We have finally released her, released her body, from the purgatory of not being covered on TSJ.

[Video]
[7.73]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Sultry, sweaty, aerobic disco embellished with every little Euro-bosh flourish you could wish for. “24 hours never seemed so far away/Feels like a lifetime ago,” Agnes sings, seemingly referencing the fact that the last time we covered her was over a decade ago. 
[7]

William John: God, if only Lady Gaga had stumbled across something like this on her journey to Planet Chromatica.
[10]

Edward Okulicz: It must be the mid-to-late noughties again, because here’s another song that bites “Fade to Grey” while also being better than “Fade to Grey.” It also brings to mind lovely memories of Rachel Stevens’ “So Good,” only nobody’s going to accuse Agnes of being a slightly weak singer. Her performance, as if hiding in the corner of her vocal booth, is a nervous powerhouse. That spoken word bit is bizarre in a wonderful way too, though isn’t it a “Sliding Doors moment” not a “sliding door moment”?
[8]

Juana Giaimo: The song already starts so upbeat that when the chorus arrives, it falls flat. In the pre-chorus, she adds an extra beat and disco backing vocals echoing her already strong voice, all of which create expectation, but when the chorus arrives, her voice turns thinner and the melody slower. Sure, it’s good, but not the dance explosion I was expecting. 
[6]

Samson Savill de Jong: This is pretty much the perfect form of this type of song. Pumping bass, glissando-ing keys, strong singing, lyrics that’re pretty obviously written by a Swede in their second language, soaring violins, spacey distant vocals at the start, a weird spoken bridge that doesn’t really work but makes it feel “arty.” “24 Hours” doesn’t play with the tropes, it just executes them to perfection.
[8]

Dorian Sinclair: There’s a real imperiousness to Agnes’s vocal on the verse of “24 Hours” — she has a commanding presence as she lays out the stark facts of heartbreak and what comes after. It contrasts well with the airy vulnerability of her head voice on the chorus, particularly immediately post-bridge when it’s just her and the piano. The ways she shifts her register are super thoughtful, and the production post-bridge is near perfect. I just wish the pre-bridge underscoring was a little more responsive to the ways in which she uses her voice.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Evokes Goldfrapp (Supernature specifically), Ladytron, Robyn, “Rapture”-era Blondie briefly, and other strobe-dance luminaries, but sounds flat, emotionally detached. Maybe we should have heard the story in the moment, rather than with 24 hours’ distance.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The spin kicking drums knock down the door, the stalking bass and wheeling synths follow Agnes’s smooth croon as she spreads her echoes through the building, then begins to climb the stairs, the bass synths and drums clearing her opponents as Agnes continues to climb, unencumbered and getting ready to place down the satellite. As they reach the last stairs, Agnes floats over her echoes on the steps of the sweetly plucked piano, then lands on the top, placing the satellite on the roof, broadcasting… we are still here.
[10]

Will Adams: “24 Hours” draws inspiration from several space-electro hallmarks — the breathy interlude that opens the song from Donna Summer; the nod to Eurythmics in the first verse — but I mostly hear Goldfrapp in its DNA. It’s that steely angle on an otherwise standard breakup anthem that adds intrigue, as well as a narrative purpose: only in the post-chorus midway through does the pain peek through — “that was the last time I’ll ever be yours.” But it’s a brief flash, and Agnes remains determined to move forward, blasting off into space, propelled by synths and kick drums.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: In the armour of electro revival revivalism, Agnes heads forth, fights, and steals a Gaga line so brazenly as to be surreptitious. This has gusto on all fronts — crunching, throbbing, punching, mobbing — and barely needs 24 seconds to assert that something big is happening.
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: This is pretty much a shot-for-shot remake of last year’s mildly disappointing “Fingers Crossed,” but it’s hard to be too upset when “24 Hours” improves on the formula in almost every way: bigger, darker, faster, less likely to be mistaken for an unreleased Future Nostalgia outtake.
[7]

Faltering as we reach single number four in the new-album cycle…

[Video]
[4.55]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Now, I only have one earbud in, right? Once I grab the other one, I’ll hear something other than withered bass-subservient production, limp vocals, and… oh no.
[4]

Austin Nguyen: A decent SoundCloud demo that attempts not-so-decently to upcycle parts of Billie Eilish’s actual SoundCloud-era output: “My Boy” eye-rolled bitterness without the arch wryness, “Idontwannabeyouanymore” dead space filled with scats, “Ocean Eyes” mellowness laid back to a fault with pockets of whisper-rushed reverb. How any of this should amount to some “7/11”-adjacent music video escapes me — the bass shudders like it’s in a library, not an LA-mansion party, and when the synths come in trying to compensate, it’s too late. If the intention were understated confidence, the delivery comes off as mere crepitation: all noise, as if “You Should See Me in a Crown” were centered around a cicada.
[5]

