Hey, hey, you, you!

[Video]
[6.67]

Claire Davidson: The buzzing guitars that sear through the verses are pleasantly reminiscent of early-2010s bubblegum, a sugary approach only enhanced by the girl-group spirit of the lyrics, which see I-dle take turns in chastising a friend’s unworthy ex. Yet the chorus, which sees the group’s harmonies take a backseat to cheap eight-bit synths, makes “Girlfriend” sound like the Kidz Bop version of itself — an even odder choice given the profanity-laced bragging that follows its candy-coated mantras.
[6]

Kayla Beardslee: Soyeon writing a “fuck male mediocrity” banger is just what I needed after this week of songs. It’s silly, the drop sounds a bit shit in an endearing “this could have been released when I was 13” way, and it’s always such a pleasure to hear the members of I-dle have genuine fun when they sing. Girlboss, goofy, recession indicator — however you want to joke about it, I’m never going to get tired of seeing them create fearlessly and shamelessly. And congratulations for putting a provision in their new contracts so that they don’t have to censor the curse words anymore. Fuck it up, ladies!
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: “I don’t give a fuck about love cuz we are —” is a very funny censorship. Song’s fine.
[5]

Will Adams: Basically Icona Pop’s “Girlfriend” with the Tupac quote replaced by a bratty IDGAF hook, and just as charmingly corny.
[7]

Leah Isobel: “Girlfriend” labors to achieve the kind of rollercoaster momentum that characterized second-gen K-pop; while the effort shows, the attempt still succeeds. Wheeeeee!
[7]

Ian Mathers: Nothing about the rest of the song makes me think the chorus is going to soar quite like that, and it works: both the slight surprise on first listen, and once you know it’s coming. God knows the internet will probably make a few different things out of “your girlfriend, better than a boyfriend” (she’s like a good bae! you know, just gals being pals), but however you take it, it still slaps. 
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Superficially I am close to the precise opposite of the person being pandered to here. But if you listen enough times, it becomes apparent that I-dle are less concerned with pushing the girl crush agenda than they are with correcting, ex post facto, the people who have been mispronouncing their name for the past several years. Which, as someone who can barely pronounce his own name correctly, is more relatable than it should be.
[6]

Jel Bugle: I-dle are still in my top four K-pop groups (alongside Aespa, Ive, and Itzy), though I’m not sure the cringe edgy swearing helps this song, quite unnecessary, and it’s making an 8/10 of song into a 7/10. Anyway, still a great tune and way more interesting than a lot of modern pop songs! Plus, “Good Thing” is the superior recent song; 9/10 for that one.
[7]

Mark Sinker: Strut vs structure, structure vs strut: all these deft little passages yoked by tension together, but still the sung stretches are where they sometimes wobble and sag a little (even in the funny sung stretches). Structure as semiotic bait-and-switch (boys for girls, girls for boys): ok this business they know in their souls, no glitches there. But structure as the management of the succession of sections? Perhaps Soyeon needs to listen to more 18th century chamber music and less prog (singing-as-flaw being a very prog problem; yes, rapping is a solid modern workaround but it’s evidently not quite enough of a workaround here). Adding: as connoisseurs of punctuation within a band name, the loss of that (silent) (g) is greatly to be regretted!  “all the (g)irls are (g)irling (g)irling all the (g)irly (g)irls,” as a wise rival collective once put it.
[7]

Will we heed Nortey’s call?

[Video]
[2.89]

Nortey Dowuona: ….please, I beg you, my fellow writers. Do not grant this man the favor of a two-paragraph take down. Respond to acts of desperation with indifference.
[0]

Mark Sinker: tbh we shouldn’t let people carry on saying “I’m a rolling stone” — we shd straight away be like “ron wood is a rolling stone, yr just some guy”. anyway mgk does the taylor s push-push-push thing a couple of times, which does interest me as a fragment of modern learned delivery, but then nothing else interests me, so take him away 
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: After a half decade in the lab, MGK’s finally done it: he’s fine-tuned his level of stupidity so perfectly that he has completely eroded the lines between sincerity and irony, the two forces no longer locked in dialectical combat but synthesized into something greater. Gone are the flow-chart love quadrangles of “My Ex’s Best Friend,” the arena rock grandeur of “Bloody Valentine,” whatever “Emo Girl” and the country era were. Those songs were not, in any real sense, clever. Yet even in their context “Cliché” is beautifully boneheaded, taking what must be the product of a truly hideous songwriting camp exercise and committing to it so fully that I am fully convinced of its greatness. I don’t know if this is a great song, but I do want to give it the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize in musicology.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: If you’re gonna crib this hard from emo-pop-punk of yore then you’ve gotta have some whine in your voice. You’ve gotta be kinda unpleasant.  Something shrill and cracking. Because delivering this straight-forward sappy stuff with all the oomph of a burnt-out grocery store clerk asking if you want a receipt is just nothing, man.
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: Relient K’s “Be My Escape” is a hyperactive 00s pop-rock-arrangement masterpiece nearly on the level of “A Thousand Miles” or “Drops of Jupiter”, so I’m not mad that MGK is ripping it off.  This is entirely predictable, and lacks the desperation of my emotional support Christian rock one-hit-wonder. (To say nothing of the other song it pretty clearly copies.  Wait, what do you mean he’s stolen from “Be My Escape” before?) I don’t even hate this, but it speaks to how lazy this song is. I hate the way he says “create nostalgia”; it’s like when ChatGPT tries to be wistful and whimsical. Yeah, ChatGPT comparisons are also lazy, but that means I’m giving Melly Gelly Kelly the respect he deserves.
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: The loudest backlash against MGK’s “Cliché” isn’t from those on the margins accusing him of “selling out,” an act of which he’ll gleefully accuse himself. It’s from those on the inside accusing him of trying to sneak in. They’re angry that, in trying on a mode of music that seems consciously “above his station,” he’s violated one of pop’s unwritten sumptuary laws. A previous micro-generation may have given him a ride to the top 10 on the backs of Camila Cabello and peak ’90s fetishism, but the Zoomers are not inclined to be so generous. He’s 35 years old and, despite the KFC-esque rebrand, still has “Machine Gun” in his name, so he should be relegated to Blackbear and Trippie Redd collabs for the rest of his career; Jelly Roll if necessary. He should forever live in the shadows of Megan Fox and Eminem, not ask to sit next to them in the cafeteria. As a marrow-deep lover of pop-punk in its variously crass mutations, and as someone who typically scorns this sort of Pop Crave gatekeeping, I wish that MGK had given me a better song to be an apologist for. The best case I can make, aside from the wacky Baudrillardian brilliance of “create nostalgia,” is that the thin, watery production lends “Cliché” a wanly depressive air that’s all-too-fitting of the subject matter. If genres were personified, this would be the sound of a revivalist moment that’s painfully aware it’s nearing its sell-by date; Kelly may not be fully ashamed of what he’s attempting here, but the chorus itself sounds like it is. Though self-sabotage is a ground-level pop-punk trope, that sort of pity-making, on its own, isn’t enough to merit the underdog a free ride. Blink-182’s 2003 self-titled is a prime example of a band jumping ship from a scene they helped create, and sonically that may be what MGK is aiming toward. But Blink had a steadfast and battle-hardened faith in the new path they were knowingly forging there, whereas MGK’s career motives are revealed almost by accident: “I like that you like me.” There’s a deep honesty to that, but I’ve learned from experience that it’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to say out loud.
[4]

