Follow up to sleeper hit that has us reaching for the snooze button…
[Video]
[3.29]
Andrew Karpan: Indie boyz without style or substance, this noble effort to reproduce the band’s incredibly random, billion-streaming hit last year collapses on the weight of its own vacuousness, a thudding bass riff wasted on the kind of empty emotional noodling that creatively bankrupted fellow travelers Alt-J sometime in the last decade. It’s pop music for people who’ve never had a good time in their lives.
[2]
Tim de Reuse: The grooveless clap-on-every-beat chorus is already making it difficult to feel the music in my bones, but the vocal delivery seals the deal. The enunciation of “dance” into “DAY-unss” is a monumentally irritating flourish, and when the crooning in the quiet parts starts to edge towards Adam Levine (the platonic ideal of Voices That Make You Want to Punch Your Headphones) I can’t even pretend to identify with the main character anymore. Whoever she is, man, she’s way better off.
[3]
Leah Isobel: If they keep stomping on the downbeat, it’s going to crack under the weight.
[4]
Juana Giaimo: Glass Animals have entered the group of indie rock bands with a catchy, anonymous, mainstream hit and a few dozen songs nobody else knows. It seems they now sound like Tame Impala (synth solo! vocoder vocals! psychedelia!), but way messier.
[3]
Alfred Soto: The hell does a “hurricane” taste like — as wild and tempestuous as the college-era cocktail? The na-na-na sound effect recalls the worst bits of early 2010s electronically coated rock, as if Foster the People were New Order.
[2]
John S. Quinn-Puerta: I’m having the same problem I had with the last Glass Animals track I blurbed: the idea all feel half goodness and reliant on cliches, and yet I still find myself enjoying it in spite of that. The fuzzy bass really drives it forward, and though the vocals are weak at some points, the falsetto redeems them. It feels like something made for me if I were six years younger, and not as easily disappointed by the abruptness of some endings, literally and metaphorically.
[5]
Edward Okulicz: An actual curate’s egg: great bassline, awkward falsetto, vocal effects that scream “well, let’s use all the presets.” The song also ends one chorus too early, although at the same time the chorus isn’t so good that I really needed to hear it again.
[4]