Singles Jukebox Resistance Education
[Video]
[3.00]
Will Adams: That’s… not what peer pressure means. Unless this is intended to be a tender song about Julia convincing James to sneak behind the school building and smoke cigarettes during recess, in which case please retroactively add eight points to my score.
[2]
Scott Mildenhall: No doubt Bay and Michaels thought they’d stumbled on a fresh idiom for a love song; it seems possible they were so taken with it that they were blinded to its complete incongruity. Quite aside from its connotations of implicit coercion, peer pressure is more commonly spoken of as applied by groups, not tormentedly solo love interests, and usually with pernicious results. So in fact, this is nothing fresh. Just another inadvisably assured song in music’s grand tradition of iffy perspectives on romance.
[4]
Alfred Soto: I’m not sure he felt much pressure to imitate the styling of Shawn Mendes.
[2]
Thomas Inskeep: When you combine the tastes of two horrible-tasting things, rarely do you get something that tastes better.
[0]
Ramzi Awn: “Peer Pressure” makes a great case for American twee, and it is the perfect song for Julia Michaels, who has made her name on insecurity pop. Unfortunately, it takes a bad turn and winds up whining instead of swelling. In the end the single fails to escape the sum of its wayward parts.
[4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Very thankful that this isn’t an extremely low-stakes take on the modern PSA song, and also that the Michaels-Bay combination somehow maximizes their modest charms. The whole affair has a weirdly wholesome energy that makes “Peer Pressure” difficult to dislike.
[6]