For anyone who’s ever wanted to know what a fox says…
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[5.62]
Crystal Leww: This song originally came out all the way back in 2011, and a remix by luvstep duo Adventure Club made it into a minor club hit in 2012. Eager to capitalize on the success of Zedd’s “Clarity,” “Youth” has been re-released with a rework that makes sense for the hook and drop driven approach to current EDM. The original and the Adventure Club remix both take the time to build into moments of big payoff and fall back into pauses meant for reflection. The new version is all hook, all payoff, all boom. It’s still a good track because Foxes is still a great vocalist who can pull off the most obvious and elementary heart-on-your-sleeve lyrics without sounding anything less than completely and totally sincere. But still, it’s hard not to compare to superior versions.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: I keep flip-flopping about how good “Clarity” actually is. At first I thought it was a pretty alright bit of EDM pop, then I thought it was a fantastic blown-up number, and then other takes on the formula made me switch to thinking it was all way too dramatic for its own good. Looks like “Clarity’s” guest vocalist Foxes is embracing the same grandiosity for her solo career — “Youth” doesn’t even reach the 30-second mark before bringing up dragons. She can deliver a line like “don’t tell me our youth is running out,” but the majority of the single sounds like it is trying to hard to soundtrack a 30-places-to-go-before-you-die video, with those Imagine-Dragon-ish drums.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Whether it’s Stevie Nicks or Tori Amos, women with a strong mytho-poetic bent sound best testifying over dance beats and synths, but it’s not a good idea to allude to dragons when your beats sound like Imagine Dragons.
[4]
Anthony Easton: It would be churlish to note that a certain upper class British female singer tends to absorb everything that Kate Bush has to offer, and maybe inaccurate. However, the kettle drums add enough variety that I am not completely bored.
[7]
Brad Shoup: The disbelief registers heavy in her voice, but the keyboard clouds are ever-present, like the next stage in consciousness or turning 25 or something. The effect isn’t tragedy, or even a lament. It’s more like the pause before accepting fate. The beats fade, then are severed (a nice update of Hemingway’s famous quote), but the song continues.
[7]
Scott Mildenhall: “Run Boy Run” with a less interesting voice, climax, and third thing that might be hiding in there somewhere and would complete this triple. It’s not actively bad, just not active enough, or at all; there’s very little to latch on to. There is a lyric about “these fading beats” though, so she’s at least written someone else’s line for them.
[5]
Will Adams: The youth-obsessed pop that dominated last year had an underlying melancholy, but it was always masked with bright synths and promises of the best party of your life. Foxes’s take exposes youth for what it is: agonizing but bittersweet in its ephemerality. “Don’t tell me our youth is running out, it’s only just begun,” she sings. The veneer is obvious; for Foxes and her friends, youth is running out. It’s in the way she severs the word in two. It’s in the heartbreaking image of “these fading beats,” which echoes in broken-up pieces. It’s in the way the whole song threatens to fall into a black hole of reverb, but in its final seconds dissipates into a dry kick drum: the final beat.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: If this is youth, give me age any day.
[4]