Also an improvement from last time, albeit with a lower bar to clear…
Melody Esme: I first heard “Lose Control” at a karaoke bar, sung by a woman with serious pipes who stole the entire night. When I listened to the song proper, it was an enormous letdown, totally lacking the gravitas of that performance. That night will probably influence my response to anything I hear from Teddy Swims for the rest of my life, so I guess take it with a grain of salt when I say: this also should have been sung by that woman. Or any woman. Or just someone with a voice capable of actually selling a soul record, because this is pathetic — like what would happen if Bruno and .Paak were late for a Silk Sonic session so Hozier filled in for them.
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Taylor Alatorre: “Teddy Swims” is properly the name of a Warped Tour wash-out who went on to do production work for Hoodie Allen and Blackbear; it’s not a name fit for a somehow depoliticized version of Hozier. But if “Bad Dreams” commits the sin of being lucratively boring, it at least avoids the pitfall of investing its copycat motions with any kind of extra-musical significance. Where Hozier cried “power” in a creaky set of quotation marks, Swims quietly sues for peace. Surrender in the face of an unwinnable battle is no vice, no matter how strong the stink of cowardice.
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Alfred Soto: I hear Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” in its lilt and the grain in Teddy Swims’ tone, not to mention its evocation of impending doom. Like “Crazy” it acknowledges futility. Eat, drink, and pine, for tomorrow we will die of measles.
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Ian Mathers: I still hate this shit, but maybe it’s a sign of how much worse everything has gotten that it doesn’t even make me mad anymore.
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Jeffrey Brister: My brain craves novelty, of which this song contains none. A thin, self-consciously ’70s production (that sounds exactly suspiciously like a Halsey song)? Wow! Soulful white boy without distinguishing characteristics? Wow! Rote and flat lyrics carried by a passable vocal performance? Wow! I want no more of this!
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Nortey Dowuona: One of the greatest powers of the (seemingly) unaltered voice is that when it strikes an emotional chord, you know it’s actually raw, the most direct and immediate reaching out from the person to you, you and even you, reading this website because you searched something related to hot singles and wound up here. Swims is one of those singers — a YouTube comment from Nothing-H6i called him the reincarnation of Joe Cocker (slow down, comparison is the thief of joy) — but his unaltered voice, especially in a live setting, is both deep and strong. The lyrics were written by Swims along with Sarah Solovay aka Solly (writer of this twee little gem), Mikky Ekko, and Rocky Block (co-writer of this Lil Durk song used to comfort the Theo Von/Adin Ross demographic, which I like a bit since the guest singer apparently sounds like a goose, as well as a bunch more songs you’ve never heard). Every time Swims interprets this song, he reaches for pathos and empathy, a plea for help, a naked vulnerability that either lands face first and pitiful or wide eyed and sweet. It really depends on whether the voice in the listener’s mind should be spliced, diced and re-filtered to escape the limits of the human voice and take it into strange, inhuman, cyborg places, or spliced, diced and re-filtered to represent the living experience of one big, bald, tattooed Englishman singing to you in a small café and moving the patrons beyond belief.
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Dave Moore: Thank you to the human Shazam network of the internet for identifying “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits as the guitar line that was driving me crazy, but that really doesn’t do justice to how wholly pilfered the rest of the song is, too. And yet in the back of my mind I know if Adele did it I’d think it was one of the best things she ever did.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I get no enjoyment at all from listening to this. Every pained vocalization, every flanged guitar stab and demonstrative snare hit feels empty to me; whatever feelings Swims has do not survive transit. And yet, I feel a certain perverse respect for “Bad Dreams” despite all this. Perhaps it reminds me too much of the soul revival tracks that my high school pop ensemble teacher favored, the Fitz & The Tantrums-alikes that I dutifully jammed out to for four years. It’s not a style that moves me at all anymore, but as I listen to “Bad Dreams,” I can almost conjure bass tabs and keyboard charts to memorize and devote myself to (and can imagine the students of a semester from now who will be playing along to teenage takes on Teddy Swims’ adult melodrama).
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Katherine St. Asaph: There’s probably an optimal level of Teddy Swims melodrama, such that I might actually enjoy him, but he hasn’t hit it yet. “Lose Control” was ridiculous; this is blunted.
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Claire Davidson: I actually quite like the gentle, contemplative guitars that drive this song, but “gentle” and “contemplative” are not words that should be used to describe a track whose lyrics revolve around begging a lover to stick around, much less one helmed by someone with as huge a voice as Teddy Swims.
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Mark Sinker: If you passed Teddy in the street, would you expect a trifle this pretty coming out of his mouth? But it is just a trifle, and you’d remember you passed him long after you’ve forgotten this.
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