The Sound of 2019 longlist is a not-so-longlist this year, which must mean all the chaff is gone!
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[3.00]
Julian Axelrod: It’s 2019, and passive-aggressive class-based shouty sadboi indie rock is BACK, baby! Send a page-long text to your ex! Dig your old Virgins records out of storage! Men are never the problem!
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: “Your body shape was a warning sign,” goes the first line, and the rest of the song is equally as clumsy and charmless. I like how the chorus is meant to replicate the loud-volume talking one does at noisy concerts, but realistic small talk (“How you doing? Well, I want you to know that I am doing better than I was before”) doesn’t make for compelling music. That “I’m on your news feed twice a day” is all this dude wanted to hear isn’t particularly romantic, either.
[2]
Nicholas Donohoue: This song was made for the Twitter subset who has “My DMs are always open ;)” as their description.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: How dreadful for Sea Girls that even after they got longlisted for Sound of 2019, the only recording the label provided of their new single was of drunken pub karaoke.
[2]
Crystal Leww: As it turns out, I extremely love Franz Ferdinand, I guess.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: Goddamn if the most influential band on the 2010s in the UK isn’t the fucking Killers.
[2]
Alfred Soto: The Killers are an infuriating band, often ludicrous in the wrong ways, but their frontman’s genuine envy of queer musical tropes saves them. Sea Girls are the result of a band’s envy of caddishness, as in, “Why can’t we be as macho as we’d like to be?” Answer: the nagging synth.
[1]
Edward Okulicz: This song is sending unsolicited dick pics to my ears, and I wish it would stop.
[2]