Holly Boson: You watched the “Not Like Us” video so now YouTube Shorts keeps showing you interview clips about ancient Eminem beef. His face is screwed up under his hat and beard — “When I wrote ‘next to Taylor Swift‘, I mean that’s not… I think I got taken out of context, ’cause what I meant was that in exactly seven years, MGK is gonna try and combine slightly punk-inflected commercial pop production and his kinda, y’know, singing voice, and people on social media will be like, ‘yo, this shit is horrible, like what the fuck’ but it doesn’t matter because Spotify decides what music kids listen to and he can get next to Taylor Swift, by which I mean in the algorithmic sense. You put on a single from 1989 and it plays a Machine Gun Kelly song next, and it kinda makes sense because it has the same chugging guitar pop thing and lyrics about love, but it’s not something kids actually enjoy hearing but maybe they don’t turn it off.” (Condescending eyeroll/blink.) “So he does his li’l numbers, and then critics will use those numbers to be like “yo, MGK is actually a good pop punk songwriter, dawg,” but those people are just pretendin’ they think that because they don’t like me and it would be more interesting if he could actually do somethin’, because his melodies aren’t as good as they used to be and he looks and sounds like an even bigger fuckin’ herb than he does now, seven years before this happens. And he’ll settle for being an artist people can put up with if they aren’t paying much attention to him, and you won’t be able to bring him up without thinking of artists people actually know who they are, whether that’s the Cars or the Ramones, or Taylor Swift, or me. Or Diddy.”
[0]

Jonathan Bradley: Arpeggiated guitar and some earnest butt-rock spoken word: the opening bars of “Cliché,” suggest MGK has designs of Post Maloning his way back to Nashville, which would be such a crafty expression of white privilege that you almost need him to be deploying that card deliberately. The dawn of Country Kelly is stalled, however, by a double-time drum beat that indicates this is supposed to be more of his pop-punk jawn, and there are some extra “getting out of this town” lines thrown in just in case you missed the design of this exercise. Are we being misdirected though? Breezy rhythm, plonky synth colorings, a tousled-haired gent out front: is “Cliché” what you get if you squeeze “As It Was” into 2025? How thoroughly dispiriting if so: Harry Styles was subject to a lot of sniffy hectoring about his stylized femme turn in those long-ago days of 2022, but with our culture in full masculine ravanchist mode at the moment, it’s hard to imagine anything so frou-frou being so celebrated in the middle of the road. Cliché is what we get, I guess.
[3]

Ian Mathers: I’m sorry, what?
[3]

Count ’em while you got ’em…

[Video]
[5.00]

Taylor Alatorre: The name “trance music” implies a transportation to a separate mind-state, where the genre’s lulling repetitions and slowly evolving progressions have led one to detach from their ordinary surroundings and become immersed in a more meditative, transcendent slice of existence. “Blessings” does indeed transport me to a familiar yet frustrating reality, namely one in which my download of a dubiously legal software crack has been stalled at 96 percent for the past three or so minutes. I really wish I were listening to keygen music right now.
[5]

William John: I encounter this brand of radio-house in almost no other context other than when entering and exiting my gym, a liminal space where Jax Jones, Cheat Codes, Oliver Heldens, and their various associates continue to rule the roost. Like its forebears, “Blessings” is inoffensive and indistinguishable, and is perhaps best described as impetus to remember to bring your headphones next time. 
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A gorgeous piece of furniture.
[7]

Leah Isobel: “Blessings” glitters like an airport runway at night: it’s really just a concrete platform, bricky and harsh, but the pianos and Clementine Douglas’ vocal performance lend it a deceptive sparkle. Calvin could make this kind of set-transition banger in his sleep, but songs like this always work for me. I like the feeling of speeding up, achieving liftoff, and ascending into the void.
[7]

Mark Sinker: The salvation of this pleasant but otherwise slight song is the squiggliness, micro and macro, of the singer’s voice. 
[6]

Julian Axelrod: I usually prefer the Calvin Harris collabs on the higher end of the star-meter, from his immortal Rihanna collabs to the tropical favor-fests Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1 and 2. But he’s found one of his best collaborators in Clementine Douglas, whose house diva purr glides across Harris’s burbling synths like a rock skipped across a digital ravine. You gotta love a song with a generic title that never shows up in the lyrics.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I hope I’m not doing the music equivalent of getting suspicious about em dashes (a noble punctuation mark), but… are we sure this isn’t machine generated?
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: The snare is so disrespected in popular music. It’s not just the upper mid sound that allows the mix’s attributes to have definition, it’s a marking of its own. Please use it wisely rather than anchoring it to the top of the mix to flesh out everything else now.
[3]

Jel Bugle: I heard a Calvin Harris song the other day, and he was doing that country music thing! That one was more memorable (a [3]) than this dance track is: a bit dull, the kind of song to boil the kettle to. Euphoric/soporific. 
[2]

Dull Alice – Wait We Actually Like This One

[Video]
[6.89]

Hannah Jocelyn: This song is insane and sounds fundamentally disjointed — I tried cutting the second pre-chorus or shuffling different sections around to figure out what wasn’t working, but it simply had to be this way. Dreamy Wolf Alice normally outdoes their British-rock-savior mode (“Yuk Foo” and “Giant Peach” are low points); this goes in a completely different direction, into the arch art-rock Last Dinner Party think they’re doing. TLDP try to be edgy, but don’t actually risk sounding off-putting. l had no idea Wolf Alice had something this baffling in them, and it’s funny that it took Greg Kurstin of all people to bring it out. 
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I do not understand the internal logic of this song at all — I am on record not understanding why Wolf Alice songs do the things they do, generally — but understanding is overrated. This has an exciting lack of sense, building from a riff that, to any rational observer, belongs on a smartphone ad circa 2013 into a rolling barrage of Ellie Rowsell’s voice, contorting and sharpening into devastatingly fine points. It’s thrilling; the only thing I’m left wanting is another pivot, a third act to even stranger territory.
[8]