Dorian Sinclair: You know when karaoke tracks bill themselves as being “[song] by [band you’ve never heard of] in the style of [the actual artist you know]”? Generally, this heralds that you’re going to get some very thin and dodgy production that just sort of loosely approximates what the original song sounded like. For those karaoke tracks, I assume it’s about resources, and the company not being able to afford rights to the original mix stems. Since this is presumably not a problem for Finneas and Billie Eilish, I have no explanation for why “Lost Cause” sounds as empty as it does. Eilish’s lassitude doesn’t help — normally she rides the line of “disaffected but engaging” well, but here she just sounds bored with the track.
[3]

Will Adams: It’s hard to believe the same team who sampled crosswalk tickers, dentist drills and ASMR Invisalign (on top of already blustery beats with glitched-out vocals) would turn in something so pared down, to the point where it sounds like a demo. The coffeeshop vibe suits Billie better than expected, but the close-up draws more attention to the lyrics, for better and for worse: “you got no job,” on top of not making sense as a converse to “you think you’re such an outlaw,” feels especially callous given the pandemic making that the case for millions.
[4]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: I dig Finneas’s work on the bass, and Eilish’s vocal melody is instantly memorable, made to sing along and bob your head. But the lyrics don’t really stand up to scrutiny, particularly the central declaration: “you got not job.” It feels like an unneeded and unearned punchline, ill-matched with the interpersonal complaints the rest of the song focuses on. 
[5]

Edward Okulicz: The ultra-minimalism of this bass-led kiss-off doesn’t suit Eilish that well. It would have suited someone tougher, or a bit jazzier and smokier. But I was still kind of getting into it, and then where the sublime payoff was supposed to come — from the master of such things, a woman who managed to weaponise “duh” into a world-destroyer — all that was there was “But you got no job.” That’s not it.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Billie Eilish, after making several trip hop-adjacent songs, finally loses the “adjacent” entirely: beat from Mandalay’s “Insensible,” vocal timbre and attitude from Martina Topley-Bird. The genre allows Billie and Finneas to get away with more minimalism than they otherwise might, or that was accurate to the ’90s really. The chorus makes me bristle — using “you got no job” as a zing right after the worst mass unemployment since the Great Depression seems unnecessarily cruel, as does calling someone a lost cause at the irredeemably old age of, what, 22? (And I thought I was a harsh critic.) Then again, nobody ever asked or expected a Billie Eilish song to be nice.
[5]

Aaron Bergstrom: Comes off like an OpenAI rendering of a “Billie Eilish type” song, specifically one where the computer was only given the most basic details of what her music sounds like (“it’s really sparse and she insults people”) and then was left on its own to figure out the rest. So instead of the ominous minimalism and devastating punchlines that made When We All Fall Asleep such a fascinating album, we get beige coffeehouse vibes and half-hearted digs about being unemployed.
[3]

Andrew Karpan: What would a Billie-style song of the summer sound like? It’s a boring question, for sure, but it’s one that she manages to answer cleverly, her voice splashing around the room like errant waves on a beach day. In the context of a sunny day, her aloof disinterest bit, a performance of studied pouting rooted in camp, ultimately becomes impossible to resist.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The soft petal drums waft behind Billie’s even softer voice, as the bass pops in, light synths on the walls. She gathers the echoes around her, carefully dressing and styling each, and lays down a sweeping synth cord line network, the echoes following each off and away, with Billie sitting and watching it all.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Here’s the second new single I’ve reviewed in as many days by a generational icon who confuses slow for cool. The ooh-ooh-oohs and the loping beat help, and her hip-hop diction’s crisper. No lost cause, but the road map’s smudged. 
[5]

We have some notes about the vowels, Mimi…

[Video]
[4.56]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A vocally talented, pleasantly floral, sonically-of-the-moment offering from an emergent Tik Tok star that slots anonymously into the current teenage melodrama renaissance. 
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: To some extent I can’t help but compare “Good Without” to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U“. Beyond the titular similarity, both narrators are in a similar position, still caught up in a former relationship when the other person shows every sign of having moved on. In that comparison, “Good Without” suffers a bit; its melancholy may match my own experiences better than Rodrigo’s fire, but it’s less dynamic, and the lyrics look vague next to Rodrigo’s pointed specificity. It’s not bad — the melody is decent and I particularly like the slow build of the piano — just a bit generic, especially its chorus.
[5]

Jeffrey Brister: Feels like I’ve always already heard this song, given how pervasive every element of its construction is: the affected coo, airy and booming arrangement, the whoa-oh’s. Nothing novel, nothing new, no value-add to make this particular instance stand out. I’ll get it confused with another song playing over an uplifting trailer or the closing moments of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I’m certain.
[3]

Ian Mathers: Can someone please tell me where this particular vocal timbre that’s everywhere now originated? It does feel British, is it Adele? Ellie Goulding? A mix of the two? If I am hearing some Adele, at least she makes it sound a lot better. (This is probably the recent nadir of the form, at least for me.) Anyway, it’s everywhere right now and I hate it, and here the remix is much better both for giving it a bit of pace and also by swallowing the worst excesses of the style.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Posting an opinion on “Good Without” means reckoning with the stew of influences in which it bobs. I don’t doubt Mimi Webb’s sincerity, but from the swell of backup vocals to the starchy insistence of her own performance there’s a cynicism to the way it refuses to offer a moment of originality. 
[3]

