Just be glad we’re not covering the Frankee to “Jerika”‘s Eamon (finding this song is left, mercifully, as an exercise for the reader)…
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Niki and Gabi are YouTube personalities who make concerted efforts to establish themselves as Very Different from each other, so much so that they refer to themselves as “opposite twins.” It’s a shame, then, that they’re unable to build on their brand here and communicate even a hint of personality. That I didn’t immediately assume “RU” was performed by YouTube stars is impressive. But at the same time, sounding like a trainwreck is more memorable than sounding MOR.
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Josh Love: Probably the most interesting thing about delving into the world of Niki & Gabi is seeing just how thoroughly the word “hipster” can been drained of all its pejorative weight. Between the twins, Niki is the hipster, presumably almost entirely because her hair is blue and she’s not cosplaying as Ariana Grande like her sister. Living through years and years of hearing people toss around “hipster” with the level of antipathy leftists use “neoliberal,” it’s endlessly amusing that to these YouTube millennial go-hards it’s a totally benign label that just means “not girly-girly.” The song itself is serviceable if unremarkable, which is hardly surprising since it seems likely that making pop songs is just one tentacle of the girls’ uber-thirsty multi-platform strategy for growing their fame.
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Will Adams: The fascinating thing about music made by people who are not primarily musicians is that the music itself often takes more risks than most top producers are willing to. Here, the clear effort to make the drop sound as close as possible — via knotted synth chords with virtually no reverb — is a welcome change, like Ellie Goulding’s “On My Mind” played right in front of your face. But the other puzzle piece is personality, which Niki and Gabi lack. As more resources become accessible, as the gap between expensive productions and bedroom-tinkerers closes, novelty pop and chart pop will similarly merge. It just hasn’t done so quite yet.
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Katherine St Asaph: Music curiously antiseptic for the fingerprints and bluntness of the lyrics, like one of those vintage perfumes that smell viscerally musky yet also exactly like soap. Except that’s precisely the wrong metaphor, as one is old and the other is hyper-new: beauty vloggers (there’s a portmanteau further there, probably) nominated for the seventh(?!?!) Streamy Awards and leaping from platform to platform like millennial Mario sisters. Thanks to production technology advancing and the LA scene/online influencer scene Venn diagrams merging, synthpop now sounds the same everywhere. (As with Spotify’s so-called “fake artists,” though, it’s easier to find out the the best boy grip on the video than the presumably separate person who produced the song.) In theory the YouTubers should have the edge in on-record personality, “on-record personality” comprising after all their entire career; but every note is studied, like they’re so afraid of being called Rebecca Black they can’t even turn the harmonies up in the mix.
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Nortey Dowuona: The synths slide low to the ground around the stuffed 808s while doing cartwheels over the soft Soulection drums, while Niki and Gabi harmonize until you can’t tell who is who.
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Will Rivitz: The power of syncopation in action: a vibrant verse and pre-chorus like those of this song should climax in a burst of chorus, but the awkwardly on-beat synth grumbles feel deeply wrong, stilted and lifeless. Shame, because the pizzicato strings in the song’s opening dovetail perfectly with Niki and Gabi’s vocals and the occasional electric guitar pluck, but even the best run-up doesn’t matter if the landing doesn’t get stuck.
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Alfred Soto: The synthesized pizzicato has more bounce than the vocals, but Niki and Gabi sure can harmonize.
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Tim de Reuse: The dry, squelching synth of the chorus is a gorgeous piece of sound design; totally isolated and mechanical, there’s a certain monumentality to it that wouldn’t have been there were we given a lush, overstuffed drop. Unfortunately, the relative sparsity of every other section does not work in the song’s favor, and the vocals are thrust out onto center stage. Occasionally their cutesy, sanitized physicality is a little grating, but mostly it’s all just dull.
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