Jel Bugle: It’s alright when it gets going a bit, but this is nothing that special hitting like a souped up Last Dinner Party, with a repeating groove. I just can’t get particularly excited about this one! I’m sure the fans will dig it, they go crazy! 
[6]

Ian Mathers: Did you know we’ve covered six Wolf Alice songs on the Jukebox? I sure didn’t. I also have no memory of any of those songs, and I’ve blurbed one of them! Will I remember this one? If so, I suspect it’ll be on account of the piano/beat pulse threading throughout the rest of the song. The rest is pretty good but that’s what sticks in my head so far.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Play this over this scene. 
[8]

Alfred Soto: Up for a cha-cha-cha, even an ersatz one, I enjoyed this usually feral band’s take on 2017-era Paramore genre play. 
[7]

William John: Someone more uncharitable than me might say that Ellie Rowsell’s vocal performance on this is in homage to the celebrated “holistic vocal coach”, the late Ariel Burdett. Leaving that dynamism aside, the arrangement reminds me of the angular thrash-outs on Paramore’s latest album, which mostly left me cold.
[6]

Claire Davidson: The stalking, maniacal piano chords that open “Bloom Baby Bloom” suggest a primal rage ready to erupt later in the song—why else would Wolf Alice incorporate such a deliberating alienating melody, one that feels pulled from an esoteric cartoon, if not to induce dread? Evidently, “Bloom Baby Bloom” is intended as a study in contrasts, using that cryptic opening to give way to a more ethereal hook, where vocalist Ellie Rowsell vows to use the angst present in her personal life as fuel for enacting a more sustainable form of growth. For all the beauty that’s meant to emerge from this transformation, though, the song never feels all that inspiring; in lieu of anything resembling a melody, the hook simply replaces those piano stabs with an equally thudding kick drum march, hardly evocative of the transcendence Rowsell seeks to achieve.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: Sometimes what you really need to do is combine all the worst qualities of your worst critics into a single imagined person – a surrogate hater, to borrow from Girard – and then just really go to town on them. When I’m having arguments with this person in my head, I too like to punctuate my thoughts with occasional one-second bursts of upper-fretboard guitar riffage.
[7]

Mediocr – Unimpressed… 

[Video]
[3.93]

Dave Moore: I’ve been working toward a workable definition of what I call windowpane, the uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary that is the decades-long result of convergence between mainstream pop and indie, which you can read about here if you’re into that sort of thing. There aren’t a ton of men doing windowpane, but this isn’t a very useful statistic because there aren’t a ton of men really doing anything in pop right now that isn’t post-AmIdol butt-croon. If sombr is any indication, there’s no reason for more men not to get in on it. He seems to be doing pretty well! 
[6]

Hannah Jocelyn: I was out with two musicians and my partner at the time, and we kept Shazaming the music — I slowly realized this dreamy kind of sound has become pro forma for any band starting out in the same way as stomp-clap in the early 10s or sapphic folk in the early 20s. While this doesn’t not remind me of faux-indie mainstays like Fitz and the Tantrums and the Neighbourhood, it mostly feels like a streamlined version of of what TSJ contributor Dave Moore calls Windowpane and I call Yearncore; essentially a toned-down version of the shoegaze revival mixed with a a deorientationalized variation on that wistful, earnest singer-songwriter mode (Phoebe Bridgers’ producer Tony Berg is on this track). The more I listen, the more I hear something vaguely 60s about the wall of sound, and that’s when it clicked: “Undressed” is not exactly timeless in the classic sense, but it would have been pretty good in the 60s, pretty good in the 80s, and pretty good in the 10s, so it’s pretty good now. In fact, some parts are better than pretty good! I love that Sombr visits his Mothr post-breakup, even if that’s probably just a throwaway filler line, and while I’m mostly sick of Windowpane, it perfectly captures the exhaustion of starting from scratch. 
[6]

Iain Mew: There is a diabolical genius at work in taking the airy stomp-clap offshoot best typified by Vance Joy’s “Riptide” and combining it with the fevered jealous imaginings of “Mr. Brightside”. Only doubled up, because he sees a gleam missing from her eyes and starts picturing them both with other people! Where it goes wrong is in missing the importance of “Mr. Brightside” being entirely in urgent present tense outside of one inciting kiss. “Undressed” switches back and forth between tenses oddly, and when the second verse reaches “I took the train to see my mother”, its gloomy banality takes away the possibility of the narrative working as psychodrama. That turns the bit about his partner’s future children with another man from a momentary intense delusion to a long-held outlook on life, and it’s really creepy. 
[1]

Jel Bugle: A lot of things remind me of “Somebody That I Used To Know,” not a song I especially like — he even looks like a gawky Gotye. I feel that he may be overly concerned with the physical aspects of relationships and that this could be part of his problem, but what do I know? I’m sure this will be a big hit: his voice is okay, and he’s got the look. A sketchy [6].
[6]

Julian Axelrod: Perfectly fine post-post-The Neighbourhood stream pop with a weird anti-stepchild twist? In Sombr’s defense, he was born the same year Cheaper by the Dozen 2 came out.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: I can only assume “Undressed” is a Republican Party psyop to make traditional masculinity sound good by comparison.
[0]

Kayla Beardslee: Have you ever wondered, “What would it sound like if Brandon Flowers sung ‘Somebody That I Used to Know?’” I haven’t, actually, but I guess the result is passable.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: Rhyming “mother” with “another” – yeah, whatever. Rhyming “mother” with “another” with “lover” – okay, I think that you think you’re being cute, but as long as you stick the dismount it might work out.  Rhyming “mother” with “another” with “lover” with “suffer” – I’m hitting the eject button. My fight-or-flight has activated. I need to go take a walk.
[5]

Mark Sinker: I like the holes in my sweater, just a silly thing to say about me. Unremarkable emotion from a querulous baby. 
[2]