Katie Gill: This might sound absolutely crazy…but Mimi Webb (or Mimi Webb’s songwriters) really should do country music instead. I know that this is supposed to be a big, impressive emotional pop song but honestly, swap out those guitars for something a little more acoustic and we’ve got something aggressively Kelsea Ballerini on our hands. Likewise, if you took a country spin on this song, it would make it more interesting and make a statement in the woefully barren field of women-focused country music. But as it is, the song feels oddly half-formed, like it’s waiting for a remix that will hopefully blast it right up to radio airplay.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Comes across like Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” if the singer didn’t believe it for one second, which makes for a less catchy song but a more interesting story. The swelling backing vocals are kind of hacky, but taken in context of a singer struggling to convince the listener of something unbelievable, they work really well. I do fear for the ongoing health of English vowels though; to add to the ongoing trend of people singing the long-i vowel sound (like “bike”) as if it was “oy,” Webb sings the “a” in “heart attack” like an long i sound. I fully expect if she’s still performing this song in ten years, someone’s going to have a heart attoyck, probably me.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The plucked guitars lift behind Mimi’s soft, pliant voice as plopping piano drops cycle around her feet. Then the KanYeezy bass barges in with the Puff the Radio Dragon drums hammering down as Mimi’s echoes roar. Mimi makes her way as the pistachio shell drums bubble inside the piano drops, looking around, then leaping away, lifted by her roaring echoes, with Mimi soaring into the piano drops and disappearing.
[7]

Samson Savill de Jong: This is so aggressively dull. Because Mimi Webb is a young women writing about heartbreak there’s an easy comparison to be drawn with Olivia Rodrigo, but instead I’d like to contrast Mimi with Adele. That might not seem fair, given that Adele is a far better singer and is attempting to make more complex music, but Adele succeeds at something that Mimi fails at. Namely, Adele is able to take her personal issues and make them sound big and universal. “Good Without” is attempting to do a similar thing, trying to make Mimi Webb’s heartbreak sound big and important, but it falls flat. In part it’s because Mimi just isn’t a strong enough singer to put the required emotion into her voice (and I hate the vocal effect they use every time she sings “last” in the chorus with a burning passion). It’s also because the song is so generic, and so predictable, that it’s impossible to feel like there’s any emotion to it. So instead of empathising, I’m just utterly bored.
[3]

n.b. not Fox, Foxes, Fleet Foxes, Foxygen, Peter Fox, Zack Fox, Jamie Foxx, Ray Foxx, Njena Reddd Foxxx, Bullet & Snowfox, or Ylvis…

[Video]
[5.80]

Aaron Bergstrom: Over a decade-long career, Foxing has built a reputation for sprawling, widescreen emo-tinged indie rock, culminating with 2017’s Nearer My God, an instant classic of the genre. When the band announced that the lead single (sorry, ritual) for their fourth album would be a seven-minute collaboration with Why? called “Speak With The Dead,” it was (a) awesome, and (b) completely on brand. “Go Down Together,” though, is something else entirely. It’s an attempt to channel all of that ambition, anxiety, and dread into a three minute pop song and, as the band has described it as a meditation on “financial ruin, hopelessness and love,” maybe it makes sense that they would seek inspiration in the global-financial-crash-core indie pop of 2008 and 2009 (Manners, for sure, but also In Ghost Colors, Oracular Spectacular, and even Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix) for their reimagining of “21′ Bonnie & Clyde.”
[8]

Oliver Maier: Foxing’s curious career trajectory has taken them from twinkly Midwest emo to anthems that sound designed for empty arenas. This could unkindly be called selling out (if it were like, the ’90s) but between 2018’s Nearer My God and their present batch of singles, the approach has been hit and miss. Part of me finds the folksy skip of “Go Down Together” off-putting, like a tidied-up Of Monsters and Men cut, but I’m not bouncing off it entirely. It might be that this sounds more meticulous than a lot of songs in its vein tend to — if nothing else, it’s better produced and arranged — or it might just be that Conor Murphy, as ever, sounds like he truly means every word.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The ghosts of Modest Mouse and Clink haunt this slow, sad stomper: the working out of trauma with the aid of a romantic partner whose presence may itself worsen the trauma. “It’s not enough that you’re wrestling with yourself/But your friends talk shit while you’re going through hell,” Conor Murphy sings in an electronically manipulated warble. Instead of building to one of their inexorable climaxes, “Go Down Together” stops at just over three minutes as if it saw no hope of continuing.  
[7]

Austin Nguyen: I actually didn’t mind the timbre of “Dance Monkey” that much, but Conor Murphy’s closed-eye moan-melisma (especially that second “we’ll go down there togetherrrrrrrr”) makes my ears feel voyeuristic, as if I were hearing him masturbate his voice over the opening riff of “Break The Rules” at half-speed to get aroused for the Actual Performance. The electronic squeals and other guitars can’t come in soon enough.
[3]

