t it? You could predict them from a year away – Sleep Token gets Worst of the Week for “Caramel”, PinkPantheress gets Best of the Week for “Tonight”. This is an interesting batch of songs, but where they’d fall in my opinion is far from a surprise. I’m not crazy in either direction about the others, but the Honourable Mention can go to “End of the World” by Miley Cyrus whilst Rudimental and Khalid take “All I Know” to the Dishonourable Mention. As for what’s on the horizon… Myles Smith and Shaboozey have a track, Pulp could get the legacy sales, Bon Iver has an album and Ken Carson has what some could consider an album. Knowing my predictions and this show, we’ll see none of it end up on the chart next week and instead we get a Central Cee feature and a sleeper hit from a six-month-old album. As for now, thank you for reading, rest in peace to Clem Burke, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 05/04/2025 (Ariana Grande's eternal sunshine deluxe: brighter days ahead, Nemzzz, Central Cee)

For a third week, Alex Warren’s stuck to #1 with “Ordinary” on the UK Singles Chart. Meanwhile, Ariana Grande releases a deluxe set and more as I welcome you back to this “weathered” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, brief discussion of sex, misogyny

Rundown

As always, we start our episode with this week’s notable dropouts, those being songs that exit the UK top 75 (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid adieu to “FUFN (Fuck You for Now)” by JADE and “TOXIC” by Playboi Carti and Skepta – that was quick – as well as the Sleepy Hallow version of “ANXIETY” featuring Doechii, “Arm’s Length” by Sam Fender and big hits like “DENIAL IS A RIVER” by Doechii, “Guess” by Charli xcx with the remix featuring Billie Eilish and finally, “I Love You, I’m Sorry” by Gracie Abrams – good riddance to that one and I can’t say that outside of “Arm’s Length” that much of quality is being pushed out here.

As for what’s scooting up to fill in the space, we have our gains and returns, with that category including an intriguing return for “Sultans of Swing” by the Dire Straits at #41. My dad always said, like he would Status Quo, that Dire Straits were “much of a muchness”, and I can only ever think about that when I remember them, but I do think they deserve at least some more credit for being more ambitious and lyrically interesting than people… okay, well, my dad, gave them credit. I have no idea why the London blues rock band is back on the charts with their 1978 record about a jazz band, but it is being streamed – I always assume TikTok virality – and is now right outside the top 40. It first peaked at #8 back in 1979, and speaking of viral videos, the #1 was “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor – I hope I’m not the only one who remembers the CGI alien singing that song. The next week’s #1 was Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes”, so a lot of iconic 70s pop tracks were doing well during that time. Speaking of, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac returns to #75 for no reason. Then, of course, we have our gains, with “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” by Dasha at #67, “Beautiful People” by David Guetta and Sia at #64, “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY” by Calvin Harris at #63, “NOKIA” by Drake at #10 and unfortunately, sombr continuing to break out with “undressed” at #37 and “back to friends” at #35.

We can already see what’s changed up in our new entries with Ariana Grande at #5. The track “twilight zone” from her deluxe edition of eternal sunshine, subtitled brighter days ahead, debuts at #5 (the album’s at #3 on its respective chart), and we’ll have to discuss more of that later, but before, we still have a very stable top band, with Benson Boone bumping about boringly on “Beautiful Things” at #4, “Anxiety” by Doechii at #3, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #2 and of course, “Ordinary” at #1.

New Entries

#70 – “Shake it to the Max (FLY)” – MOLIY and Silent Addy

Produced by Silent Addy and Disco Neil

Okay, I’ll bite as always: what is any of this? So MOLIY is a Ghanaian singer who has actually charted before alongside fellow Ghanaian Amaarae on “SAD GIRLS LUV MONEY” (#29 in 2021). Since they broke out, I’ve been mostly hearing about Amaarae, thanks to her distinct high voice and building reputation as a bit of a critical darling – her album Fountain Baby didn’t cross my radar much but was met with rave reviews I distinctly remember seeing, and I did enjoy her briefcontributions to albums by Janelle Monáe and Stormzy. MOLIY has fell to the wayside – I’m sure the Kali Uchis remix didn’t help that – but she has returned to the charts alongside US-based Afrobashment producers Silent Addy and Disco Neil with a viral single released late last year. It definitely goes on the attack more than your typical Afrobeats production, with some distant, darker pianos and a murky, basic flute loop behind a gang vocal sample and more stilted drums that even come with a record scratch introduction. The whole instrumental seems to constantly float between embracing fizziness, goofy sound effects and overall jovial energy, and keeping a level of siren-led menace that adds slight edge but might not have helped with MOLIY’s delivery being so feathery, sometimes sing-songy, and out of place. Much of the content is flexing and dancing – I do like her little refrain where she whispers to the DJ. You’d think any of this would lead to a sweet build-up, but like a lot of Afro house before it in the past year, it just kind of fizzles out and for a track that really loves that one-bar flute sample, it doesn’t really work for me. It charted this week because of a more recent remix starring Jamaican singers Skilibeng and Shenseea, wherein Shenseea completely runs away with the track through a commanding presence that is much more fitting for this instrumental, whilst still incorporating the melodic ideas MOLIY set up in the original. That verse comes after Skilibeng though, whose off-beat, hypersexual murmuring is practically unlistenable. Martinique’s Kalash and Maureen also have a remix but ultimately, both remixes have their pros and cons – I do love the double-tracked back-and-forth Kalash trades with MOLIY on the chorus, but the mix on Maureen is slightly rough and distracts from what is an energetic but not focused performance. These are all star-studded with big dancehall names, but they don’t necessarily fix what are my personal issues with the song, so until a producer takes a jab at switching the arrangement and instrumentation around, neither the original nor its posse cut editions are going to convince me on this, though it’s still not bad.

#55 – “Bluest Flame” – Selena Gomez and benny blanco

Produced by benny blanco, Dylan Brady and Cashmere Cat

I feel like it will be relatively easy to keep this episode actually brief, because the acts we have lined up aren’t particularly interesting to dive into in these stages of their career. This is most obvious for Selena Gomez and benny blanco, currently Hollywood’s pop music power couple because Taylor and Kelce have been quiet. Obviously, both have prolific careers in the industry mostly from the 2010s, but considering the sheer amount of co-producers, the fact that Selena has worked with blanco before and that he doesn’t have a very obvious sound or approach to distinguish him currently, it makes a lot less sense to make a collaborative album even if the love and connection is there. Both Gomez and blanco have been on the same airy monogenre nothingness for nearly a decade, for better or for worse, and this album, given its attempt to trend-hop whilst also not giving any real effort to the styles it tries out, not treating them with any respect, before falling back on hazy slop, is one of the worst examples of it. Sure, some tracks are okay, I Said I Love You First is not entirely dead on arrival but it really does come off as disinterested in itself to a tedious degree. It debuted at #4 on the albums chart last week but it seems that the fans have picked up a favourite to be a sleeper hit, and as soon as you hear Selena sing “I just want to go all night, I just want to go insane” in the most robotic Auto-Tune possible with Dylan Brady co-production, you can tell who this is aping, I remember “pink diamond”. At least there’s a string swell in the intro that is pretty, though it goes nowhere until a basic electroclash beat pops in and the contrast that Charli xcx, who co-wrote the track and clearly provides backing vocals, could have pulled off through either her personality or a larger purpose to the track, flails here since it’s purely an exercise in hyperpop sound design. The one verse is basically a mumble demo showered in the same Auto-Tune Fraxiom would dress themselves up in, and the rest is just that chorus pummelled into your brain. At least Brady brings some good metallic percussion, it’s not an awful song, but structurally, it’s frustrating, it doesn’t seem to be able to keep the same momentum that Charli and Brady would on their major work together, with the shining moment for me being the breathy gasping over rubbery bass in the outro, that kind of comes out of nowhere after a long time repeating that chorus. I can respect the detail, this is the kind of production I usually like, but I don’t see a wider narrative or even much of a character at all to put it into context, and it definitely doesn’t stray enough from or take enough shots at pop convention to be in any way rebellious or parodic. It’s just a filter that can be turned on and off, and that cheapens those brief periods on the album where it really should be on… also it makes no sense to be on the album, the rest is basically 2020s-fied lounge music without the humanity.