Ian Mathers: Does the intro here and some other bits remind anyone else of “Somebody That I Used to Know”? Weird that it happened twice, huh. Just reinforces my belief that Doechii figured out a better way to work with the sample than most. This isn’t bad (some of the lyrics scream “I have very little life experience” but that’s fine! young people need music too) but most of the distinctiveness is, uh, the bit that reminds me of a better song.
[6]

Leah Isobel: Insipidly written, badly-sung drivel for the most part – which is, of course, no crime. But that “children of another man” line, wedged clumsily into the rhythm and wailed against a sudden chord progression shift, comes off as some real incel shit: here is my vulnerability. Take pity and fuck me. No thank you!
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: “I don’t want the children of another man / To have the eyes of the girl I won’t forget” may just be the single most disgusting lyric I have ever heard in a top 40 song. Along with the rest of “Undressed,” it still holds some value as a window into a very particular post-adolescent yearning for adult complexity, for a misery more profound and meaningful and hauntingly complete than any yet known. Such literary overreaches may indeed be worth of study, but preferably from a distance with all subject names redacted.
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: In a lyric otherwise characterized by deep, almost anonymous vagueness (“you’re saying to me what you’re saying to me”?) there’s something jarringly specific about the bit in the bridge where he sings about not wanting “the children of another man to have the eyes of the girl I won’t forget.” He really puts himself into the line, too, drawing out that “forget” until it takes on a load-bearing status in the song. Unfortunately, it’s a terrible line — an ugly sentiment, expressed with neither grace or self-awareness. In five years, I will probably not remember this song. If I do, it’ll be for the kids’ eyes thing!
[4]

Claire Davidson: I’m sorry, but in a world where “Sweater Weather” is the 7th most-streamed song on Spotify (?!), you cannot root your song in a robust bass line, drench your voice in reverb, and open your first verse with a couplet that references “the holes in your sweater”—and, to make matters worse, rhyme said lyric with the homophone “whether” immediately after the fact. The Neighbourhood’s brand of detached, desaturated “indie” rock looks much worse on “undressed,” though, as vocalist sombr’s palpable desperation to reunite with an ex clashes horribly with the monotonous sonic palette surrounding him, stripping his whinging of any of the drama necessary to be at all engaging.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: This would be a 8 if it was live. It’s not.
[4]

Chartsare Doomed – Horrible Terrible

[Video]
[3.31]

Mark Sinker: ‘Section 20. How the Sphere encouraged me in a Vision: “Look yonder,” said my Guide, “in Flatland thou hast lived; of Lineland thou hast received a vision; thou hast soared with me to the heights of Spaceland; now, in order to complete the range of thy experience, I conduct thee downward to the lowest depth of existence, even to the realm of Pointland, the Abyss of No dimensions. Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. Now listen.”’ (from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott, 1884) 
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Just ghastly.
[0]

Ian Mathers: What the fuck did Olivia Newton-John ever do to you, dude? (Supertramp probably deserve it a little, though.)
[1]

Taylor Alatorre: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
[1]

Kayla Beardslee: STOP INTERPOLATING SONGS THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN DONE A MILLION TIMES, EVERY DAY I GET CLOSER TO DEATH
[4]

Leah Isobel: For this kind of “you know you really want it ;)” conceit to work, it would need a performer with overflowing, undeniable charisma. Or, barring that, at least enough swagger and warmth to give off the impression that he’s actually heard of the concept of sex. Benson is not that performer; he has a strangely mannered way of singing that calls to mind an owl (“whooonce you know…”) with the enunciation tics of a theatre kid (“…all you do is push me out“). So when he sings a line like “Just relax and join my company,” it sounds like he’s making a sales pitch. Join Boone Inc.! We do casual Fridays! Still, he projects an essential decency that blunts the possibility of a harsher read.
[3]

Claire Davidson: When I first hit play on “Mystical Magical,” I was genuinely shocked by what I was hearing: how did an ex-Mormon American Idol contestant—who rose to fame from the success of last year’s most inept hit songs—find a credibly slinky bass groove to anchor his latest single? More important, how the hell did he manage to sell it, playing the flirt with just enough smirking distance to be a convincing leading man? Alas, if it seems to good to be true, it usually is, and such is the case with “Mystical Magical,” too. Sadly, the song cannot sustain that coy, push-pull dynamic beyond the verses, as evinced by its pre-chorus, where Benson Boone makes a bold leap into his upper register to announce the sincerity of his affections. The problem is, though, as “Beautiful Things” so painfully demonstrated last year, is that, while Boone is a capable performer, he doesn’t exactly have the widest range as a vocalist. As such, he’s forced to deliver these revelations in the kind of hyper-articulate falsetto you’d sooner hear from a children’s movie musical villain than a pop star on the rise. This reduces a potentially sauntering anthem into a hilarious piece of high camp, helped by neither the emergence of strings on the chorus nor the lyrical evocations of… moonbeams and ice cream. Even Boone’s promise of unforgettable chemistry sounds vaguely threatening, proclaiming that “nothing’s gonna feel right” after his partner experiences it—and, in any event, who refers to their own romantic prowess as either mystical or magical? Oh, well—if we’re settling for theater-pop, it’s still better produced than half of what’s on the Wicked soundtrack.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: After Mark Zuckerberg assassinated his character via association, Benson Boone is probably doomed to a year or so of disproportionate hate. On “Mystical Magical” it’s disproportionate for sure — the song feels like it was intended for someone else but somehow ended up with Boone, despite sitting awkwardly in his vocal range. Maybe Lana Del Rey? Not Chappell Roan, although Boone is kind of doing the “Good Luck, Babe!” cadence.
[5]

Jel Bugle: A sort of Harry Styles Magnum P.I vibe. It’s kind of flat, metronomic, a B-grade performer with a D-grade song. Mundanely miserable. 
[4]

Tim de Reuse: Some phenomena are the kind of thing you can only have one of in a track. Emphasizing the wrong syllable to force a rhyme; emphasizing assonance between two words that barely sound alike; mangling a turn of phrase to jam it awkwardly into the meter of your verse. You can do that once in a pop song. It can spice things up. It’s cheeky. Boone has elected to employ this technique on nearly every fucking line.
[2]

Alfred Soto: When he tries a star-fucked falsetto — Justin Timberlake singing “Late Night Talking” at a Memphis karaoke night — in the bridge, the sky tore asunder. 
[4]

