We’re not going to go home with you, Niall, but you can buy us a drink.
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[5.43]
Vikram Joseph: Allow me to list the ways in which this is profoundly silly — Niall Horan’s strained Alex Turner impression, rhyming “name” with “drink,” the fact that it sounds like it belongs on Radio 1’s B-list in 1997, Horan’s apparent belief that ink is an uncommon tattoo medium, and, obviously, “J’adore la mer!“. I think I quite like it.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: This shouldn’t be a thing, but Niall doing some Robbie Williams-esque Let Me Provide Some Light Entertainment For You stuff is actually pretty catchy. Each part of the song lasts about 15 seconds so it never gets boring, and honestly, I couldn’t have told you who was boredly drawling this. It’s low key, but there’s real movement in the bass too; it has a groove that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the UK charts in about 1990, 1994 or 1998.
[7]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Your best friend’s younger brother is all grown up now! You remember, the cute but derpy one that always had a massive crush on you, but you’d just pat him on the head and tell him “Nice try”? He was always so boyish looking with the boyband hair cut, but now he’s got some unkempt stubble and new haircut. He’s picked up an electric guitar and knows a couple pick up lines. He’s been around the block a couple times, probably had some one night stands in hotel rooms, and even knows a little bit of French. His voice is deeper. He’s discovered tattoos and sunglasses as a signifier of coolness. He consumes alcoholic beverages. So it’s too bad then, that after he asks you out for a drink — and you really want to say yes — you remember all of a sudden that he’ll still never be able to be anything except your best friend’s weird younger brother.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Come now, my boy, you know you’d never allow an act so savage to your sensibilities as a phone number tattoo — a line as unconvincing at the background guitar raunch.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: Heavy rock piano slams down on Richard Watterson’s hands as Niall’s snotty croak is summoning a sledding guitar with paper Bond drums and Daniel Craig bass face are used as a shield from thousands of angry adult Gumball fans who just want meta jokes and a movie, gorshdarned it.
[4]
Oliver Maier: Maybe someone tipped him off that “top 3 least interesting 1D expats” isn’t much of a selling point but Niall has seen fit to transcend the aggressive beigeness of his last album and bestow upon us this gleefully anachronistic big beat cheesefest. It’s incredibly 2000s-feeling, such that the best comparisons I can draw are to Junkie XL’s once-inescapable Elvis remix and the colossal self-assuredness of bands like Take That. The lyrics and vocals convey personality inasmuch as they reveal that Niall is the kind of person who thinks faking a Southern drawl and saying “I love the sea” in French is some incredibly suave shit, and unfortunately I find that perversely charming. I can’t really substantively defend my enjoyment of this song beyond the “it’s just fun!” defence, but like, it is! Especially the middle eight! I look forward to hearing this in a car commercial in a few months and smiling as my thoughts turn briefly to Liam… I mean Niall.
[7]
Ian Mathers: At its core this is a perfectly pleasant, unoffensive whiff of a song, studded with plenty of aesthetic and technological choices that soon enough we’ll be able to look back at and point to as emblematic of what the state of the middle was in pop in 2019. Just as the narrative doesn’t really go anywhere (even the bit that goes “you know what I want/you know what I need” is relying on you filling in the blanks in the most generic way possible) so this is a song that doesn’t seem made so much as designed to one day be the back track for a smoothly-shot car commercial.
[5]