The fun continues with a song chosen by Alec…
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[7.00]
[9]
Will Adams: City of Clowns, my favorite album of 2025, is a middle finger to our current hellscape of tech-capitalism, AI-training and surveillance. On “Fun Times,” Davidson’s acidic mask slips briefly, and her taunting verses give way to an existential lament: “time is never coming back / what you choose, you might lose.” In the context of the album, it’s a striking and rare display of vulnerability. On its own, it’s not as profound. With the metallic thwack underpinning everything, though, it still bangs.
[7]
Alfred Soto: “Fun Times” goes from a jam to a bop at the 1:24 point when the sequencer shrieks like a person trapped in a closet with a tech bro. I wasn’t sure about the whispery-somber vocal choices, but it gains resonance and assurance with each blip.
[8]
Katherine St. Asaph: Menacing cool for the cool zone.
[9]
Claire Davidson: There’s a danger inherent to “Fun Times” that never really seems to coalesce: Marie Davidson, armed with an imposing, husky whisper, confronts her listener with a vow of hedonism that implicitly warns against what she views as the dour alternative for a woman in her late thirties, that being the pursuit of domestic fantasies that can never be fulfilled. For as confrontational as the track is in spirit, though, Davidson’s palette of wheezing, hardened synths fails to convey a greater degree of intensity or muscle across the track, and the lightly teasing hook never develops the urgency to be menacingly catchy. Even some of Davidson’s observations, while perceptive in scope, seem to have been hampered in the process of translating French to English: the line, “Baby, I ain’t no mommy / But I’ll cool you, spicy, naughty, naughty,” doesn’t exactly radiate foreboding sexuality.
[5]
Ian Mathers: Every time I’ve heard Davidson before I’ve appreciated it more than actually been grabbed by any of the hooks, but “Fun Times” is an exception. Great beeps, love the beeps. Good chorus too!
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: There was once an app that held the archives of Radio Soulwax, run by brothers David and Stephen Dewaele until 2014. Radio Soulwax itself began as a website in 2001 with 10 mp3 playlists. You can still find an approximation of the radio playlists, although the playlists no longer work. All that work of careful archiving and design and coding, all to rot in the Internet Archive. Soulwax themselves have kept busy producing for themselves and others, but despite that, their aesthetic is still ’80s retro stylish synthwave. Marie should have chosen Bjork — I couldn’t find her app, either, but at least she isn’t still stuck in 1984.
[5]
Andrew Karpan: Hate to say it, but I don’t think any of these times sound very fun at all.
[5]