#42 – “Up from the Bottom” – Linkin Park

Produced by Mike Shinoda

I am so exhausted of talking about the new “Linkin Park”. Emily Armstrong has a great voice, the circumstances surrounding her are iffy but she’s absolutely a good presence, just not with the same heart as Chester had, though much of that is due to the lyrics and melodies being their most uninspired yet. This is what I’ve said about nearly every Linkin Park song post-reunion, it is just a routine at this point, the same routine they’d actively stray from when they, well, tried. This is from the From Zero deluxe edition, it chugs along with a back-and-forth between Armstrong’s singing and Shinoda’s half-assed rapping, it’s mostly about feeling stuck with demons that get at least some family detail in the bridge but nothing much more than platitudes anywhere else. It ends too abruptly, it has clean production that goes for electronic elements and vocal editing, which could be cool if they went further with it like they did in the early 2010s but sounds awkward and restrained here, like they don’t want to do anything too threatening to the formula. The main difference is this one has what seem to be 808s in the bridge which do not go great with the turntables, but it’s such a brief moment that is otherwise so in tune with the same-old, same-old, that it scans as regular. That’s my main problem with Linkin Park post-reunion: it all scans as way too regular to the extent of not even sounding like Linkin Park anymore, just a high-budget tribute band making what they think “Linkin Park” sounds like, continuing to produce that at an alarming rate until that is what Linkin Park sounds like, and we forget all their experimentation and humanity that drove those big hits, massive albums and even the more regretful or less celebrated records alike. This just doesn’t need to exist, and it doesn’t sound like it wants to either.

#39 – “DILEMMA” – Nemzzz featuring Central Cee

Produced by ZEL and ProdByNathan

I have heard a few songs here and there from bubbling-under Manchester rapper Nemzzz but never been impressed with him specifically as a mic presence even if the beats are okay. Thanks to the Cench stimulus, this track from his latest tape RENT’S DUE (debuts at #6 on the albums chart) is Nemzzz’s first entry into the top 40, so did either bring their A-game here? Well, the loop of choice is a very conventional liquidy sample you’d hear in any drill beat, but there’s a much more interesting choice of percussion here, aligned up with “Sprinter” and beats of its kind that integrate lighter tropical percs into the more typical drill palette, adding much more of a groove but also running the risk of being a bit less sensible to mix, and with the strained buzzing sounds ZEL and Nathan have added here, it doesn’t sound too clean to say the least, kind of just a messy array of sounds, especially with Nemzzz being such a non-presence that he ends up actively distracting from the song. When he goes for a staccato, sing-songy flow in the chorus, he sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else, and even when just rapping bars like normal, he’s slightly slippery in a way that doesn’t fit with how tight drill beats can be… though not this one, which is just chaos. Sure, I liked the Brandy line, kind of a laugh on first listen, but both Nemzzz and the more competent-sounding Central Cee are rapping about deceptive women in such a gross, immature way. I honestly prefer when they teeter off-topic into gangster posturing because the content is a bit more stylised there, less ugly and possessive. I love the frantic end to Cench’s verse with all the percussive sounds he can string together in the intense scene he’s describing, the flow is great there and I wish there was more of that because it takes up space that this clanging beat is lacking whilst adding more reason for it to even sound like that in the first place on a lyrical level. Overall, there’s promise here but the focus is just all off.

#26 – “intro (end of the world)” – Ariana Grande

Produced by Ariana Grande, Shintaro Yasuda, Nick Lee and Aaron Paris

I have not listened to the new deluxe edition of Ariana Grande’s 2024 album eternal sunshine, largely because I did not care much for the original release, it being possibly her least adventurous project yet and not connecting with me thanks to sickly sweet production that sometimes shines on the more vibrant tracks but more often lands into plain paper territory. With that said, I really do like the introductory track, a short pondering on if her current relationship is right for her, questioning how much she’s valued and beating herself up a bit for just how much overthinking results from small interactions. I may not like the closer, “ordinary things”, but to have her grandmother answer the questions she’s asking here is a cute book-end, so why not ruin that by tacking on extra tracks and playing the intro twice? There are only six new tracks – five excluding this one – so we will run through half of them here, though with the same producers she was working with to make the incredibly clean sound the standard edition had, I wasn’t excited for the leftovers, though given a year or so has passed from the album release, these could be pretty different. The backing harmonies coalescing with the acoustics and strings for a really sweet swell is still great, though without the abrupt ending after her worrying that it’ll all end tomorrow, it does cheapen the original first half… as does the weird, wispy bridge she’s added that picks up some background noise amidst the breathy, close vocal takes that sound slightly pitch-shifted, clumsily overlapping the takes and having the vocal cadences spill into each other. It does make perfect sense to do that if you’re going to flip the intro on its head and turn it into a moment where she felt unloved and separated herself, but it’s still a pretty, wispy song that trades the fuller mix of the original for vague atmosphere by the end, and that confidence she’s trying to sell at the end can’t work. Conceptually, I do enjoy the twisting of the song, the answering of its questions in a different way than the original album, because that does speak to the subtitle of brighter days ahead, it’s just that it doesn’t sound very good to me at all, kind of a sloppy continuation.

#19 – “dandelion” – Ariana Grande

Produced by Ariana Grande, Max Martin and ILYA

“dandelion” is a bit of a left-field song, with Max Martin and ILYA taking some frenetic, cluttered production from Pharrell’s input on 2018’s Sweetener, fusing it with the detailed, echoed vocal takes and a deflated, bluesy sax (or trombone?) into a surprisingly empty-sounding song. Ari’s vocal parts take up so much space in the mix here thanks to the horns trailing off into the back behind the trap-adjacent drums and a real driving 808 that has all sorts of fuzz on it in the intro. This is more of a seductive track that is straightforward in its sexual content, the breathy take and gasps for air make this one pretty damn clear and though some of the harmonies may be too loud, it’s a weird mix overall that soups up the low-end into a slightly detached instrumental. By the time the bridge comes in, it’s warped into a reversed horn section trampled under skittering hats and snaps, and an incredibly overwhelming set of harmonies that come as a surprise after the bridge starts with what is basically just murmuring. I do wish there was a smokier, intimate element to this that does get taken away with the factorial trap-style beat, but the core elements of a good sensual jam are here, I just wish it chose either a much slower, subtle approach or a much more vibrant, high-energy ravenous approach, it finds itself in an odd middle spot here. That may be overall what the deluxe edition is going for, though, as we can see in both the intro, the shoddier, less idealised finish on this track and pretty much everything thematically about the next one.

