We’re hard on the follow-up to TSJ’s best song of 2014.
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Josh Love: This is de la Torre doing Lana Del Rey but with an infinitely lighter touch. “Use Patron to clean the wound” is the best lyric here, but where Del Rey would’ve really labored over it like she was trying to pick up a sponsorship, de la Torre gives it an insouciance that underscores the joke.
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Luisa Lopez: Sofi de la Torre has a voice that sounds like flowers growing out of sandpaper. It’s beautiful and everything behind or around her works to keep it afloat, building scenes of empty cities or dirty beaches and beats recreating the lovely little noises that grow in the moments that pass on your way to sleep. The actual song almost feels secondary, and even though it’s executed with excruciating tenderness there’s always a triteness in love songs, or can be, somehow, even if it’s just a thought. The song seems to know this and fades into an ending just as passion might have taken over.
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Katherine St Asaph: Sometimes you hear a song, and get the undeniable sense that the artist would sound the same, make the same record, whether they devoted themselves to a particular scene, went through years of label retooling, or stayed locked for decades in the suburbs or workforce or Mars. Other songs sound as if the year and its trends are dyed into every note. Usually when people talk about this it’s to say the former’s better/harder/more authentic, but I disagree — one does well to invent an aesthetic, but can do just as well to be swept along by one you know can do that. “Vermillion” was the latter sort of a song as lonely dance, and “What People Do” is the latter as lonely blog-R&B; but it seems less of a kind with Jhene Aiko and her legions of imitators than singer-songwriter stuff, as in with the ice-and-big-boys posturing and 808s-ified vocal processing I swear I hear both Kate and Tori references (lyrical and musical, and I’m them leaving unexplained hoping anyone else picks up on them; basically, this must be where all the influences people swore they heard in FKA Twigs went). The central hook’s familiar enough — I swear I’ve heard it on radio a decade or two again, in some hit — but not quite polished, nothing quite minimalist. The result’s a fragile beauty that’s close enough to the lyric I’m going to call it a deliberate effect, pulled off successfully.
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Anthony Easton: Dull, precise, quiet, Sofi wants us to think that the song is deeper than it is, so she hushes it into a somnolent ego trip.
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Alfred Soto: Sufficiently R&B in sonics and approach that I think de la Torre chickened out by using those vocal filters.
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Micha Cavaseno: This is what pop sounds like through the filter of guilt smothering one’s joy.
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Dorian Sinclair: It’s hard not to compare it to “Vermillion.” Both use chilly production and de la Torre’s sighing phrases to give a sense of an outsider looking in. But where the isolation of “Vermillion”‘s narrator was apparent and external–these streets weren’t meant for me to walk–“What People Do” is more ambiguous. It’s obvious the narrator has found a place in the most material sense (“it’s cold/whatever/I’ve got leather”), but something’s still missing. The recurring “that’s what people do” reads as a statement, but it’s sung as a question–implicit in de la Torre’s delivery is not only the unvoiced “isn’t it?” but also a more complicated query: if that’s what people do, why isn’t it enough?
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Will Adams: If the anxiety of “Vermillion” turned into wallowing, perhaps. But “What People Do” is a cut above the bleak pop that Tove Lo has been flogging for several singles. The Lorde-esque aspiration/resentment for luxury (“I’ma play golf with the big boys”) and low-end heavy mix are there, but it’s Sofi de la Torre’s jagged vocal that cuts the deepest.
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