It’s summer somewhere, and it’s also 9PM somewhere.
[Video]
[7.05]
Kat Stevens: Peggy’s continued shameless tactic to lure me in with random snippets from Ibiza Anthems vol 1-4 mixed by Alex P & Brandon Block is absolutely working.
[8]
Oliver Maier: Absolute head-empty stuff. Pretty 90s inasmuch as it sounds like “I Like To Move It” for a corporate boat afterparty. In, like, Dubai.
[6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The kind of big dumb pop hit that feels all the sweeter after a half-decade of sophisticated, fashionable house music from Peggy Gou. Somehow, I feel like this is her true form — a hook-focused trickster spirit hitting all the dopamine release points as quickly as possible. Everything else — all the long-form odyssey-like qualities of her earlier work, all the couture and style and glamor — fades away. In pop music — and “Nanana” is excellent pop music — all that is secondary to the sheer sugar-rush joy on display here.
[9]
Crystal Leww: Peggy Gou has made something like five songs in like five years, and yet somehow her status in dance music is now enormous — she regularly sells out massive crowds in at least three continents despite incredible price tags (her last NYC show was on a Wednesday and tickets were one hundred and forty eight American dollars each). Yet, if you’ve ever seen a video of Peggy Gou DJing, it’s all cameras up, with no one seemingly doing any actual dancing except maybe Peggy herself. Her whole schtick is like the culmination of the blurring of lines between DJ and influencer — it’s seemingly just as important to be seen at a Peggy Gou show as it is to actually enjoy a Peggy Gou show. All this being said, all five or so of Peggy’s songs sound so incredibly warm and timeless despite the fact that they are perfectly engineered to trend chase after all. “(It Goes Like) Nanana” hops on the trance and eurodance revival that’s been percolating the last two years, with an unmissable ATB sample and yet unlike what it’s ripping — corny, goofy, silly — it’s engineered to be so cool, conjuring images of exclusive parties on yachts and perfect bob haircuts that cost $1,000 a pop. “It Goes Like (Nanana)” works because it gives anyone a chance to feel like they could be a part of that exclusivity – it’s a song meant to played in rooms with wood paneling and on expensive soundsystems while twirling around in circles with your best friends.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: She used to be good, what the freak happened? Are we all so desperate to run back to 1985 just cause Studio Ghibli was founded that year? They’re not shuttered yet!
[5]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Peggy Gou never changes, nor does she need to.
[7]
Ian Mathers: She just doesn’t miss! What’s that? Lenny Kravitz? No idea what you’re talking about.
[8]
Scott Mildenhall: Finally, a song worthy of a one-hour YouTube loop. Peggy Gou’s work doesn’t feel formulaic so much as geometric — “Nanana” has the colour and kinetics of a game of Breakout, pinballing predictably, but forever satisfyingly.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Bliss is the absence of thought.
[7]
Alfred Soto: In Peggy Gou’s eternal 1998 and 1987, plinkety-plonkety pop house is the lingua franca. I’ll admit to confusing “(It Goes Like) Nanana” and Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam.” Who wouldn’t?
[6]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: nah nah nah
[4]
Claire Biddles: The Peggy Gou: The Complete Singles compilation that comes out in 2034 is going to be the greatest dance pop album of all time.
[8]
Edward Okulicz: I didn’t have “Peggy Gou gets an actual hit single” on my 2023 bingo card, but if you’d told me that it was going to happen last year with a song that steals as much from K-Klass as it does from ATB, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. The whole song’s as slick as the little “9PM” guitar line and if it’s too soft to be a real floor filler, that seems like a decision rather than a flaw.
[8]
Aaron Bergstrom: Answering the question, “How do you get from ‘I Go’ to ‘featuring Lenny Kravitz” in one step?”
[6]
David Moore: I love the small touches in this, especially the chintzy pitch-bend synth guitar, even though this song’s massive success after “I Go” kind of feels like when a major director finally gets an Oscar for a merely competent movie after getting snubbed for their masterpiece. I’ll take it, though.
[7]
Peter Ryan: In the right light a bit of a supercut of Annie’s Endless Vacation tracks. I can’t complain; Gou’s track swells in sync with the lyric’s devolution into a heady non-verbal state. She gets it — don’t think, just move.
[9]
Brad Shoup: Now this is a Eurodance text: verb choices just a couple degrees away from expected, similar clauses chained together, a big arrow pointing at the universal hook. If ATB could clone his hit i don’t see why Gou can’t. I dunno if this is a one-off trance dalliance but if not: try “The Lonely One” next.
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: A dance song which performs its intended function ably and effectively, and which is committed to becoming a throwback club hit even as it is afraid to commit to representing anything beyond that. Those little bent synth phrases after the chorus sound cool.
[6]
Will Adams: A panoply of musical choices designed to hit every pleasure point in my brain — mindless, wordless hook; house piano chords; organ bass; synthetic guitar straight from an ATB classic — that its slightness doesn’t really matter.
[7]
Vikram Joseph: This deserves to be heard under a high sun by a glittering sea so much that, listening to it for the first time right now, I almost want to hold myself back from it so that I can save it for the summer of ’24. But to do so would be futile, because there’s nothing delayed about the gratification that “(It Goes Like) Nanana” provides. It’s so deeply kinetic, decorated with lashings of house piano, sweet pulses of synth and a fleeting quarter-century echo of the motif from “9 PM (Till I Come)”; it might have a big, dumb club-goading chorus but it’s also smart enough to under-stay its welcome. Best just to give yourself entirely to it — I mean, it’s summer somewhere.
[8]