#5 – “twilight zone” – Ariana Grande

Produced by Ariana Grande, Max Martin and ILYA

No, there is no real connection to The Twilight Zone – no references or parallels that I can see outside of the general use of the phrase as being in a surreal situation. There doesn’t need to be,  but with the twinkling 80s synths courtesy of Max Martin, you’d maybe hope that direction could be promising, yet this just ends up as another blocky pastiche á la “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)”. The delivery feels oddly deadpan for her in the first half, blending into the watery mix that the stock drums serve to disrupt. Given the recent Oscar nominations for Wicked, the reference to winning for Best Actor because she felt misled by her relationship is definitely a pointed lyric, but the song is mostly not pointed at all, though not curved at the edges either. It ends up in a unique space where it clearly still sounds like a demo but there’s so much complementary production with the subtle strings in the pre-chorus, the constant tampering with Ari’s vocal to add layers of reverb, echo and tuning that pan across, it’s a really fantastically mixed song for the awkward “pretending to be over you” content. In the pre-chorus, she’s tempted to be bitter and call his new girlfriend to tell her just how awful he was, but then doubts herself once again: “was I just not me at all?” is a pretty devastating question to ask about a relationship, and the entire song sees her face her identity in a confused yet very interesting way. It takes the softer sound palette she’s working with and uses it to be as messy, hypocritical and fighting against her instincts as possible, with the detailed vocal mix that she always has, thanks to doing a lot of her own vocal production, doing absolute wonders for the track thematically. That brief outro where it is only the different, echoing voices surrounding your ears, it really sounds, firstly, amazing, and secondly, just like the album cover looks. Given some of the lyrics on “warm”, which didn’t chart but I didn’t listen to, maybe I should do a full listen of these bonus tracks after finishing this episode, there is something there in her unique, wispy brand of copium present in that promise of better days ahead that I would actually like to hear more from. Consider me much more interested in this route of production and writing than I was for the more relatively standard R&B fare of the initial release. Surprisingly not mad at this being in the top five at all, it’s brilliant.

Conclusion

I have no clear idea on what to make of that week – half of it was Ariana Grande and a lot of it seemed to be in a similar vein of blending popular, more disparate sounds into a watery mix to some clumsy effect. Best of the Week goes to Ariana Grande for “twilight zone”, which I surprisingly love, whilst Linkin Park clearly take the Worst of the Week for “Up from the Bottom”. Everything else is just too cluttered in the mid-range to make much of an impression for me quality-wise but I definitely did underestimate how interesting this week could end up being, even if I’m not too big a fan of the actual songs on display. As for what’s on the horizon, an array of singles from Ed Sheeran, PinkPantheress, Wet Leg, Miley Cyrus, it could get interesting, and Hell, maybe Black Country, New Road pick up some steam so the week gets REALLY interesting. For now, thank you for reading, rest in peace to Young Scooter and Terry Manning, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 29/03/2025 (sombr)

Well, if it happens once, it’s a miracle, if it happens twice, it’s typical: it’s now quite “Ordinary” for Alex Warren to sit on top of the UK Singles Chart, so welcome back to this “extraordinary” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: languages, references to sex and toxic relationships

Rundown

As always, we start the episode off with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (the region I cover on this blog) after five weeks there or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid adieu to, unfortunately, a batch of good to great songs with “Born Again” by LISA featuring Doja Cat and RAYE, “Cry for Me” by The Weeknd, “CRG” by Central Cee featuring Dave and “Headlock” by Imogen Heap… as well as “Raving in the Studio” by Aitch and Bou and “It’s ok I’m ok” by Tate McRae, which might just be a terrible enough combination to make up for those fallen soldiers.

As for what’s replacing it, “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen returns to the chart yet again at #74, alongside “Austin (Boots Stop Workin’)” by Dasha at #73 and “Feel It” by d4vd at #54 for some reason. It should tell you just the kind of week this is when our notable gains start with “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers and the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” at #67 and #66, then – deep breaths – there’s “Somedays” by Sonny Fodera, Jazzy and D.O.D at #57, “Here in Your Arms” by Nathan Dawe and Abi Flynn at #55, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan at #53, “like JENNIE” by JENNIE at #49, “Too Sweet” by Hozier at #47 and “Call Me When You Break Up” by Selena Gomez, benny blanco and Gracie Abrams at #46 thanks to the first two’s waste of time album release (I Said I Love You First debuts at #4 on the albums chart). That is then followed by “Stargazing” by Myles Smith at #45, Disturbed’s “The Sound of Silence” cover at #44, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey at #42, “It isn’t Perfect but it Might Be” by Olivia Dean at #40, “Tell Me” by Sonny Fodera and Clementine Douglas at #39, “The Door” by Teddy Swims at #37, “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez at #33, “BIRDS OF A FEATHER” by Billie Eilish at #30, “The Days” by Chrystal at #27, “MUTT” by Leon Thomas all the way up to #26 thanks to a “CB REMIX” (take a guess), “Burning Down” by Alex Warren at #23, “Dark Thoughts” by Lil Tecca at #20, “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae at #19, “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey at #14, “NOKIA” by Drake at #12 and a new peak for Warren’s “Carry You Home” at #10.

Chappell Roan’s “The Giver”, a debut from last week, tips off our top five at #5, followed by usual suspects like Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” at #4, Doechii’s “Anxiety” at #3, Roan’s own “Pink Pony Club” rebounding to #2 and of course, the rather ordinary. Speaking of ordinary, we have four new songs, you know the routine.

New Entries

#65 – “undressed” – sombr

Produced by sombr and Tony Berg

Two of our debuts this week come from the same relative unknown, “sombr”, and yes, I’ll have to bite: who the Hell is sombr, and why does he have two debuts this week, one being the highest? Well, to answer the second question: slow week. Now for the first, sombr is Shane Boose, a young American singer-songwriter active since at least 2021 who has picked up serious viral traction with over 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify, but until now, they haven’t been concentrated enough on one track to push for that chart hit… and they still aren’t, we have two, but this one is being pushed, was released last week, probably propelled his bubbling song up through residue streams. We’ll look at that later on but for now, “undressed” doesn’t particularly strike me as anything. It’s got a basic but pretty infectious bassline in the dusty indie rock groove that would come off really programmed (probably is) if not for a cute enough attention to detail by placing in additional guitar strumming and pleasant vocal harmonies, almost in a doo-wop style especially with the rhythm and classic soul guitar licks. It’s a breakup song where he whines about how he just can’t get over this girl, and there’s just nothing worse than suffering as she moves on quicker than you can… but the scenario is really contrived in the second verse, the chorus has a clunky main conceit – “I don’t want to get undressed for a new person all over again” – and that bridge goes into kind of icky territory, in my opinion. “I don’t want the children of another man to have the eyes of the girl that I won’t forget” – sure, obsessive is the point but bringing up genetic inheritance and the prospect of a new family she has with this guy is misguided at best and just creepy, gross entitlement at worst. The song’s about as smoky and dull as the kind of person who would truly be this obsessed would come off explaining this to you so no, terrible first impression.

