Not pictured: your editor’s attempt to face-morph Dove Cameron with David Cameron.
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[4.29]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: We’ll slot this one somewhere between Big Time Rush and Ariana Grande & Social House.
[5]
Alex Clifton: Very few things in the world strike me as sexy. A lot of the time when singers in particular are going for seductive or hot, it just doesn’t click with me. Dove has broken that cycle with an anthem that sounds like it’s from a queer spy movie about rival agents who get together. Cameron’s music career has been a bit iffy for me, but she’s arrived at a great sound — and she sounds like she’s having a ball, too.
[9]
Katie Gill: Out of all of the various people in the Disney-channel-singers-turned-pop-stars pipeline, Dove Cameron has been a bit of an anomaly in the sense that she’s obviously best fit for comedic musical theater. She’s got the pipes, she’s got the stage presence, arguably her two best known post-Descendants roles have been in something musical theater based (Hairspray Live and Schmigadoon)…so it’s baffling that when you’ve got someone who can give that theatricality, who can be legitimately funny at times, you give her a pop song that smooths every edge of personality out in the quest to see how much of Billie Eilish’s style one can ape without it being copyright infringement. Like, at least try to make her the next Olivia Rodrigo or something! Olivia had a few songs where you could act.
[3]
Andrew Karpan: Perhaps I’m paraphrasing, but I think it was Jon Caramanica who clocked Billie Eilish as more in the Tony Bennett mold of trad pop than anything the edgy font choices on When We All Fall Asleep… would have us believe. Well, here it is: a fake Billie Eilish record that puts this mawkish traditionalism in sharp relief, coming to us courtesy of an ex-Disney Channel star who wants so much to break out soundtrack work and pivot straight into pure empowerment-core, complete with bad guys galore.
[3]
Ady Thapliyal: This song suffers from a series case of Hollywood-soundtrack-itis (case studies 1 and 2) in which Hans Zimmer BLAAAAARPs are substituted for a natural build-up of drama and emotion in the chorus.
[2]
Edward Okulicz: The flirtatiousness that Cameron should be using to hook her prey seems a bit schlocky, like something you might have heard in a bad 90s trip hop crossover attempt, and the words almost have this snarky tone to them. Yes, it’s great that assumptions about gender and the mainstream acceptance of bisexuality have brought something like this about, but the trail was blazed a fair while ago — “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend” to name but two that came to mind, and does this have any of the power or want of either? Nope.
[5]
Oliver Maier: Anything that does this sort of Menacing Jazzy Hook thing sets off a cringe foghorn in my brain so loud that it’s hard for me to formulate a take more articulate than “please stop.” So uh. Please stop?
[3]