But we never change…
[Video][Website]
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Inspiring, uplifting, and motivational — in the most impersonal and corporate of ways.
[4]
Samson Savill de Jong: Meaningless drivel dressed up to sound like it’s important and profound.
[4]
Alfred Soto: An anthem for anti-maskers who still felt twinges of gift after shaming us.
[3]
Will Adams: After more than 14 months of a pandemic, I’d expect songwriters to come up with sentiments more profound than “some will take their last breath while others breathe new life.” Or maybe the profundity was there, but it got sanded down as much as the stadium rock production to make it more “universal.” Nothing’s changed, yet things are different. Why say anything at all?
[4]
Ian Mathers: Musically this is whatever but lyrically I need to know if anyone sat them down and played them “Incredible Thoughts” because “we have GPS and yet we’re still lost” is pretty much the level this is hitting on.
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Thomas Inskeep: Fair-to-middling ’80s pastiche, but at least you could make a video akin to this one to it.
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Vikram Joseph: Given how hard lead singer Ryan Hennessy appears to be leaning into Bono’s aesthetics in the video, it doesn’t feel too unfair to draw comparisons between the two Irish frontmen — most pertinently, that Hennessy is channelling the vapid self-importance of mid-late period U2 with uncanny accuracy. There’s nothing inherently bad about their slick, stadium-oriented, synth-flecked sound (though there’s not much to recommend it, either), but Hennessy’s insipid insights into the pandemic are painful to endure. They span the full spectrum from empty platitudes (“some of us will lose ourselves while others rediscover” — gosh, Ryan, tell me more!) to delusions of grandeur (“I’ll be the light/if you follow me, I will be everything you need”), with a particularly ill-considered detour involving a line about how “they’re standing on our necks.” (From four white guys? Really though?). Bono would be proud, I’m sure.
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Mark Sinker: Thesis: “just cz things are different, don’t mean anything has changed” Antithesis: “if you follow me i will be everything you need” Synthesis: faking geldof-bono syndrome as a joke, for clout
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