#56 – “MONA LISA” – j-hope

Produced by Blake Slatkin, Cashmere Cat and MISOGI

Very quickly after his team-up with Miguel, BTS star j-hope has returned to the chart with “MONA LISA” and… oh, my God, this is terrible too. He’s going for a bit of a 90s R&B groove and he almost gets there with the Neptunes four-count and pianos, but the more modern-sounding percussion is particularly flat, kind of like a failed Tommy Richman type beat. The main problem here is j-hope though, whose weedy nasal harmonies are utterly sexless, his sing-rapping is drenched in so much Auto-Tune and filtering that when the lines end abruptly and leave awkward dead space where I think a rhyme should probably be, it sounds really awkward, like he’s been cut off manually by the engineer. There’s a single verse, it’s what ChatGPT would produce if you fed it any modern pop-rap song about girls, the pre-chorus resorts to stuttering, and the content is ridiculously substanceless: “I like my girls pretty”? Really now? I was assuming that superstar singer j-hope preferred to crave sex from women he finds deeply unattractive. “Pretty, so fine, one plus the nine” – it’s a contrived way of saying she’s a 10/10, perfect-picture painting of a woman, but it sounds childlike when he phrases it like a counting game. I suppose the beat is fine, it’s a bit catchier and more of a shiny, colourful production that you can expect from BTS members, but you can also sadly expect gutlessness and that’s exactly what we have here. And no, the Afropop version isn’t any better, don’t be ridiculous.

#50 – “Just Us” – Jack Harlow featuring Doja Cat

Produced by Hollywood Cole, Tay Keith, Angel Lopez, Ojivolta and Dylan Graham

Jack Harlow always has so many producers and I’ve never gathered what is warranted about his content, style or even vision to have that many people around his instrumentals. The songs don’t all smash either, evidently, the royalties have to be ridiculous, this can’t be financially sustainable, Jackman. Anyway, this is one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard. I usually love a lowkey R&B sample under some Atlanta bass percussion, but there’s no atmosphere or buildup to this one at all, using a particularly awkward vocal sample of TheOwnlyHope that feels more like random fragments clashing with the beat, and with the bass coming in so early, the clicky drums being so stale, it’s an ugly slush of loops more than anything. This could still work, you just need character, and Jack Harlow is murmuring lowly some of the worst lyrics possible, and I was genuinely surprised to find out that this was written! He probably doesn’t mean literally, maybe not even on his phone, but rappers are very quick to say that they freestyled a big hit, so there’s an insecurity there when Mr. Harlow discusses the production of the song with producers Tay Keith, Hollywood Cole and Angel Lopez. He claims that they were producing as he was writing, and he had his lyrics finished before the beat was finished, which is supposed to be impressive, but it actually reveals the embarrassing idea that he had the time to flesh out his short verse or think any deeper about that chorus, add some ad-libs or any spirited energy to make the flow boring… and this is the best he could do, or at least the most effort he chose to put in. Jackman, your last full album had a track about how it was unfair that critics claimed your success was in large part because of you being a white rapper, and needing to put less effort in. Thankfully, Playboi Carti released an album recently so the low-effort Olympics in modern rap are competitive, but “she clutch-clutchin’ my huh, I’m adjusting like huh, she husky like mush-mush in this bitch” is not something you keep in the final release if you want to prove you’re not lazy and relying on socioeconomic privilege to get you where you are.

The malformed verse is awkward, the “in this bitch” refrain rhyme scheme is lazy, and Doja Cat completely obliterates him with way more energy, using similar flows but going for way longer and actually going into some detail about the rendezvous, some vague attempts at wordplay, memorable couplets comparing his marshmallows to her black coffee and the blue frosty (okay, this is all gross). There are some cute references to Pac-Man and Omarion because, sure, and she actually recontextualises the lazy, cheap “huh” repetition from Harlow’s chorus into something more clever, using it as a question, censorship and a representation of the moaning, it’s not just for the flow, it’s called effort. There’s even a bit of a subtle recurring conceit of heat, cooking and freezing that fits the song’s content perfectly, and a mention of Jack’s name being Jackman which is great because I find that funny too, though he compares him to a jackrabbit… well, if this song’s accurate, you’re better off going for one, at least the toys don’t rap back to you. Doja takes such control of the song that it doesn’t save it but almost makes it worse, wasting a talent on boring production and an awful performance from Jack who doesn’t even attempt to go for the back-and-forth but does sloppily tack on a bunch of old R&B references (about as corny as low-tier Drake bars) to the end. My headcanon is that he heard the “Ice Box” line and went back into the booth to chase some references so that he could pretend Doja had more to do with the song other than demolishing the need for his presence on it at all, and in this rush, came up with some of the most trite attempts at artist-based punchlines since, again, Drake, whom Jackman is clearly aping the whole time here. Given how male-female rap and R&B duets are so common and such a typical trope, it is somewhat impressive to see it done this terribly, crown this as one of the worst. What an embarrassment. Doja would run off scot-free from that embarrassment if she hadn’t even considered the idea of “sex song with Jack Harlow”; I watched the video even and that also seemed awkward, filled with cameos from people I’m supposed to know about and weird shots in this set that looks really expensive, hence why they probably don’t cut to too many else. They already blew the budget for a barely top 50 hit on cameos and Jack Harlow bread-trimmers.

#43 – “back to friends” – sombr

Produced by sombr

Welp, this is a track from the real tail-end of last year, book-ending our episode with another sombr song, his viral breakout hit, this time self-produced without the help of prolific executive, session musician and recently, Phoebe Bridgers producer, Tony Berg. Given how short and worthy of side-eyeing the newer, professionally-pushed single was, I didn’t have high expectations, though part of me thought that maybe his sound had just been watered-down. That is true to an extent, Berg got rid of the obnoxious distorted echo effect that turns his already obnoxious vocal tone into a yelp… and I’ve never heard yelping sound more careless and phoned-in. The content is very similar, even in structure, and there’s a very similar set of harmonies and grey indie rock guitars, except this time with a certain 80s pop bombast. Those effects try and obfuscate the terrible post-breakup content but largely fail – my side-eye became eye-rolling at the bridge about “the Devil in [her] eyes” and all of the lies she supposedly told him because she wanted to just be friends. Sure, the verses paint some intimacy there, but how did it go so wrong? Why so quickly? What lies did she actually sell you? Without any of this detail, it’s a context-less moaning sesh about a woman quietly and peacefully moving on, much like the last one. I assume they have to be about the same woman, right? Maybe if you combine the two lyrically, there’d be some substance, but more likely, it’d just show you a before and after, both with contrived writing and guilt-tripping that’s insufferable coming from anybody, let alone someone as faceless and one-note as this guy seems to be. If this is our first big breakout star of 2025… well, sombr’s year will be a sombre year for me. Sorry, I couldn’t go the episode without doing some spin on that.