Julian Axelrod: On one hand, hearing Benson Boone’s music without the Party City Freddie Mercury cosplay forces me to appreciate the sturdy song craft happening under all the moonbeam ice cream bullshit. On the other hand, I just have to sit here and imagine this man doing flips like I’m some kid listening to a radio serial during the Dust Bowl? No thank you!
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: What the fuck is it with flat, pedestrian drum programming outside of rap. Did pop producers forget that having dynamics and groove does not come from playing slow kick snare patterns at the bottom of the mix, especially since there’s plenty of toms, hihats, cymbals and rims to play? If this had to be an easily reproducible drum pattern for the drummer, give them a better and more durable pattern so when they get to vamp, or riff, they don’t just play by ear to juice it in the last 50 seconds before the sudden end. Evan Blair, who apparently handled the production, including the drums, couldn’t throw in one snare riff. Getting this song to work was not impossible; merely difficult, a simple matter of tom/snare/hihat/kick. Instead here is Funk Loop 5 from a stock DAW sample pack.
[0]

Hannah Jocelyn: I always saw Harry Styles’ music as like doing the same equation but somehow different results each time. Basically nothing separates his best songs from his worst ones. (“As It Was” is an accidental masterpiece – the songwriting so vague, the performance so nondescript that it somehow perfectly captured the dissociation of the Biden era.) But now I understand that Styles/Harpoon et al might be secret geniuses instead of lucky flukes, after seeing someone try so hard to recreate it and winding up with “what if Good Luck Babe wasn’t about anything?” Oh my god, this chorus is so bad, can we stop interpolating “Physical” into every pop song please?? How do you go for Freddie Mercury and wind up at Tiny Tim?? The verses aren’t even that bad! If Benson just stopped using his falsetto, it would be a Boone to us all.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: So much the sound of someone ungoofy straining for eccentricity that it does become goofy. The interpolation is less signposted than JCDecaux’d, a distraction from all the fainter things about this that feel familiar. It’s of a piece with Conan Gray’s “Lonely Dancers” and many prior American efforts, evidently borne of a land where Wang Chung were the most iconic band of the 80s. And really, would that be such a bad thing?
[7]

Joshua Lu: More AJR than Queen, slightly more enjoyable than grating. I don’t quite understand all the umbrage.
[5]

Back for another top 40 hit, six years after “Ransom”…

[Video]
[6.33]

Julian Axelrod: “Dark Thoughts” operates on two levels of nostalgia, appealing to listeners who miss Bush-era Neptunes beats and peak Soundcloud rap in equal measure. Even when he’s trying on a throwback sound, Tecca’s voice is eternally frozen in the amber of 2019.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: …are we sure this isn’t a Neptunes beat left on a studio computer that Folie’s and Lucas Scharuff are passing off as their own? It’s not a good one, I can see why they didn’t use it on a Kelis album. Tecca sounds fine.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Neptunes? Have y’all met 2017 SoundCloud rap?
[7]

Leah Isobel: Titling a song “Dark Thoughts” and then rapping “I get dark thoughts too, but I keep ’em” is fucking hilarious. I’m a little suspicious of the nihilistic turn culture’s taken in the past year, but this strikes me as more joyful than dead-eyed. At its heart, pop is escapism – let’s have some fun!
[8]

Dave Moore: Look, it’s a chart drought, I will accept every sub-Neptunes post-modal party rap. We need warm bodies!
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: The doomer rap to Katseye’s doomer pop, except a bit more literal this time. Unsurprised to discover that producer Lucas Scharff’s YouTube page is full of “THE NEPTUNES X 2000s X PHARREL WILLIAMS TYPE BEAT” type uploads.
[7]

Al Varela: We’ve seen a lot of trap rappers from the late 2010s, early 2020s fade out of relevance, and yet it’s surprising that Lil Tecca is one of the few that’s still kicking. “Dark Thoughts” is getting by off of a sticky guitar-driven beat and a tight hook reminiscent of The Neptunes, but it’s not reliant on it. Tecca himself has incredibly strong melodic instincts, and his confident punchy flows make his voice stand out among a sea of slurred, vibes-driven rappers. It’s pretty lightweight pop rap, but it’s very good lightweight pop rap! I nominate that Lil Tecca takes the pop rap throne from Drake.
[8]

Jel Bugle: The rapping’s good — flows along nicely and not too slowly.
[7]

Ian Mathers: There’s something sweet about “she got dark thoughts, let me hear some now/baby, I’ll be messed up for you” right up until we get to “I get dark thoughts too, but I keep ’em” and then it feels a little less healthy. Lil Tecca considers himself a hook writer though, and this one’s pretty solid.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: When Lil Tecca first became a known entity in 2019, it was possible to observe that he represented a certain unfavorable indicator for the long-term sustainability of mainstream American rap in the 2010s and 2020s. Here was “Ransom,” a song almost entirely devoid of qualities — a sub-Juice WRLD-ian ramble of a hook, nevertheless charming in the context of a broader ecosystem full of similarly warbling rappers, each with their own microhit. They were all drafting in the tailwinds of Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, and Juice WRLD, but waves have always had hangers-on. Yet “Ransom” rose from a minor regional hit to the top 10, sticking there for more weeks than made any sort of rational sense. It did not matter in the moment, per se, but it had the certain air of a bubble — the Pets.com of Soundcloud rap. Now, 6 years later, Tecca returns. He has gained no particular skill or distinction as a performer. He is still charming, but not in any way that I can put my finger on. He is still tuneful, but not in any way notable way. Yet he returns to a pop-rap environment much diminished. His contemporaries have made them selves irrelevant, died tragically young, or become insular superstars largely unconcerned with traditional pop success. In their wake, their inheritors squabble over petty fiefdoms while an older generation of stars reclaim vacant thrones. And here’s Lil Tecca again. He’s adapted to the times — he no longer raps over identikit Lyrical Lemonade trap, but the Neptunes revivalism here is not particular better — but the overall prognosis has gotten much worse. Here, at the end of days, Lil Tecca gets another hit. Scholars will long study how this, of all things, could occur.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: Lil Tecca really just wants you to love him, and while the desire for love and approval can lead in some strange directions, other times it can lead you to click on the first Pharrell type beat in the search results and do some standard-issue floating over it. The simplicity and unambition of Tecca’s goals with “Dark Thoughts” are its precise virtues, as is the lack of manipulation involved. He could’ve chosen to excise the four-note Neptunes intro or simply selected a beat without one, but who would he have been fooling then? Working within his limitations, he also doesn’t try to imitate Pharrell’s dry, off-center vocals or dissonant harmonies, instead using his typical rising-and-falling melodic patterns to sing-rap about getting with a goth girl or whatever. You can call this a cheapening, or homogenization, or “stuck culture”; compared to some of Tecca’s peers, I think it counts as being a responsible custodian of the past.
[7]

