The word of the day is…
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[5.33]
Anthony Easton: Tension requires a kind of rise and fall, and an instability, not being sure when one is being attacked. It has to engage the back bits of your reptile brain. This is too overwhelming to be tense.
[3]
Will Adams: The way the tension in the verses — a static bass undergirding a melody that shifts upward — unfurls in the chorus is rather smart, and removed from its ubiquity five years ago, the splayed AutoTune is quite pleasant.
[6]
Scott Mildenhall: There’s an abundance of tension: so many divergent sounds converging across an unsettlingly wonky sort of metallic noise thing (technical term), all in front of the faintest of ghostly “oohs”. Attention is something harder to pay though, because it ends up just forming one surreptitiously unnerving whole that suggests less going on than there actually is. Save for one early pitstop, it’s breathless, great at creating an atmosphere, but fixating too much on it.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Electronic dancehall at its most colorless.
[2]
Josh Langhoff: The tension and release are so subtle and straightforward, “Tension” could serve as a lesson to others — say, in the “Tension and Release” chapter of So You Want To Make Afropop Bangerz (3rd Edition). Kach repeats his phrases down low while producer Sarz builds additional layers, and then Kach releases his voice up the octave for the chorus — stop — repeat — and then you’re off and running through rapper and coda, shaking off weights you didn’t know you were carrying.
[7]
Brad Shoup: The track’s static like suspended animation; you really pick up on it when all but the drums drop out. The chorus is like waterboarding: you’re buffeted by the hook’s overlapping waves. I don’t even know why there’s rapping, except as a badly needed breather.
[8]