Conclusion

Well, that was just a four-track playlist of lazy songs about women by young guys who I shouldn’t expect to know better. What a terrible batch of songs, I was actually laughing by the end because of just how lacking in quality all of this was, and how remarkably similar a lot of it was honestly, it’s all R&B-adjacent too, at least in the singing style with sombr. Erm, j-hope probably has the best song here – I think the “band version” is actually somewhat okay with the guitar-led outro – so I suppose “MONA LISA” gets Best of the Week. Worst of the Week goes to Jack Harlow for “Just Us”, pick a sombr song for the Dishonourable Mention. Expect Ariana Grande next week, maybe Kesha and hopefully a song that’s any fucking good. Thank you for reading, long live Cola Boyy, and I’ll see you next week!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 22/03/2025 (Playboi Carti is the MUSIC, Chappell Roan is "The Giver", Sleep Token Emerge + The Weeknd, Skepta, JADE, Lil Tecca)

Alex Warren now has reached a quite extraordinary feat with “Ordinary” reaching #1 on the UK Singles Chart, his first to ever do so (not surprisingly, he first charted last year). Meanwhile, Carti gets his first #1 over on the albums chart, and, well… everything else happened too. Strap in, folks, welcome back to the “busy” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

content warning: language, references to sex, emotional trauma and the French

Rundown

As always, we start the episode with our notable dropouts, those being songs exiting the UK Top 75 (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, given how so much is coming in, we say goodbye to quite a few tracks, those being “ExtraL” by JENNIE featuring Doechii, “Little Bit Closer” by Sam Fender, “GBP” by Central Cee featuring 21 Savage, “30 for 30” and “BMF” by SZA, the former with Kendrick Lamar, “Angel of My Dreams” by JADE and “Red Wine Supernova” by Chappell Roan (more on them later), “WILDFLOWER” by Billie Eilish and, once again, “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen.

We have a sole return on the chart this week with Adele’s 2007 track “Hometown Glory”, a piano ballad she wrote about her upbringing in London and how connected and comfortable she feels there. Lyrically, I think the second verse is underwritten, but outside of that, it’s a brilliantly, oddly tense song that reflects the environment in which she made it – after talking with her mother about the potential of her leaving for university. It has also been famously used in UK soap operas when a major character dies. Thanks to TikTok, it’s back after initially reaching a peak of #19 in 2008 – the similarly brilliant “Dance wiv Me” by Dizzee Rascal, Calvin Harris (more on him later) and Chrome was #1 that week. As for the rest of our gains, there are boosts for “We Hug Now” by Sydney Rose at #50, “Running Around” by Ely Oaks at #40, “Show Me Love” by WizTheMc and bees & honey at #38 (interesting gains for relatively new artists this week) and “Burning Down” by Alex Warren at #28.

Now we have our top five, which has shook up quite a bit but still starts with Benson bloody Boone and his “Beautiful Things”, before last week’s #1, Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” is taken down all the way to #4, largely thanks to Doechii’s “Anxiety” beating it to #3 and Roan’s own new track, “The Giver”, cannibalising it at #2. We know that Mr. Warren is at #1 of course, so what’s of interest under that? Well, a lot, mostly by pretty massive artists and sometimes kind of confusing. Let’s take a look.

New Entries

#71 – “Relationships” – HAIM

Produced by Rostam Batmanglij, Danielle Haim and Buddy Ross

I’ve yet to listen to a full HAIM album, at least that I can remember, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I had and well, couldn’t remember. Outside of featured songs where they play a duet role with Taylor Swift or Kid Cudi, I could never really resonate with the laidback California pop rock – I was about to write that they “struck me as…” something but in reality, they’ve never struck me, never sparked any interest. I would like the breakbeat reminiscent of early hip-hop, especially with the scratching, but they do a processed half-rap over it in the intro that just sounds like they’re mocking their own influences, which turns the playfulness you could hear from the stray samples elsewhere in the song into a mopey apathy. That same apathy is probably behind the sister trio’s defeated chorus about relationships, being fed up with maintaining them and, well, I understand that at least, there is a lot of emotional labour involved there. This song sounds like how drained that can make you, for better or for worse. Also, they swear like they just found out what swearing was last week but don’t know exactly why or how to use it so drop it in casually like a “sentence enhancer”. I mean, I swear like a sailor when I’m tired and confused, so maybe I can resonate with that even… but that’s me falling into the trap of the song, right? I relate to it, so I must find some value in it, yet I can’t, it just still doesn’t strike me. The feathery vocal doesn’t help me understand HAIM much as humans, the bridge briefly teases the idea of generational trauma that could be interesting but goes nowhere, and the instrumental chugs along lackadaisically. I like to go on early-morning walks, when few people are out and I can stroll the streets with the sun in my step because it damn sure hasn’t risen to the sky yet, and this makes times where I have to go out, have to walk somewhere for routine’s purpose, feel so tedious. That afternoon walk, where it’s tiring to step about and make vague communication with strangers who are perceiving you as much as you are them, that’s how this song feels. I don’t like that feeling.

#68 – “Beautiful People” – David Guetta and Sia

Produced by David Guetta, Stargate and Timofey Reznikov

Giving a negative review to this song feels too easy, too obvious. Years after their relevance has solidly started to fate, David Guetta places a sample of a Sia demo leaked in 2013 of the same name that Wiz Khalifa would sample two years later, over some basic future house instrumental that reeks of laziness with a rote structure, stock percussion sounds and a synth lead that could have been used in a mid-level house hit for any of the past two decades. Listening to Sia’s voice and how the vocal has been awkwardly processed at times to cut abruptly and rhythmically trip over itself, though still being really loud over a bizarrely empty “festival” ambiance, before an uninspired drop, it’s like putting a 20-year-old dog down and hearing it whimper. And it’s Wiz Khalifa’s dog! This is depressing, and the content here isn’t much at all either, they’re basically non-lyrics – there are some motivational elements, some mentions of the high-life that probably could have been turned into social commentary later on, but it’s not only a demo, but a demo of an EDM song so there’s really guaranteed to be nothing concrete here. It would have made me sad if I didn’t hear the casso remix immediately after that adds this awkward fuzzy bass and builds into a ludicrous drop, I have no idea what’s going on there. The original song is pretty representative of the lazy carelessness that has inadvertently become part of both acts’ brand, and the casso version is hilarious, but neither are worth anyone’s time.

#46 – “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY” – Calvin Harris

Produced by Calvin Harris

It has been a while since Scottish DJ Calvin Harris hit the charts with a song featuring his own vocals prominently. I am sure there have been more minor tracks in between, or even a big hit I completely forgot (Hell, seems like I did with his vocal on #4 hit “My Way” from 2016) but the latest I remembered at first was his 2014 #1 “Summer” and the few times that he does hit the mic himself, it doesn’t seem to be just as successful – he knows that’s not his skillset, he often processes them to a ridiculous extent. That doesn’t prevent his production from being impressive or for the songs to be catchy though, and my interest was piqued by a song solely written, produced and performed by Mr. Harris. It seems like, after witnessing how well country and folk have infused the pop of today, he’s taken a leaf out of the late Avicii’s “Hey Brother” and gone for a combination of jangling country acoustics (that sound very inorganic and weedy, especially with how they’re looped) and festival-ready four-on-the-floor. Harris’ vocal is evidently not impressive at all, he doesn’t have much of a melodic idea to work with anyway, especially in the verses, and the mix is uncharacteristically bad for him: all the early 2010s swooshing of this sound is on full display, with the harmonica drowning out everything in the drop, including cascading house percussion and a synth bass that eventually transforms the song into at least something with a groove. That groove, of course, you can barely hear under what may be the fakest, most plastic-sounding harmonica sound – he even replaces the last few notes of the harmonica loop with plucky synths occasionally and it works surprisingly well because of how processed it already is, though I’d prefer that idea in a better song that deserves the glitchier elements. “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY” is a mess, what I can’t fully figure out is if it’s gleeful experimentation – his vocal has always sounded earnest, and he must have liked that melody to ram it into our skulls in the drop – or just silly, cash-grab opportunism. Whatever the motives may be, this is a risky swing and a solid miss for me. I play the harmonica, when it sounds this awful, it feels like I’m being personally insulted, Mr. Harris.