Samson Savill de Jong: When I think about this song, I like it a lot. I like the arrangement, I like the singer’s voice, I like the little electronic touches that peek through occasionally. The lyrics, especially, I think are outstanding, dealing with weighty topics without getting bogged down by them. But then I listen and I just don’t feel moved in the way all of the above would imply. I still recognise its quality intellectually, but I don’t feel compelled to tap my foot or sing along with the chorus.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: Dripping with sincerity, crisp vocal chops, plucked banjo, a whole lot of inspirational layering — and to what end? A vague, waffling positivity. It’s not that I’m opposed to anything feel-good, but when I’m feeling down, “We’ll go down together” is not really the most revitalizing message, and the intensity of these upbeat melodies have completely sterilized the song of any other kind of nuance. There is no meat on these bones.
[4]

Ian Mathers: Every generation gets the “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” they need.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: The verses on this show a great deal of care, painting a story of pledging one’s troth to someone in times of hardship, and you can’t be too down about that. But the chorus feels like an underwritten formality, lacking the evocative lyrics, not making the repetition work, being a little boring, and sounding like an unearned resolution. That’s not the worst crime, and it’s not the worst song. It’s just that it’s all very nice, but it’s also too nice.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The loping bass that opens up to flat drums — covered by Conor Murphy’s rasping voice, dusted by brittle, fluorescent synths and cartwheeling guitars in the distance — is so powerful it might distract you from the rote writing. Might.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Like an “indie rockers deciding to write a pop song, you know, as an experiment, a lark, just this once” starter pack: the polite synth percussion, the electronic antenna-twiddling, the frosted-glass processing on Conor’s voice. The result is something I’d convince myself is quite pleasant come December, as a space-filler in year-end lists.
[5]

• Hannah Jocelyn mixed SHAR’s new song “The L Word”: listen on Spotify or Apple Music.
• Joshua Minsoo Kim reviewed the new “Blue” Gene Tyranny box set Degrees of Freedom Found for Pitchfork.
• Jackie Powell, for The Next, wrote about the New York Liberty’s Michaela Onyenwere and her quiet but deadly campaign for Rookie of the Year.

“Next” is merely a concept relative to the position from which it follows…

[Video]
[4.15]

Crystal Leww: Song production and engineering: $5. Music: $2. Songwriting: $0.10. Choreography: $10. Writing the lore: $834,029. Video: $32,094,802… Someone please help me budget this — my girl group is dying. 
[3]

Rose Stuart: I’m not going to write off aespa this early. All SM artists have teething problems at the start of their careers, with the exception of maybe BoA, and they all (well, most) eventually found their footing. aespa needs time to find their sound and their style, after which I’m sure they’ll be just as successful as other SM groups (or not, considering all the trouble the company has been in lately). But “Black Mamba” was just an underwhelming debut song and easy to recover from. “Next Level” is outright bad. The song is dominated by something that falls uncomfortably between rapping, speaking, and chanting, which is supposed to sound cool but instead sounds disdainful and bored. When the track does switch things up, the new musical elements sound out of place and lackluster. SM Entertainment has always pioneered the K-Pop sound of practically changing songs halfway through, for better or worse, but even in the worst examples there is at least a small part of the song that works. Nothing about “Next Level” works. Even the bridge, which finally shows that the girls have some of those famed “SM vocals”, is limp and uninteresting. More than anything, it sounds like what small companies were putting out in the early 2010s, and it was dated then. For a song called “Next Level”, it’s impressive how much it seems out of touch. 
[3]

Dede Akolo: Unfortunately, this beat drop feels completely unearned and unfulfilling. This song becomes better with every listen, but that doesn’t say much when at first listen I wanted to swear off it. SM Entertainment needs to understand its limits and know that not every song needs to jumpcut into another stratosphere of genre.
[4]

Kayla Beardslee: I feel like we’re collectively watching SM Entertainment go through a mid-life crisis. Their spouse (aka their status as the undisputed top K-pop company) left them for a younger woman (aka HYBE), and now SM is staying out late and drinking in crowds of much younger people (aka debuting a new group) to try and escape their problems. On one of those nights, they did mushrooms for the first time and hallucinated a magical world called the Kwangya. You go over to their house to check on them and find that they’ve bought a shiny, expensive new car (…aka the rights to a song from the Fast & Furious soundtrack), and they keep insisting that their best friend from high school (some high-level creative director[s] willing to go along with Lee Soo Man’s shenanigans) has stumbled upon a perfect get-rich quick scheme (aka imitating Blackpink’s image-first and music-second marketing while using L O R E as a Venus fly trap for stans) that will finally turn their life around and get them back on track. beat drop You leave their house and drop your smile as soon as you’re out the door. After you’re gone, SM sits on their couch, drinking a warm beer and staring at the TV as it plays BTS and Blackpink US television performances on a loop. “Soon,” SM mutters, “soon I’ll be on the next level. No one knows what the K-pop world needs better than me. They’ll see… they’ll all see.”
[0]

