Our recommendation: don’t do as the title instructs…
[Video][Website]
[6.44]
Patrick St. Michel: I’ve listened to this way more times than I’ve actually wanted to, trying to find anything to muck up my gut feeling after hearing “Delete” once. But nothing has, so: “Delete” is perfectly nice sounding music, and would probably sound great inside a supermarket, when you don’t really want messy emotions getting in the way of buying dinner ingredients. It’s fine, but I think I’d rather just listen to Neon Bunny.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: A lot of songs with techno-metaphors go gonzo and obvious (cf. “Disconnect Me“) and thus don’t age much better than their term of choice, but “Delete” is pleasant, professional, understated. It’s a nice surprise.
[7]
Madeleine Lee: A whirlwind of synthesizers and reverb around Azin’s breathy, haunted voice, which pushes between and against the flat, straight counts of the beat like a dancer, as opposed to a robot. She’s not the warm soul that the machine contains; rather, the coldly efficient environment is the machine she wishes she could be, something with data instead of emotions.
[7]
Mo Kim: There’s something intriguing about the act of deleting a person from your memory, the idea that wiping away somebody could be as easy as hitting a key. Thing is, human brains are faulty hard drives — our age is scratched all over our bodies, and even cleaning the dirt off our skin can reopen cuts we thought had clotted years ago. “Delete” understands the emotional experience of trying to forget. It keeps circling back around to that chorus, Azin protesting that she doesn’t remember but commanding herself not to remember directly after, her voice exhausted as if she cannot afford to waste any more energy on this person. Meanwhile, the instrumentation waxes and wanes in intensity but ultimately returns to the same four-bar motif, synths sparkling like distant lights not quite in reach. The whole song feels something like a mirage, or a closed-circuit. That may very well be the point.
[8]
Dan MacRae: Crystal maze pop done right.
[8]
Iain Mew: My mishearing of Lee Hi is finally used in a real chorus! It’s one that works well with sad disco, with the way Azin throws us directly into it showing a justified confidence in the groove. That compensates for a lack of further developments.
[7]
Micha Cavaseno: Not nearly as striking it hopes to be. Compared to other Azin records, this song is a bit too conservative on the beat scale, and while it might serve as a striking departure from most pop, the bubble synths and erky electro-disco strings flex pretense in the worst ways.
[4]
Brad Shoup: Wonderfully controlled, but the alternatives (letting the synth melody flare up, writing a bridge that’s worth a damn and lasts longer than two seconds) would have meant a lot more for a song called “Delete”.
[5]
Sonia Yang: Graceful and hypnotic. The entire EP this is from is good, but Delete is definitely a standout. I love the video; her dance feels both controlled and wild and the muted aesthetic fits the music well.
[7]