#30 – “Dark Thoughts” – Lil Tecca

Produced by Folie’s and Lucas Scharff

Speaking of personal insults, Lil Tecca is in the top 40. The New York rapper had a big hit when he was a fresh-faced auto-crooner in 2019 with “Ransom” and he’s been bubbling under ever since, never quite able to replicate that success as he was a product of trap peaking anyway, a weird time where that bubblegum version of rap could still be big without fully staling into cheese. He still has been at it, occasionally charting in the US especially and having some catchy enough pop-rap tracks but nothing that has caught on in the same warbling way his first hit did, until he remixed his producers’ songs for a surprisingly easy and immediate top 40 hit, his first since “Ransom”. Yes, I mean producers plural – this beat was originally released by Lucas Scharff as “FLY” in 2023, as a Neptunes type beat on YouTube, and it definitely has that 2000s R&B bounce, reminding me of say, Snoop Dogg’s “Beautiful”. It’s a great beat, if non-descript, and self-declared “French popstar” Folie’s bought it for use in his song “Nosleeve” in 2024. I actually think this song is pretty good. It wasn’t a massive streaming hit but has some decent numbers, probably thanks to just how infectious that beat is but also Folie’s himself, whose falsetto chorus may not sound the most technically proficient but is really catchy and charming, as he uses the verses to blend between English and French. I don’t know what it is about the French language, but it leads to a lot of throaty-sounding raps that give a grit to him opposite the thin attempts at singing. To be fair to Tecca, he didn’t just translate the song as he very easily could have done for a cheap, easy hit, he does go for a different set of flows, though not too different. Hell, he actually sounds way worse on this beat than Folie’s – his vocal is mixed too loudly with obnoxious levels of processing that mean it echoes all over the dead space, not allowing for much in the way of bounce that Folie’s left space for. He doesn’t go for any interesting vocal deliveries, the verse is tiny and now that it’s all in English, I can really tell how void of lyrical substance this is. I am interested in Folie’s now, I wonder if all of his music is in the same throwback style, so I can thank Tecca for that, but for a rapper who has always focused on the production side, having made beats for other artists and always having his songs sound as clean as possible, this is remarkably lazy in that department and pretty much all the others.

#25 – “FUFN (Fuck You for Now)” – JADE

Produced by LOSTBOY and Dave Hamelin

Jade Thirlwall of Little Mix finally lands that second top 40 hit after months of trying to capture the success of her solo debut, “Angel of My Dreams”, which was ironically pushed out of the top 75 this week, and ignoring the Eamon and Frankee flashbacks I get from a title like that (read up on those early 2000s R&B one-hit wonders on the UK charts, it was weird), I suppose something about this song in particular let it launch this high, perhaps the brashness of its volatile post-argument chorus asking her partner to leave her alone for now, though she lacks much detail in describing anything he did in particular. I’m not saying it’s necessary but the song ends up playing the role of JADE as unconsolable and just seeing red, without giving much backstory, it ends up not hitting nearly as solidly as it could, the anger doesn’t feel too righteous. Perhaps it’s the sound of the song that… goes for probably the worst option for this kind of content matter, breathy falsetto multi-tracking, swooshing waves of pads and generic electropop drums that more indent the mix than empower them. Perhaps it’s the chorus that… goes for an anthemic Lady Gaga style, despite much more well-constructed Lady Gaga songs existing from her album last week, and then trips over its own lyrics instead, becoming more of an ignorable block of noise than anything really furious. No malformed bridge can save that, even that string swell, it just ends up ringing into nothing for me, which is frustrating because I like the idea of the song’s content, there’s something there with the synthy melodrama and JADE is a great vocalist, it just fails to fully capture that feeling because it refuses to face more grounded or intense realities of how that overwhelming anger channels itself. It’s not like it doesn’t go far enough, more so that it circles right back into the other direction. Disappointing, for sure, but I’ve come to expect that from JADE over the past few months.

#21 – “TOXIC” – Playboi Carti and Skepta

Produced by Cardo, Dez Wright, Mu Lean and Stoopid Lou

Playboi Carti’s MUSIC is exactly what it says it is – music – and it is difficult to exactly place what else it is. After five weeks of mysterious teasing, mysterious images of different outfits, mysterious appearances on livestreams and mysterious ditching of his children, the mysterious man releases a decidedly not mysterious album: 30 barely-mixed tracks released after hours of telling Kai Cenat that it would be coming “any minute now”, with little in the way of substance, structure or even theme outside of vapid flexing, sex, drugs and violence. Whole Lotta Red went for a distinct character, this is a confused mixtape-esque release that goes for a strategy of overwhelming the listener with so much that you can’t really tackle it from the approach you would any normal record.

The album released at a later, non-standard time without the metadata even showing up on the Spotify credits, any given song was completely blank outside of the track file itself, its title, Carti’s name and an explicit marker. Since then, it allegedly has had mixing improvements, its features have been added to the titles and several music videos have been released, with digital editions that contain extra songs from his 2023-24 single releases tacked on the end. The more the label does to make this album a coherent experience or sensible release, the less it works because polishing this album seems to be a futile task. It’s definitely one of the stranger releases to be this successful but the truth of the matter may just be that the more questions you can ask about the album, the more appeal it’ll have to not just his core fans who buy into the bizarro alternate reality Carti lives in, but the general audiences being introduced to more underground sounds Carti’s influenced by.

This is not some avant-garde, inaccessible piece of experimental art – Hell, there’s probably more effort involved in listening to it than there was making it – but it’s understandably polarising thanks to some genuinely weird moments the entire runtime with Carti’s voice inflections, off-key melodies, clipping bass and, I’m impressed I’ve yet to mention it, DJ Swamp Izzo yelling over damn near every track with gunshot effects and snare rolls on his soundboard. As for my personal opinion… well, it depends, it’s been a week and I’ve listened to it a few times all the way through, and when I’m in the mood for it, it works a charm, it’s a reckless collection of mindless bangers and odes to pure, devilish decadence. When I’m not, it’s lazy slop with no effort placed into constructing functional songs. Whatever it is, it is, undoubtedly, MUSIC. Except “OPM BABI”, I am not actually sure if that legally counts as music.

