Is every day the 14th?
[Video]
[4.89]
Alex Clifton: Exactly the kind of fun, frothy disco I want for Valentine’s Day — something that goes down easy and keeps me dancing until I go to sleep. I added a bonus point because music videos just don’t have enough armour these days and thankfully Olly Alexander is working hard to rectify that pressing issue.
[7]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Somewhere in a secret bunker sipping on a mimosa, Jessie J is smiling mischievously to herself at the idea that someone has revived this concept with even less success than her.
[3]
Leah Isobel: Olly Alexander’s voice is brittle plastic; he works perfectly with Galantis’ toybox orchestra. But it’s really all about the grunt after the chorus, which introduces a sexuality that ties the song’s build-and-release structure together with its needling, needy lyrics. Campy, blunt and hedonistic, this would work great on Fire Island.
[7]
Thomas Inskeep: More like high fructose corn syrup.
[4]
Oliver Maier: Olly Alexander’s songs are superficially pretty similar to that of a lot of his UK dance-pop peers, but there’s an earnest joy at work that saves them from succumbing to the same monotony. Galantis’ delirious string arpeggios are an ideal complement.
[6]
Alfred Soto: What with his acting gigs and outsize cultural presence, I wonder whether Olly Alexander has any interest left in pop music. The synth string flourish and rattling bass decorate a vocal and lyric as detached from the zeitgeist as anything I’ve heard. He hasn’t come this far to act like a closeted gay man put in the position of having to grope his girlfriend.
[2]
Scott Mildenhall: It was a shame that two thirds of Years & Years left, but even more so that Olly seems to have joined them. There is nothing bad about “Sweet Talker” — the conventional strings loop unconventionally, and the chorus is a neat if lightweight package — but it feels like an afterthought. As with Night Call generally, it no longer sounds like music with personality, but music by a personality; an artist whose energies may now lie elsewhere.
[6]
Samson Savill de Jong: I really thought this kind of generic, copy-and-pasted, vaguely EDM-influenced “pop music sludge” sound had died a death in the late 2010s, but it’s been having a resurgence (or at least I’ve been hearing it more) over the past year. I am not for it.
[3]
Nortey Dowuona: The hopping pianos are swept up by the synth strings and the snare crack, with Olly’s pealing voice cutting through. The usually airbrushed build-up knocks him out of the way for the violins to spin atop the bass drop and the skipping drums, but once that has ended, Olly jumps back atop — before the violins kick him in the chest and into the mud, doing capoeira to the drums, leaving Olly to croon weakly over the sweeping strings as the bass gallops away.
[6]