Mark Sinker: This jukebox has been brought to you by the digraph sh and the chords I and V. 
[5]

We like this! Fancy that…

[Video]
[8.06]

Alex Clifton: PinkPantheress feels like the light coming off a disco ball: chill, muted and glittery. And it works so well. I can play “Tonight” on a loop and end up with an endless party that somehow never bores me. It’s bouncy and flirty, PinkPantheress has a lovely and cool voice, and the production is top-tier. I’ve bemoaned the decline of bridges this week in a couple other reviews—at this point I’m convinced Taylor Swift hid the instructions on bridge-writing from other songwriters—but here I think it actually works out pretty well. “Tonight” relies on this constant, pulsating energy, whereas I think a bridge would break up the party a bit prematurely. I don’t go clubbing anymore (I’m in my thirties and always tired) but I’ll gladly have my own private PinkPantheress dance party in the kitchen. 
[8]

William John: Scene: the club. You’re in the thick of it; a fan is helping to dry out the sweat that’s beading on your forehead. There’s a rubbery bassline completely enveloping you. Then someone’s saying – singing? – something; it could be the surrounding noise, or the fact that you’re so caught up in your own euphoria, but it’s mostly unintelligible, though you sort of catch the word “superstar” a couple of times, and when you do, you feel your stomach do a little somersault. You lean in and ask them to repeat what they’d been saying, just as the beat quickens and begins to resemble a church bell removed of all reverberation. The reply you get is surprisingly forthright. “You want sex with me? Come talk to me,” they say, twirling effusively, and you don’t know whether to shut your eyes and start breathing heavily, or to open them as widely as possible. I indulge here in this semi-invented vignette to illustrate that while Pinkpantheress might, historically, have been parsed as a bedroom artist – she did start out anonymously, after all – “Tonight” is as vivid and hyperreal a song about partying as can be conceived; it’s a three minute reality show about dancefloors and all the baggage attached thereto, and as soon as the sampled string opening ends and the beat kicks in, no matter where I am listening to it, all I can see are strobing lights. The track is epic in length by her standards, but still short enough to seem like it’s over just after it’s started; she manages to run us through hedonism’s full gamut in a way that’s both pithy and extraordinarily detailed. Her anxious delivery through the verses contrasts with her punctuating every other line with nonchalant “like what?”s, demonstrating that sometimes, at the party, all you need to do to turn that tension into frisson is smile and offhandedly flick your hair.
[10]

Mark Sinker: The loop of “like what?” is the focused essence of PP. Breathy glide-and-build, distractedly fashioned from very nearly nothing and all the better for it. 
[9]

Jel Bugle: I like the conversational approach PinkPantheress takes to her vocals — it’s like she is talking on her phone at a club or something. Others will talk about her samples and inspirations; I know nothing of such things.
[7]

Al Varela: “Tonight” opens with the strings of a Panic! At The Disco sample that eventually burst into galactic synths and an infectious bounce, blasting you into the song like you’re going into hyperspace. The atmosphere and vibe of “Tonight” is ridiculously immersive, a bliss to listen to both on headphones and pumping out huge speakers. PinkPantheress is the perfect vocalist for this type of song too. Soft spoken and sweet, but with enough of a unique tone and assertiveness to her that she still stands out even within the suffocatingly rich instrumental. She’s the life of the party and she’s living up every moment of it. I heard this song being played on the dance floor of a queer party not long after it came out. That’s how you know this is a classic in the making. 
[10]

Ian Mathers: Given the number of samples on the new PinkPantheress that make me feel very sickos.jpg, it’s kind of a shame for me personally that the single is the one that did not have me hooting and hollering (no offense to Panic! At the Disco fans). She samples Basement Jaxx three times! “Illegal” is basically just a big chunk of “Dark & Long (Dark Train Mix)”! But I wouldn’t like those tracks as much either if what she was bringing to the source material wasn’t compelling in its own right. Her approach works as well, or better, for horniness as it ever did for sadness.
[8]

Kayla Beardslee: This is a PinkPantheress Song (TM). PinkPantheress Songs (TM) are generally not my cup of tea, but “Tonight” is cute and bubbly (and long) enough that bits of it have been slipping into my head for several weeks, uninvited but definitely not unwelcome. Right now it’s a perfect [7], but give me another two months and I might decide that it’s an [8]. To this Pantheress skeptic, though, “Stateside” is the real story of her mixtape (and among its many successes, on that song I’m not absolutely befuddled by whatever she’s trying to sing in the verses).
[7]

Iain Mew: “Stateside” worked its cross-Atlantic dynamic with a “Freak Like Me” sample and a pointed gap where a reference to “American Boy” might have gone in an alternate universe. For “Tonight” PinkPantheress carries on the same conversation in unlikely fashion by sampling from Panic! at the Disco’s Pretty Odd, the most Britpop-indebted American album ever. Which is cool and also one tiny detail of many, just part of the textural background to a portrayal of moment-to-moment mutual infatuation that’s like Charli XCX’s “What I Like” if it played even more on being simultaneously chill and frantic. “You can ruin my makeup […] you can even ruin my life”.
[8]

Julian Axelrod: PinkPantheress has such a good ear for the tiny details that elevate a song from catchy to transcendent. Sometimes they’re just accent pieces, like the mood-setting Panic! at the Disco sample that probably accounts for 20% of her mixtape budget. But the most integral elements are the pieces of her perma-fried brain that get mixed into the melange. I’ve heard big-budget pop albums that don’t have a single hook stickier than the way Pink says, “Like wha?” She gets away with songs this short because she makes every second count.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: She’s graduated out of aural wallpaper entirely. This is PinkPantheress as fully operational pop superstar, studded with so many hooks that she tosses off great ones — the way she says “like what?” between lines alone! — as if she doesn’t even need them. If I read this too closely, analyzing it forensically versus any of her previous work, I’m not sure I would find that many changes of note; perhaps the bassline is more insistent, the tempo and intensity dialed up by a few ticks. Instead, the triumph of “Tonight” is only recognizable when you zoom out and give yourself away to its groove, the thrilling alchemy of desire and uncertainty that she manages to communicate with understated charm.
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: The voice that slides between the bass squelches is engineered by PinkPantheress herself, and is often sheltered by filters and reverb, but neatly compressed throughout. Each take is either propped up in obvious cuts and overlapping directly into the next, especially for the pre chorus, or simply skids through the top of the mix all tranquil. There’s the customary Melodyneing, making the lead vocals feel so smooth on the eardrum, there’s slightly panned and lowered adlibs that pop out just beyond your ear, there’s the backgrounds lowered 3 semitones swaddling her chorus vocals. All takes thus spark little moments of bliss, each perfectly inserted and arranged to not quash the sleek rhythm Pantheress composes with Count Baldor, Aksel Arvid and PHIL. Thank u Nickie Jon Pabon; your dedication is noticed. Now if only you could mix Jack Harlow’s lead just a bit lower…
[9]