“CRUSH” definitely does, it’s one of the more significant and complete ideas on the record though how far it still strays from being a full song is its most frustrating aspect considering the idea here is great: a sex song that constantly edges you without any valuable pay-off, featuring some of the most minimal, pitch-shifted and borderline unrecognisable Travis Scott backing vocals ever outside of a few “STRAIGHT UP!” ad-libs. The cinematic hype towards a climax that never comes fits perfectly with the transactional promise of the “shawty” who is “gon’ let [Carti] crush”. There’s honestly a fair bit I love with this track and did on even my first listen – the way the panning synth bloops land on the lead melody is smooth and straight out of a Sega Genesis, and the piling up of ad-libs into a cacophony is a fascinating choice, even if the sound of Carti’s chains clinging when he whistles into the mic demonstrates an issue with how his vocals were recorded all over the album. The choir vocal that comes in makes the promise of sex sound more like Travis trying to manifest it, especially over the rapid-fire hi-hats failing to find a groove over the guitars crushed behind them, and especially when he interrupts them by begging in a baby voice to “let [him] fucks”. The song is a constant intro but when the 808s finally come in, they feel delayed especially with the metallic, feedback-sounding snare that keeps the drums outside of a solid rhythm – even when they feel “complete”, this is brief and a chugging guitar comes in with such an ugly one-note loop that the beat never feels “right”. Sadly, the only real verse on the track has Carti say he’s “hitting that bitch like a deer”. What?! It doesn’t get better either, with him giving up flow-wise and rhyming the N-word with itself, before the F1LTHY producer tag comes in at a seemingly random time, same with Swamp Izzo’s obnoxious snare rolls, it seems like trolling. That’s where the track devolves for me: it fails to find a footing, that’s okay, in fact, it makes the song unique, but it runs out of tricks and probably didn’t need a real verse… or maybe Travis, who hasn’t impressed me recently but was great on this album, could have laid down some bars instead of murmuring like a rabbit the whole song. Now what does any of that have to do with “TOXIC” with Skepta? Nothing. Nothing at all, I just wrote these Carti reviews the day before under the impression that “CRUSH” would be the one charting and I got flash-banged with Skepta instead, and whilst I still like parts of “TOXIC”, it’s not nearly as interesting so I’m not letting this go to waste. “CRUSH” is still a big song, it could replace “TOXIC” next week, who knows? I actually have next to nothing to say about this track, I’m kind of glad the circumstances turned out like this – Carti does a lazy Future impression then Skepta renegades the track primarily because he uses actual words. The UK-US references are cheesy but I like the “community service” line and he has a decent presence on the track – of course, I like Skepta, I like his little reference to “JumpOutTheHouse” where he uses Carti’s original inflection, it’s a menacing trap beat but not much else.

God, there’s a lot I could say about a more interesting track like “MUNYUN” or “CHARGE DEM HOES A FEE” or “FINE SHIT” or “POP OUT”, and that’s not even prodding the hornet’s nest of Kendrick’s contributions or whatever the Hell is going on in the album’s last third. If someone could tell me what’s going on in “LIKE WEEZY”, “TWIN TRIM” or “HBA”, I’d appreciate it but still not know what to make of it. Thankfully, we only have three songs as is allowed by the Official Charts Company, so I’ll try to keep it brief for the next two. Keyword is try. But first, Sleep Token.

#17 – “Emergence” – Sleep Token

Produced by Carl Brown

Do you roll with the waves? Sigh, I don’t have much goodwill for anonymous London metal band Sleep Token, whose 2023 album Take Me Back to Eden was so astonishingly terrible that I ended up enjoying the Auto-Tuned ballad “DYWTYLM” placed randomly amidst the dirge more than anything that resembled metal. Is that a genuine guilty pleasure? Is that a show of the underlying songwriting capability of frontman “Vessel”? Or do I just find the song hilarious in the same vein as Wolfmother’s “High on My Own Supply”? Probably a mix of all of the above but mostly the last. I knew Sleep Token were a lore-heavy band with a strong fanbase that you really have to “get”, kind of the twenty one pilots of modern metal, but I didn’t expect they had the streams and sales in them for a top 20 debut (even though I’d predict it crashes next week). There are few rock bands, let alone metal bands, who can reach the top 40, it’s pretty much just Bring Me the Horizon who consistently get there – no, I’m not counting that Linkin Park revival as metal.

So if we’re going to introduce Sleep Token of all bands to the UK charts, and not bring back Ghost who also released a new single recently, I suppose I’ll have to entertain that idea to some extent and well, I don’t know why it starts like a Lewis Capaldi song with dirthy pianos and a smoky voice singing a stock melody, followed by an acoustic guitar even, but at least there’s some more atmosphere with the heavy reverb and echo that brings Vessel’s vocal out in the chorus, enveloping the mix. The fan-written Genius annotations hint towards deeper meanings I am not even going to touch considering the characters that seem to be involved. Like twenty one pilots or Gorillaz, there is definitely a level of understanding you can reach without diving into all of that lore, and it’s actually a somewhat simple song in that regard about prompting someone to come out of their shell… mostly so they can embrace the vocalist since they’re the only one who can quell his woes, it’s all kind of weird and patronising honestly, especially with the pitched-down mantra “go ahead and wrap your arms around me”, which plays until the electric guitars finally start winding in. Then he starts rapping over a dated-sounding dubstep-adjacent beat, the bass and snares really sticking out as feeling kind of untextured and awkward in the mix despite an obvious attempt at making them really fuzzy, it all sounds at odds with each other and seemingly by mistake given how cinematic the song tries to be. We’ve got some beeping like a heartbeat but little in the way of intensity, just extra swell that kills time until yet another “drop” that doesn’t hit nearly as well because he’s still awkwardly rapping, bizarrely quietly, over some heavy guitars just dropped into the mix clunkily. There’s “so much” to this song but also so little that actually works. Even in Bring Me the Horizon’s worst songs, it won’t sound as mismatched and ugly as this, and build-ups may feel worth it – here, we get the slow, crashing drum beat and guitars that should sound really cathartic after a period with no build-up, just more moaning over a vaguely atmospheric soundscape, it’s like a slowcore song that refuses to build up to something special at the end, instead building to different ideas that it rejects and tries again at later. There’s a nice enough sax solo after a metal chorus ends and there is no reason why it is here, it doesn’t feel thematically purposeful, it fades out with the rest of the song and acts as an outro, and it comes so soon after a louder passage cuts off but nothing in the lyrics or in the transition gives way to it, it’s just there because hey, ideas are cool, let’s add all the ideas. This isn’t progressive metal, this is giving up while you’re ahead metal. Like everything I’ve heard from Sleep Token, it’s a waste of time, I’m sorry because I know there are massive fans of this band and I can see an alternate universe where I like these guys – Hell, I love Avenged Sevenfold’s similarly bullshit prog-metal album the same year – yet this is another frustratingly discombobulated effort from them in my opinion, and the slow pace of it extends that into insufferable territory.

Congratulations on breaking the charts, Sleep Token, I don’t see how you can stick to them, and you probably don’t want to. Also, editor's note: I had to split this review not because I naturally made a new paragraph there, but because Tumblr has a limit for how many characters are in one paragraph. I'm blaming Sleep Token for this.