Alfred Soto: Ignorant of the behind-the-scenes machinations at SM Entertainment, I approached “Next Level” as a moderately entertaining quasi-rocker garnished with a moderately entertaining beat drop interesting for its own sake rather than where it takes the song — certainly not to another level.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: It’s ridiculously ambitious for a single even if you aren’t playing into the Sherry-Turkle-Life-On-The-Screen-meets-Code-Lyoko persona work that aespa’s doing in their girl group worldbuilding. And yet, despite the world-conquering reach of “Next Level”, there’s something slightly threadbare about its construction — the linkage between the Fast & Furious soundtracking bit and the new jack swing bit is amateurish, and the individual sections lack the drama required to stand on their own. “Next Level” doesn’t quite work as a pocket symphony — but as pure auditory entertainment it’s undeniable, a wave of hooks that can’t stop itself.
[7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Ruckus, extra, Bruno Mars-level-vibes silliness that unfurls with the subtlety of a stick of rainbow dynamite exploding.
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: I badly want “Next Level” to work better than it does. There’s some really excellent details here: I love the rubberiness of the bass ostinato, and the swagger all the vocalists bring. But it’s a weirdly static song. This is an odd complaint when midway through there’s a deliberate and drastic switchup, but the secondary theme introduced at the “beat drop” is so different that it feels like someone abruptly changed the radio station — and when we return to the original theme, nothing from the interlude is carried forward. Things just carry on as though it never happened, and we end in essentially the same place we started. Some fun notions, but without a strong structure they fail to make an impression.
[3]

Will Adams: See, what worked about the gimmick in “I Got a Boy” was that the tempo change felt like a shot in the arm, like getting a power-up in the middle of a Mario Kart race. I cannot fathom why anyone thought having a slower breakdown in the middle of a solid — if swiped — midtempo electro groove would be exciting. It’s less “next level” and more “character died and respawned at the last checkpoint.”
[3]

Juana Giaimo: I wish the proportion of the Fast & Furious cover to the original songwriting was the other way round. aespa has really good vocals that I feel are not taken into account by their team. The way they sharply emphasize words — “I’m on the next level”, “I see the nuuu evo” — is addictive, but a little bit repetitive. When the beat drops and the song suddenly turns jazzier, their vocals sound so fresh: they are playful, effortlessly going from singing to rapping, with the loose beat making it all really dynamic. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last long and when the main track comes back again, it sounds even more structured than before — I feel it needed something new, maybe a slight variation of the melody to complement that interlude.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The snarling bass and scattered drums circle aespa, the percussion trailing and then chomping but waved away by the bass, which slings in synth horns that bring in plush JJTL keyboards, then sweep in aespa. They climb upon it, riding it carefully, before pulling down the snarling bass into the scarred and scattered drums, spinning them amongst their hands, then leapin upon it and riding away.
[6]

Rachel Saywitz: So, I came into this review ready to comment on the absurdity of aespa’s entire concept and drag the horrible “I Got A Boy” callback that we should have left back in 2013. I was even ready to sing a few praises — I enjoyed the bubbling sputters of personality, heard in a defiant Ning Ning (“watch me while I work it”), and the robotic yet assertive hook of “I’m on the next level.” But then I remembered that “Next Level” was advertised as a rework of a song from the Fast & Furious: Presents Hobbs and Shaw soundtrack, almost donning a badge of honor. I hadn’t heard the song; I assumed aespa wouldn’t actually be reworking this beat-for-beat. Well, no less than three minutes ago had I pulled up this aforementioned song on my MacBook and immediately resisted an urge to throw it against the wall. Even now, my fingers are trembling, turning this would-be three-to-five sentence review into a vengeful diatribe. THEY TOOK! THE WHOLE SONG! THEY LITERALLY JUST COPIED THE SONG AND PASTED IT INTO GARAGEBAND, HAD THE GIRLS SPEAK WORDS LIKE “KOSMO” AND “THAT’S MY NÆVIS” IN A VOCODER, AND ADDED A LITTLE JAZZ BREAK IN THERE FOR SHITS AND GIGGLES AND CALLED IT A BRAND NEW GREAT SONG WHY?!?! I am both fast and furious, the hobbs and shaw colliding into my body, fighting to break free from my temptation to drive a fucking used station-wagon with a horrible paint job into the SM building and demand some answers because THIS? THIS is a travesty. As the Hobbsman and Shawster would say — this calls for a furiously fast exit out of your entertainment agency. (Full disclosure: I have not seen any Fast & Furious movies.)
[4]

Michael Hong: Too “Fast & Furious playing with the little car parts in the garage” not enough “Fast & Furious racing through the city.”
[4]

The closest thing to reaching pi score that we’ve ever seen…

[Video][Website]
[3.14]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: This song calls to my mind a scenario — it’s Christmas Eve in Australia, I’m just getting over my US jetlag from a week ago, and my mum drives us to Coles at Noosa Heads for some last-minute supplies. We both break out in a sweat in the time it takes to walk from the car, and enter to hear the opening strains of “Missing Piece” by Vance Joy. I sigh resignedly — Australian Supermarket Music is an aggressively tiresome genre and it haunts me every time I come home. There’s an ocean mention, some enthusiastic acoustic guitar, a possibly slightly over-pronounced Australian accent, wistful oohs — all the classic stuff, but with none of the charm those elements could theoretically hold. Mum takes pity on me and sends me to the courtyard with a Calippo while she finishes shopping, and it’s only because this song gave me all these Australia feelings that I’m giving it even 1 point. 
[1]