Claire Davidson: On a website that primarily covers pop music, is it hypocritical to complain of a song’s ephemerality? Perhaps, but the best pop at least aims to capture something in the zeitgeist, to compel the listener to remain engaged in its emotional landscape, no matter how familiar. PinkPantheress understands her craft, and it’s tough not to be allured by “Tonight.” The song’s bubbly, house-adjacent groove simmers beneath her sweet paeans to a distant lover, the musical equivalent of cheekily batting one’s eyelashes. I have some quibbles with her delivery—her softer enunciation doesn’t lend itself well to the faster verses’ flow—but I admire the song’s subtle bait-and-switch in how PinkPantheress swerves from passive pining to assertive control, almost daring her prospective partner not to show up for the affair she’s planning that night. Yet “Tonight” operates at such a cool remove that, while I can admire the song’s siren call from afar, I’m hardly ever enthralled by it, despite the urgent passion you’d think the song’s subject matter would inspire. Whether that’s a testament to the PinkPantheress approach or an indictment of it depends on perspective; personally, I like my pop music a little more intense.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I’ve heard the dance beat and keyboard in the first 15 seconds in some variation in Miami bars for 25 years, and when PinkPantheress enters with her high scratch-whisper she sounds like she AI-ed herself. That’s fine. Some performers sound most themselves when most anonymous.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Pink’s voice has a crystalline quality that really suits this kind of frosted-glass house. If anything, she could stand to be more anonymous here. 
[8]

Leah Isobel: What is a PinkPantheress song without the juicy layers of psychodrama? Not bad, it turns out!
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Don’t get it twisted; PinkPantheress knows the score. At any given moment she is acutely aware of her music’s place in the pop landscapes of past and present, hence her mostly feigned sensitivity over the trivial issue of song length. Also hence her 2023 song “True romance,” a straight-up teen groupie fantasy about a famous musician whom the singer has been a fan of “since 2004” (Victoria Walker was born in 2001. Take her seriously, not literally). It’s the existence of that song which makes “Tonight” that much less ambiguous in its tables-turned, all-glowed-up narrative, stripping any metaphorical gloss from the line about posters in her bedroom. She references P!ATD and Kings of Leon without deferring to either, and she giddily tries on a skeevy male rock star mode of businesslike flirtation, or at least her imagined version of it. The song is less about sex than its intertwining with celebrity, and how newly acquired fame can enable the crossing of status boundaries once thought impermeable. This crossing is not frictionless, however, despite the volley of coquettish interjections and hopscotch basslines that are meant to fool you otherwise. The object of affection may be a “superstar,” but the narrator still fears she is not, because what sort of superstar would admit to vomiting before a casual rendezvous? Still, she soldiers on regardless, her voice betraying fear and confidence in equal measure, her echoed “yeah”s serving as nimble reminders of an ideally charming self. Likewise, PinkPantheress herself soldiers on, almost certainly aware of how the chorus of “Tonight” can and will be heard by some listeners as a sexual come-on to them, thereby securing her own role in this unbroken libidinal chain of pop idoldom. You could even ruin her life (well, not you, though).
[8]

We could describe everything with one single number…

[Video]
[5.20]

Katherine St. Asaph: One point to justify each point:

1) “…the victory of a nihilism from which it will take us years to recover, if we even can.”
2) The 2010s were apocalypse pop; the late 2000s were recession pop; the 2020s are doomer pop. “Indie sleaze” revival, JADE’s schtick, this, that’s enough examples to get me a cushy trend-forecasting job right? (Not an example: Brat — too carefree.)
3) A preliminary theory of doomer pop: it’s the bigness of apocalypse pop without the earnestness (perhaps it’s closer to trollgaze), and the mean self-aware trashiness of recession pop with a vague, purported social consciousness. Emphasis on “purported”; coming from Alice Longyu Gao it’s a parody of Los Angeles girlies from the inside, but coming from HYBE and Geffen’s spokespeople it becomes toxic industry selling us its toxicity, although it does bang. 
4) Alternatively, considering that this originated on the Chainsmokers’ TikTok, this is basically “#SELFIE.” (The Chainsmokers do not seem to be directly involved, if that makes you feel better.)
5) The directors of “Bad Romance” and The Substance are owed some royalties from the video.
6) This is also basically “Sexy and I Know It”; I looked up, with some trepidation, what Redfoo’s doing these days, and the answer is playing tennis. Good for him.
7) Half the YouTube comments point out the bifurcation of the glowing comments of the past week-ish vs. the disgusted YouTube comments from last month. I’ll have you know that I speedran that whole trajectory in 1 minute.
8) That YouTube clip closed with an autoplay ad for Ticketmaster, which feels tonally correct.
[8]

Ian Mathers: The Tesla thing is a nothingburger (you can’t even call it clout chasing or whatever), so we’re left with… what? Both this and “Touch” are fun as hell and sound great, and crucially they do both of those things in extremely distinct and different ways. I see in the comments a lot of people who apparently only like certain types of music complaining about this song, and that’s pretty gnarly in its own right.
[9]

Leah Isobel: God bless the gooners, the stoners, the girls on molly at the club, the go-go dancers, the servers and hostesses working on three hours of sleep, the cam models, the bedroom DJs, the influencers, the menaces. God bless everyone seeking a real thrill amidst a culture of ironed-out irony, flattened flatness, listless listicles, affected affectlessness. God bless every girl who’s entered into the fucking entertainment industry, knowing it’s extractive and manipulative and cruel but hoping their dreams can still be real. God bless the joy of getting everything you want and the terror and rage of knowing that it’s not enough, can never be enough; god bless the sadness of losing the game (because you know it meant something) and the sadness of winning (because its meaning was in the act, not the outcome). God bless the broken fourth wall, the arch engagement-bait that loops back around, and the choreography you had to practice for a year and a half until you got it right. God bless boba tea, fried chicken, and – oh my god – that new beat. God bless the true subject of pop music: the almighty sensation. God bless “Gnarly,” the worst song I’ve ever heard.
[10]