#10 – “RATHER LIE” – Playboi Carti* and The Weeknd

Produced by F1LTHY, Ojivolta, Twisco, Ramzoid and MIKE DEAN

Okay, so, firstly, I like this song, and for pretty obvious reasons. The Weeknd’s vocal is great, even if under-implemented, and the pads used remind me of cloudier synths and vocal samples Carti would find himself on around 2017, with harder F1LTHY drums this time around and a decent spectacle overall – sure, it’s emptier than it should be, but it’s not as much of a dirge as “Timeless”, it doesn’t have lyrics as despicable, and it makes use of a brighter palette. Carti does sound like he did on “Timeless”, however, and that’s really the main debate surrounding this song: is Carti even on it? The answer is, objectively, yes – both Carti and DJ Swamp Izzo (for some reason) provide ad-libs throughout the track. The main Carti vocal, however, doesn’t exactly sound like him. A Mr. Keith Lawson has been credited as a writer on sites like Genius (seemingly not anymore) and he worked on providing an artificial intelligence (AI) reference vocal for “Timeless” where his original vocals were ran through a filter to sound like Carti, we have proof that parts of that reference were used in the official release. Lawson, whose solo music does show resemblance, is much more of a singer than Carti and this song shows him singing oddly well compared to the kind of strained notes he otherwise hits, though with a muffled distorted vocal that is mixed much differently and a lot quieter than the rest of Carti’s vocals on the album – you can’t hear the drums bleeding into the audio thanks to his headphones, or his chains clinging, a weird rasp that clips the mic, or any kind of outside noise that Carti’s terribly-recorded vocals often do, rarely even a human-sounding breath (though covering it in real ad-libs was a smart way to cover it up). The way the lines end is abrupt and robotic, the vocal tones switch up in a staccato, gimmicky way that feels like an imitation of Carti’s shifting vocal style instead of how he actually deploys it (which is more random and not based on the lyrics, usually not in the middle of lines). There’s no confirmation yet, but I’ve played with AI vocal filters, I know how it can sound, we’ve also heard the “Timeless” reference – there’s too much smoke for there not to be a hint of fire, and it sucks because the track itself is fire too! Carti doesn’t really write and construct songs like this, but the verses are great, they’re on topic for once, and contain some dynamic melodic ideas that are fun to sing along to… but they just don’t feel like him – even if you check the track after, “FINE SHIT” (which is alleged to also contain AI vocals, but it’s definitely less prominent if so), or really any of his other deranged freestyles on this album that he calls songs, this isn’t how he works in the studio. Outside of some more ad-lib-heavy passages, the verses here sound written and focused, playing with Carti’s voice in a more conscious way that he doesn’t really do, even if I’d prefer he did! I don’t think I’m ridiculous for wanting technological advances to be used more cleverly in art than just to masquerade a lesser-paid, lesser-known artist as the big name without the credited artist doing any of the work. For my money, I think it’s probably Lawson with Carti punch-ins (or, less likely, vice versa), but I also hope that it is Carti because layers of performance are shown here that are new, pop-friendly and… well, coherent. It’s everything that Playboi Carti’s MUSIC isn’t, so you can’t blame people for questioning if it’s really Playboi Carti’s music.

#7 – “EVIL J0RDAN” – Playboi Carti

Produced by Cardo, Johnny Juliano and Ojivolta

So, Playboi Carti’s MUSIC debuts at #[x] on the UK albums chart, with [x] copies sold. This is its highest-charting song, a solo track released on YouTube in 2023 that doesn’t even have a chorus and has been hastily changed to add an intro popular on TikTok. Carti is friends with The Weeknd so he doesn’t need to clear that sample. Just brilliant. “EVIL J0RDAN” is one of the less interesting tracks to me – that winding intro with the muffled Weeknd vocals taken from “Popular” (which also had Carti on, alongside Madonna) and spacey synth is very cinematic, sure, but it mostly just promises to sell something the album isn’t, which is thought-out. When the beat drops with the count-in, vocal hook, snare roll and unnecessarily flattened gunshot, it is admittedly exciting, but Carti is rapping about monkey nuts in his deep voice and the Cardo beat basically just loops after. It’s alright, he is actually rapping sentences here, even if a theme doesn’t last for more than four bars and it’s all vapid flexing he doesn’t even seem interested in. DJ Swamp Izzo is less of a presence here, unfortunately, and I should say for chart trivia sake that 2023’s “Popular”, from Abel’s terrible show The Idol, peaked at #10 in 2024, whilst Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” was #1. I like that song, but Carti doesn’t really fit on it, he doesn’t have much of a contribution, and I know what a weirdo Carti can be so it’s more of an intrusion than anything. He’s much more at home on MUSIC, even if that home is not the same planet as me. I can still find it catchy, though. “Just give me that pussy and don’t remind me, ‘cause I can see-yuh!” has been in my head the whole week, and somehow reciting that line was less embarrassing than saying the actual title of the song. SWAMP! IZZO! I AM THE MUSIC!

#2 – “The Giver” – Chappell Roan

Produced by Dan Nigro

So, this is a country song about lesbian sex. I know, Best of the Week already, right? Well, there’s a bit more to it – Ms. Roan initially performed the song on Saturday Night Live months ago, going for a unique blend of fiddle with pop rock guitars and gated drums that ends up sounding uniquely 80s, 90s, 2000s all at the same time and resultingly, more like the 2020s. After an aborted count-in, it lands straight in, and whilst the blend of genres and sounds can be a bit egregious, that’s a lot more interesting than faceless monogenre filler for the algorithm, and the boldness of the song’s sound, with belting over the multi-tracked hook even in the first chorus, a great fiddle solo in the post-chorus and the pile-up of drums, absolutely fits what Chappell’s singing about here. The main conceit is that she gets the job done, she can guarantee an orgasm unlike all these guys who give up before everyone’s satisfied (making the twangy male group vocal in the bridge all the more ironic), and in the second verse, she pulls from some typical US South imagery for some not-too-subtle innuendo. I love Chappell’s Shania inflections in the partly-spoken outro, she’s fully in character there and it may not be all too smoky or seductive for the content, but this isn’t a sex song as much as it’s a flex about just how successful she is in bed and, on a wider note, how lesbians satisfy women better than men will thanks to that knowledge of their own bodies. The original bridge on the SNL version featured a spoken passage saying just that though it’s been excised from this version, presumably because she’ll want to improvise a different, sassy spoken verse every time she performs it live. That kind of playing with audience expectations fits right in with not only Chappell’s image but this song’s use of her southern roots and highlighting the campness of country-pop that we don’t see often nowadays when it absolutely used to be there. I may prefer the bridge without any spoken parts anyway, the way the final chorus comes crashing in is really exciting. It’s a wonderful track, seemingly built to be a smash hit in 1995 but I’m not complaining that it’ll be one in 2025. I’m also glad she’s finally won me over on first listen for a new track, it’s taken me a while but I think I “get” it now. Scary.

Conclusion

What a week, what a jumble that ended up falling out surprisingly quickly, kind of easily, I’m happy about that. There isn’t much of quality here though, in fact, on that level, it’s a pretty terrible and confusing week, with much competition for the lower space. As you’d expect, Sleep Token take Worst of the Week for “Emergence”, doubly on principle and quality (or lack thereof), with a Dishonourable Mention tied between two iconic DJs of the past decade and change, Calvin Harris for “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY” and David Guetta for “Beautiful People” with Sia. Best of the Week is pretty handedly in Chappell Roan’s court for “The Giver” and Honourable Mention… “EVIL J0RDAN” by Playboi Carti?! I suppose?! I just hope we get a bit of a break and maybe more in the way of quality in the next episode. Aitch has a new single out though, so don’t get your hopes up. For now, thank you for reading, I am the music and I’ll see you next week!