Jitterbug into our brains…
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[6.56]
Thomas Inskeep: This is a crazy, skittery, all-over-the-place-but-still-cohesive great pop record. She talks, she raps a little, she sings well, the beats take about 5 different turns, there’s some French, the beats do some more nutty things, and yet it’s still incredibly hummable. Highly recommended.
[8]
Jonathan Bogart: Given the fact that is, in fact, the future, I don’t hear nearly enough pop that sounds like what we thought the future would sound like in the ’90s.
[8]
Iain Mew: For such an idea-packed song, “Jitter” wears its complexities really lightly. The only big disruption is the soft-rock intro getting jittered out the way, which shows admirable nerve. After that there’s a whole bunch of stuff crashing together but it’s all below the surface, Grace Mitchell downplaying the partying confidence of the lyrics as smoothly as the music does. It finally turns from impressive to something more when its synth washes re-emerge as a Javiera Mena-style rocket blast into the final chorus, fun embraced at last.
[7]
Will Adams: Well, the track jitters like the title promised, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good. After wasting a beautiful sunset intro, Grace Mitchell dives headfirst into a party narrative that sounds about as fun as hearing someone ironically use the word “slizzered” to describe their wild night. And while “jitter” perfectly matches the perky music, it’s an ill-fitting descriptor of everyone in the room (what, did they all have too much coffee before hitting the club?).
[5]
Anthony Easton: Doesn’t jitter as much as slide and peak, a kind of dance floor shift without any real anxiety, but not quite smooth either. The wide opening in the intro speeds up and then it just goes through the option, like a 3 am Chinese restaurant. I love how smoky her voice is in sections, and in other spaces it skitters like a crab. The sound near 3:40 sounds genuinely new and exciting. I have heard this maybe a dozen times in a row, and I just sit slackjawed and think, wow.
[9]
Micha Cavaseno: The missing link between Dev and Charli XCX, and many more. But of all the cut up bits of the familiar, there’s not as much to really find familiar and welcoming.
[3]
Alfred Soto: The bait-and-switch works: from a nod towards Daniel Lanois’s limpid guitar pieces on Brian Eno’s Apollo soundtrack to chorus skitter funk. With Grace Mitchell distorted until she jitters all over the place, the result honors the title.
[6]
Brad Shoup: I love the baggy piano bit in the chorus, at least. Without it, the rattling bass alone can’t overwhelm a through-composed club lyric that’s all over the decade. You could spin a half-dozen of Mitchell’s sentence fragments into its own hit, but I’d rather have more of that piano. As a songwriting demo, this is a smash.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: Pop for people who talk about pop on the Internet that people who talk about pop on the Internet and aren’t Peter Robinson may well never hear, and that’s awful. Imagine a hypothetical supergroup of Ke$ha, Charli XCX, and Tove Lo doing a pop-rap-Italo-house track (with, sneakily, the year’s best house piano riff) with French bits and chiptune bits and PC Music-ish bits thrown in because why the hell not? This sounds, somehow, both irresistibly ebullient and genuinely too weird to catch on. I hope you prove me full of shit.
[9]