Oliver Maier: In real contention for the beigest song I’ve ever heard in my life. Makes George Ezra sound like prog.
[3]

Ian Mathers: The thing about the middle of the road is that it actually is a nicer place to be sometimes, and certainly an easier one. Still, when Joy’s voice reminds me a bit of David Gray on the chorus, it mostly just makes it clear that I find the latter more interesting.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The chugging guitar and flattened drums rattle over the box drum, then fly up on the spiralling back of the bass, which flings them away onto the organ clouds, then the bass carries them higher, then they fly again. All the while, Vance is getting his eyes burnt up watching it. Then he begins to float on synth patchwork clouds, lifting him into the arms of the bass, which flies away with him, leaving the chugging guitar and box drum.
[5]

Michael Hong: The first concert I ever saw was at the tender age of nineteen, watching Vance Joy trip over his words in love. That’s what “Riptide” was, being met with the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen and watching her do the most mundane shit, yet being absolutely transfixed by it, by her. And for a while, I was dumb enough to believe that that was what the pinnacle of love was. But that’s not true, not even what love is. Love’s the emptiness you feel when apart, the contentedness you feel together. At least that’s what Joy believes on “Missing Piece,” the same twee folk song format — the only format for this kind of lovesick ache — but more patient where “Riptide” was hammering. And at twenty-something, right now, I can’t help but agree with him.
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: I saw Vance Joy perform once at a tiny bluegrass and barbecue festival in Augusta, Georgia. It was the early summer of 2015, and he was coming off the success of “Riptide”. His fans, the local white twenty-somethings who loved to complain about Augusta, but would never leave it, preferring the comforts of their parents’ money, stuck out from the other attendees, the folk and country diehards there for Rhiannon Giddens or Chatham County Line, or the jam-band devotees sticking around for Leftover Salmon’s headlining set. “It’s insane that Vance isn’t headlining”, I heard a few of them say. After watching his largely forgettable set, I found it impossible to agree with them. Like his career, Joy’s set was built entirely around “Riptide”, a song that succeeded not because of its aping of folk genre conventions like kick drums and straightforward strum patterns, but by stumbling on something meaningful: pathos. The best artists in the mode Joy reaches for on “Missing Piece” rely on raw vocals bathed in emotion. They offer something familiar, something that reads on the surface as wholesome, but call forth feelings of rage, grief, jubilee; that permeate their vocals. Comparing The Avett Brothers or Shovels and Rope to artists like Joy or The Lumineers, you can hear the emphasis on the raw emotional experience rather than the precision of repeated choruses and callbacks. But “Missing Piece” doesn’t even have catchiness on its side. Failing to reach for the shaky, emotional falsetto that made “Riptide” a hit, Joy here delivers overproduced, forgettable pablum. It’s filled with the signifiers of the genre, with its palm-muted strings and high-mixed kick drums, but its lyrics are entirely forgettable. I would struggle to even hum a bar of the chorus. That night at the festival, Joy left the stage before sunset. His fans left with him, talking loudly about how good the set had been. And so, I’m forced to conclude that this entirely unmemorable track will help Vance Joy sell out college homecoming concerts for the next three years.
[1]

Alfred Soto: A song to assure listeners the acoustic guitar is dead. 
[0]

Who says Lil Baby can’t rhyme? You’re buggin’…

[Video]
[5.11]

Crystal Leww: This isn’t new ground for either Kirk Franklin or Just Blaze, who repeat the formula again, but it is for Lil Baby, who uses the opportunity here to do a nice bit about winning together as family. You can definitely hear the Space Jam 2 soundtrack vibes coming off this one though — this isn’t meant to be a song that exists beyond the context of the end credits of a movie made for children. 
[4]

Oliver Maier: The original Space Jam theme is immortal because it brute forces its logic upon you. If you didn’t already know what the Space Jam was, tough shit, because it’s here now and it’s going down whether you like it or not, so you can either come on and SLAM or shut up. It’s more Calvinball than basketball, furiously meting out the parameters in real-time and daring you to keep up. It’s a thing of miraculous stupidity. “We Win,” by contrast, sounds at once exhaustively focus-grouped and devoid of care or thought. It’s Glorycore guff, designed to satisfy everyone and delight no-one. Kirk Franklin and Just Blaze’s beat is an ugly post-Kanye concoction, made sadder when you consider that the latter literally produced “Touch the Sky.” Lil Baby says some things. Bugs Bunny does a Fortnite dance, probably. Watcha gonna do?
[2]

Natasha Genet Avery: For a song about “striving for greatness,” “We Win” is disappointingly sloppy; the fable is about the tortoise and the hare, for one. Laden with aphorisms, this written-for-the-credits track fails to elicit any emotions (other than a strong desire to listen to “Touch the Sky“).
[4]

