Dream Academy contestant who didn’t make the Katseye cut forges her own pop path nevertheless…
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[7.00]
Will Adams: I am being pandered to. Breathy, steely seduction over pulsing electro that would easily slot into a cardio-ready playlist next to Slayyyter, Rebecca Black, or Cobrah, complete a choreo-heavy visual perfect for Gay Guy Music Video Night (source: this was played at one I attended last month)? What the hell, sure.
[7]
Alfred Soto: It’s on the beat, alright. Its electronic pulse won’t tempt me into much more than a head bob and a hip sway.
[6]
William John: The vocals here are muted, muffled and reduced to mere texture, to the extent that it’s hard to decipher what’s being sung. But attempting to discern the lyrics, let alone their meaning, of a song featuring pulsing synths and ad-libbed panting entitled “SexontheBeat” is a rhetorical exercise.
[6]
Tim de Reuse: This could have fully committed to the silliness of those moaning samples, the robotic harmonization, the title, its breathy repetitions, and all other erotic signifiers. Unfortunately, other than a few sonically adventurous transitions, this plays it entirely safe, and that’s kind of a killing blow for the whole concept: competent tech house just isn’t all that sexy. The genre is too precise and squeaky-clean to get there on its own — it’s, like, an advertisement for sexy. A club where everyone looks sexy but no one’s actually allowed to fuck.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Not the first (or last) great song to the use the strict machines of synthpop/EBM/etc. to evoke and critique the pleasure/pain of sexuality under the gaze of the industry/capital. “Make you think the choice is mine”; there’s a real sense in which this is not in fact sexy at all, and that’s kind of the point.
[8]
Claire Davidson: The most crucial line on “Sex on the Beat” can be found at the end of the hook, where Adéla vows to “bend to any shape you like” in satisfying her partner’s sexual desires. The song frames her as a kind of cipher in its icy electro-house universe, coating her blank affect in distant filters that give her voice a Y2K-futuristic sheen, which gives her voice just enough foreboding intrigue to sound both seductive and imposing, a key demonstration of authority in a song that’s otherwise a pleading ode to submission. I do wish the chorus itself was a bit more fully realized beyond its blunt-force, strobing bass synths and twinkling key accents; for as transformative as its central sexual encounter clearly is for its narrator, the hook doesn’t allow for quite the level of transcendence it should. Still, it’s rare to see a young up-and-comer like Adéla sound so confident in their sound — all the more impressive, given how much “Sex on the Beat” yearns for domination.
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Nortey Dowuona: Dang, Leland, who is hurting you? Better not be Adéla.
[7]
Joshua Lu: Relentless electropop, perfect for the darkest corners of the dingiest clubs, that coalesces into only about half of a song.
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Julian Axelrod: There’s an alternate universe where every Addison Rae song sounds like “Sex on the Beat,” and if I woke up in that universe, I wouldn’t be mad! Obviously I’d miss my friends and my family, and I’m sure there would be a million butterfly effects that would slowly drive me insane. But if the only difference is Adéla Rae? Sure! Why not!
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Kayla Beardslee: Pop music is a participatory sport, and the most successful social critique pop songs often draw attention to the artist’s and listeners’ places in the system even as they long to be free from it. “SexOnTheBeat” is angry, cold, and purposeful — sharp lyricism takes a complex, emotional monologue about a popstar giving away the most intimate parts of her autonomy and compacts it down into deviously catchy hooks — but it’s also wildly seductive and mesmerizing, thanks to a bass-heavy yet glittering instrumental that’s the sexiest thing I’ve heard in pop music all year. (Zhone also did excellent work on Rebecca Black’s “Twist the Knife.”) The music and lyrics are in active conflict, one hypnotizing us even as the other tries to break the spell, and Adéla’s performance is caught between them until her message becomes inseparable from the medium that provoked it in the first place. “Pop song critiquing the system from the inside” is not a new concept, but this is one of the best executions I’ve ever heard: both production and topline are strong on their own, but put them together and you get a brilliant ideological maelstrom. “Give me rage, give me cage, give me stage,” the song begins: Adéla starts by tracing the shape of her boundaries, then sets them against each other to dance endlessly until they tear themselves apart.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It compels you to say, you know, “slay,” “mother,” things of that nature. And I’ll do it, of course — I can’t deny the exquisite, icy electro-pop here, the way Adéla twists herself to fully encompass the sonic territory she seeks to occupy. But I can’t help but feel slightly too targeted here; there must be something more unexpected she can pull off with her next trick.
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