Will Adams: Oh my god, shoes.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: How do you go from making this to making big fish theory throwaways for ransom K-pop groups? And why are they good?
[6]

Iain Mew: Co-writer Alice Longyu Gao has done songs in similar sonic territory before and since, but in the specifics, the exact robot voice and the first-line boba, it’s hard not to see the influence of Babymint. Where Babymint frequently use the contrast between sweet and obnoxious sounds in ingenious ways, though, the closest “Gnarly” comes is a contrast between obnoxious and even more obnoxious. The result is that it’s merely pummeling when it should be thrilling.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Sorry — point of clarification: is being “gnarly” good or bad? Furthermore: is “Gnarly” good or bad? What’s happening?
[5]

Jel Bugle: The words are not good — why are they singing these weird things? There are some good bits, but I can’t see them competing with K-Pop groups with a song so weak. I feel like they risk alienating potential fans; they’ll need to find a more subtle way to be in your face.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Through the scrunches and crunches a sound emerges, not unattractive. What else?
[5]

Alex Clifton: “Gnarly” is one of the few dance crazes to hit my TikTok algorithm. I’m usually fed a stream of cat and cooking videos, so it made me sit up. The frustrating thing about “Gnarly” is that the chorus is so damn good and hooky, but the rest of the song just doesn’t live up to the promise. It’s nothing new—plenty of songs have gone viral on TikTok thanks to a slammin’ chorus and not much else—but the verses of “Gnarly” feel particularly half-baked. The opening lists a bunch of things that are supposedly gnarly: boba tea (sweet and tasty, not exactly super hardcore), Tesla (quite the choice in 2025), fried chicken (??????), and partying in the Hollywood Hills (too many syllables for the line, although the only thing that may actually be gnarly). Frankly this should’ve stayed a draft until the writers could’ve come up with something stronger to string together with this gloriously big, dumb chorus. The overwhelming effect is not “the shit,” it’s just kind of shit. 
[4]

Kayla Beardslee: This song makes me think mean things about the people involved in its cynical creative decisions. I will not say them: I’ll simply say that I don’t think that’s the mark of a particularly good song.
[4]

Mark Sinker: “Are you OK?” a character in Tom Hardy’s TV show Taboo asks another. The series is set in 1814 and no one (screams your maddening anachronism radar) said “OK” like this yet — it emerged from a silly Boston-New York banter-fad in the 1840s. Gnarly was 80s surfer slang, did it came back? If I’m post-punk enough still to be happy when song-topics shift away from sex or romance, but I’m also post-punk enough to demand that speculative street philology submit to street peer review (maddening radar ahoy). Or else range beyond one random word: now do spiffy, clipping, all sir garnet, boshta, socko, gear…!  Now do random!! This does seem like it’s buzzy-crappy enough to get a [10] from me. Except it’s just so indifferently will-this-do? What happened to Pinkydoll anyway? I liked her. 
[1]

Al Varela: Unlistenable. They reheated Blackpink’s nachos except they let it cook for twenty minutes so the microwave is a sticky burnt mess. Can’t even bother to make its embarrassing lyrics even a little bit funny. Absolutely not. 
[0]

Claire Davidson: I won’t pretend hyperpop is the most coherent genre, but what makes the sound click even at its most absurd are the half-dozen layers of irony that usually accompany the material, allowing every strange turn of phrase to become fodder for the most pit. “Gnarly,” by contrast is a Frankensteinian hybrid of product placement, rich-girl posturing, and general obnoxiousness along with K-pop’s earnest theatricality, which only calls further attention to every lyrical non-sequitur and bit of dated cultural appropriation. (I understand it’s Manon who adds the “gang, gang, gang” ad-libs, but since she’s the only Black member of Katseye, the moment still feels token and laughable.) I could just list every ridiculous line in this song and call it a day: equating boba tea, the Tesla brand, and fried chicken in the same verse? “Hottie, hottie, like a bag of Takis/I’m the shit”? Opening a verse by calling presumptive audience members “fucking boring, dumb bitch[es]”? But what really sours “Gnarly” for me is that it pairs its hyperpop affectations with the most ill-fitting, garish K-pop tropes imaginable, incorporating blown-out synths and doll-like stuttering of the word “na-na-na-na-na-gnarly” in the same breath. Purposefully bad music gaining traction is nothing new, but in an industry as meticulously manufactured as K-pop, there’s something especially cynical about building a song this brazenly unlistenable and hoping that the inevitable controversy inundates listeners with its perverse earworm potential. I know it’s bait, but I can’t ignore my own ears.
[1]

Taylor Alatorre: F*CK U ALICE LONGYU GAO YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3
[9]

Be sure to watch the lab safety video before hitting play…

[Video]
[6.00]

Ian Mathers: We’ve now covered three Mariah the Scientist songs on the Jukebox. All three have been excellent, and all three have made intriguingly different uses of their razorwire melancholy; the mid-collapse fury of “Reminders” and the postmortem tenderness of “2 You” here replaced with a steely grasp of something still very much alive. But even so there’s a reserve and defiance that indicates she’s not to be fucked around on: never has “I’m all wet” felt like less of a surrender.
[9]

Leah Isobel: There’s a strange harshness here — might be a mixing issue? The high end has an unpleasant sibilance that takes away from the song’s attempt at slow-burn sensuality. But I like this kind of straightforward pop-R&B on principle, and I unreservedly dig the string arrangement, which provides a certain daydream prettiness. We could use more of that.
[6]

Iain Mew: The strings and electronic chug appear throughout but never break out, keeping everything as a constricted smoulder. Dynamically it’s really interesting and works fine with the melody with a hint of “Summertime Sadness,” but all the references to cold sweat and wetness and fire-breathing creatures don’t go anywhere with it. I think she knows that a blue flame is hotter, but the metaphor and emotional through-line are both muddled enough that the song ends up lukewarm.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Oh cool, Lana Del Rey&B.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Can anyone actually confirm that this is the real Jetski Purp? pls help
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Even if Mariah the Scientist is just the capitalist realist SZA, I’ll still always be a sucker for a well-placed violin outro.
[6]

Jel Bugle: A scientist in terms of experiments that need to be repeated over and over. This sounds quite harsh and robotic, slightly monotonous — you wouldn’t listen to this for fun, would you? Still, her voice is nice.
[6]

Mark Sinker: “A blue-colored flame only emerges when the excited molecular radicals become dominant.” Fact-check: not a scientist. 
[6]