Alfred Soto: Just Blaze’s trick are so familiar that I didn’t glance at the credits before guessing. Baby sounds enthused, though, but the track has a mustiness: it could’ve appeared on Late Registration with the same guests.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: The combination of Just Blaze and Kirk Franklin makes so much sense, and is so obvious, that I’m a little gobsmacked it’s taken this long to get to it. (Franklin even, waggishly, tosses off a “Yo, Blaze, you crazy for this one!”) Lil Baby, however, makes little-to-no sense on “We Win,” clearly just brought in for the potential Spotify clicks. But the production on this is a delight to the ’90s head in me, and gets it over.
[6]

Samson Savill de Jong: This is so much better than it has any right to be. Space Jam, and indeed its soundtrack, might be iconic, but I wouldn’t have blamed anyone for phoning it in when producing the sequel. But “We Win” sounds like it was made with genuine enthusiasm and effort. A lot of credit for that needs to go to Just Blaze, whose beat is great (I’m also a sucker for choir beats in songs). But Lil Baby goes hard too, and I think he really matches the track while still being himself. 
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s weird to come away from Lil Baby’s heel face turn from being a well-hated pop rapper to the hero of the Atlanta rap scene. It’s even weirder to see him riding a Just Blaze beat, with Kirk chanting and crowing as the actually talented choir swings underneath the swooping bass, boulder drums and chartered pianos. Besides, rapping over Just Blaze production is always a great thing. Just ask OnCue.
[7]

Aaron Bergstrom: Come on guys, spoilers! Now that they’ve ruined the end of the movie for me, the only question left unanswered is how three unique talents came together to create something that sounds this much like a Coloring Book b-side.
[4]

Andrew Karpan: Just Blaze speeds the gospel sample up just enough that it sounds like a joyous, communal drum, around which Lil Baby delivers a PG-13-friendly church-backyard empowerment speech, whose moments the Atlanta rapper nails so well that it makes you wonder how hard Chance the Rapper’s whole bit could have been in the first place.
[7]

While we’re exhuming the ’90s…

[Video]
[4.78]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Dead horse found freshly beaten in London studio. 
[1]

Aaron Bergstrom: There’s a clip going around of Noel repeating the old Andy Warhol adage that “art is what you can get away with,” which makes me wonder what Noel thinks he’s getting away with here. Warhol at least tried to make repetition interesting.
[4]

Tobi Tella: An alt-FM dirge, pained backing vocals and nostalgic guitar lines make this feel low on ambition, high on delivery. Doesn’t reach exciting, but I commend the universality of a song that my father and I would both kinda like.
[6]

Juana Giaimo: The thing about Noel Gallagher’s music of the past 20 years is that I can’t say it’s awful, but I can’t say it’s good either. “We’re On Our Way Now” is a pleasant acoustic ballad and his voice sounds soft and calm, but it seems detached from society — not in a positive way, just an uninteresting way. 
[5]

Samson Savill de Jong: I’d kind of like to hate this, mostly because Noel Gallagher is an arsehole. He’s such an arsehole that I genuinely thought this was a “fuck you and piss off” song for a while, even though closer inspection has revealed it to be more along the lines of “isn’t it sad we drifted apart / my grandma’s dying??“. He just writes lyrics that give off dickhead vibes, even though I’m not sure that’s what he was going for. But truthfully I can’t be mad at this song. It sounds fine, it rises and falls in the right places, and the instruments do the things they should do. I can envision it playing at the end of the middle series of a TV show where everything is falling apart.
[5]

Mark Sinker: With oohs and ahs from late ’80s white UK soul — a curious and even a provocative element in context — of course this just rocks back to softcore security-blanket Lennonism, bcz where else is he going to take it? Genius-dot-com carefully identifies all the “allusions” to the work of Oasis (“hey now!”) and the song itself is either a moan about how great brother Liam’s life is right now, or a casual tale of how Noel murdered someone he copped off with. Or maybe they took pills rather than go on a second date with him. Gonna wait for Genius-dot-com to catch up on these possible lines of analysis. 
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The thin drums, lost and drifting bass, and washed out guitars swing up, floating among the swirling strings. Noel’s keening voice hovers a bit lower, covered by the women who catch him in their gossamer voices, wafting in and out of the guitars and bass. Noel is buoyed up to the sky, watching everyone behind him with that twisted lip.
[6]

Jeffrey Brister: There’s a lot here to like: a melancholy melody and arrangement full of yearning, “homespun expensive” golden hour production, a sturdy structure, the kind of compelling performance that looks easy because of decades of testing and refinement. But it doesn’t cohere into greatness, and that’s solely down to Gallagher’s voice. There’s nothing distinctive about it. It’s polished and practiced and sounds damn good, but it lacks personality. It renders what could be a really good song into a just-sorta-above-average one.
[6]

Andrew Karpan: Ever the George to his brother’s John, the latest record from Noel is confident only its steadfastness, its commitment to form and a sort of breezy searching that ostensibly purports to aim for archaic pop but is produced way too well and so ends up sounding vaguely like Lana Del Rey for leather jacket collectors, which sounds just about right.
[5]

We’re busy too, but not too busy for this…

[Video]
[7.70]

Kayla Beardslee: I first listened to Erika de Casier when the Jukebox covered “Good Time” for Reader’s Week 2019. I wasn’t a huge fan of that song (I called it boring… sorry Erika), but I’m happy to say that I’ve really enjoyed the singles off her second album! Compared to “Good Time” (which, to be fair, is only one data point), she seems to have stepped up her melodic, vocal, and production game on Sensational: yes, “Drama,” “Polite,” and now “Busy” have all been the picture of restraint, but there’s palpable energy, wit, and magnetism bubbling up from her hushed performance. I’m so glad I came around on her music!
[8]

Oliver Maier: De Casier’s magic trick is to wring glitter out of the mundane and disappointing. “Busy” is no exception; the wry, self-reflexive joke here is that possibly her liveliest, most danceable song to date is about being swamped with work. Integrating 2-step into her usual R&B palette is savvy stuff, musically channelling a little Craig David but inverting his awkward bravado into insular melancholy. Put differently, David always sounds like he’s bragging to his mates, whereas de Casier, even when supposedly addressing someone, always sounds like she’s talking to herself. That she remains impassive means you’re free to either enjoy the playful workaholic caricature or excavate all of the dismaying possibilities lurking under the surface. It gets the job done either way.
[9]

Vikram Joseph: That this captures so exquisitely that turn-of-the-millennium UK garage sound is impressive enough; that it does so while sounding vibrant and current is better still. The hook is fizzy and oddly yearning over the skittering beat (although the messy harpsichord solo is the one moment where “Busy” steps over into pastiche). Meanwhile, Erika de Casier’s amusingly matter-of-fact delivery of her daily routine has shades of Sarah Midori Perry’s vocals on the first Kero Kero Bonito album. Unlike, say, Charly Bliss’s “Capacity,” “Busy” isn’t concerned with the deeper psychological factors behind being unable to sit still for a moment. Erika just wants us to know that her calendar’s full, so give her a break ok?
[8]

Dorian Sinclair: “Busy” is one of those songs that feels like it shouldn’t work as well as it does. It sounds more laid-back than you’d expect from the title, but once you start taking stock of all the different elements there’s a lot going on here, and some of it (a harpsichord solo??) is very out of left field. The smoothness of de Casier’s vocal holds it all together, though, and if the lyrics are a little blunt and unpolished, that feels like a deliberate choice. This is particularly true in the litany of tasks she spells out before the final chorus, which could have very easily turned grating — but the sheer mundanity of the list, combined with her charm as a performer, ensures it lands well.
[7]

Leah Isobel: On first blush, the giddy, goofy bridge — “Jumping on my bike! (My bike!)/Helmet on tight!” — lingers because of how cleanly it slices through Erika’s usual melancholy. A closer listen reveals that light touch as essential to the song’s emotional world. It could be a coping mechanism for the need to optimize herself, a way to understand how empty the whole enterprise of late capitalism is, or just a lie she tells to get out of spending time with someone who isn’t on her level. It’s probably a little bit of all three, but I like the latter interpretation best: even when she claims that it’s not easy leaving someone alone while she works, her harmonizing with that baroque-ass clavinet makes it sound like she’s having a blast.
[8]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Synth voices that read as cheesy elsewhere collaborate with ethereal vocals and effectively deployed drum loops to create a perpetual motion machine. I would give this a high rating for the harpsichord alone, but it’s only a part of the highly enjoyable whole. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: The 2000 wriggling synths all settle underneath the skipping and hopping drums and cheetah bass, with Erika carefully arranging them. She juggles the drums, then hurles them along the wriggling synths, chased by the cheetah bass and the firefly synths, then they run right off a cliff and on to Erika’s arm. One of the fireflies plays the synths like a mandolin, with Erika shopping over which bike to use, then cycles over the wriggling synths, the bass keeping pace, while the firefly synths follow around her head.
[8]

Juana Giaimo: After the pleasant surprise of finding a smooth ’00s R&B track in the opening chorus, I felt “Busy” lacked something solid. The song structure is confusing: all the parts that are not the chorus could be a bridge and the second chorus has a post-chorus that never repeats again. Her vocals also sound too thin, especially in the the rap verses (the actual bridge) and I feel it doesn’t fit the irony of the lyrics. (I’m guessing they are ironic, because if not they are quite stupid.)
[5]

Alfred Soto: This bauble has the pearly complexion of Jesse Lanza’s work and the giggly delight of people who know what they’re doing without overcoming me with its adorableness. Putative pop that works as well as “Busy,” I experience before analyzing. It glistens.
[8]

Camille Nibungco: A girlboss anthem with shimmery R&B vocals on UK Garage beats. She pulls at the musical aesthetics of Brandy, Janet, and Sade with a contemporary European twist that I am absolutely enamored with. What are Erika de Casier stans called? de Casettes? Whatever it is, count me in.
[8]