Could’ve been… more bubbly, perhaps?

[Video]
[5.33]

Ian Mathers: “No, I said I like Go West, and even then I meant the Village People song the Pet Shop Boys covered, not a band.”
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: I honestly wouldn’t have expected a Colbie Caillat-and-friends-and-lovers country quartet to sound much different than Colbie Caillat, but this is delightfully surprising — much more Little Big Town than Jason Mraz. The harmonies are tight, the song is well-written, and the production sweet. Like with Darius Rucker, this genre slide-over feels much more organic than contrived.
[7]

Alfred Soto: It draws buckets from the same well of wist that Little Big Town and Lady Antebellum frequent. The harmonies signal the inseparability of lovers who couldn’t be. Sappy and inoffensive.
[6]

Michael Hong: This reminds me of “What If I Never Get Over You,” another question posed by a country group this year that dwells on lonely uncertainty and past regrets. Like Lady Antebellum, the draw is in the interplay between the vocalists, and Gone West’s harmonies are remorseful without being overblown. “What Could’ve Been” may not have anything quite as memorable as the pounding drums of “What If I Never Get Over You,” but its spacious arrangement paired with the group’s harmonies lend warmth to their collaboration.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: This has lovely verses which rest on a he-said she-said (though it’s largely in agreement, is there such a thing as a they-said?) told with expert bittersweetness. Alas, the chorus is overripe with cliches and feels sappy. To be fair, the verses lean on shopworn words too, but they’re put together artfully. Ah, nice harmonies, mind.
[5]

Leah Isobel: As authentipop-gone-country crossovers go, this is no “Leave the Pieces.” The mutual projection in the line “you’re on the mend and I’m on the bottle” adds a welcome bit of texture, but the rest of the track is too sanded-smooth to make an impression.
[5]

Do you keep them in a jar?

[Video]
[6.00]

Tobi Tella: Connecting her relationship to all the other people in her life, the intimate details that you share, the way that you open your past to others is a powerful idea. It gives the song stakes, something I feel modern country can lack way too often. It’s a little on-the-nose, but the strong concept carries it through, and Ingrid sells it.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Few songs limn the tension between moms and daughters, fewer still on the frustrated love without which the tension wouldn’t exist. I wish “More Hearts Than Mine” had lingered on this dynamic, but Ingrid Andress has the rest of the family to introduce to her new boyfriend. Striving for the specificity of a solid country song, “More Hearts” settles for rote characterizations: of course Dad will pretend not to like him and sis will ask a million questions (she rhymes “tires” and “ice and,” but kudos to the image of Dad offering the guy a cocktail). And why the hell would she claim the guy will break more hearts “if they break up”? How’s that relevant? The piano plays, as these developments have prepared us for, an average melody.
[5]

Hazel Southwell: Just listening to this has made me incredibly stressed about the idea of Ingrid’s invasively nosy family and the way they apparently interfere in relationships.
[4]

Josh Buck: “If I bring you home to mama/I guess I’d better warn ya/She falls in love a little faster than I do” is one of those lyrics that is so precise and evocative one wonders how it survived until 2019 without being written. I love this record with my heart, not my head. It brought me back to formative moments with the families of the southern girls that I dated throughout high school and college. A mom who stayed up late to help me with algebra homework, a dad who taught me how to shoot a gun. Dinners with the family, where I experienced a kind of worldliness I never knew at home, dinners where the dad would foot the bill and mom would give me drink recommendations. I don’t know if Andress has anything else this good in her arsenal, but I know I’ll be crying to this one for years.
[9]

Thomas Inskeep: Sara Bareilles with a country twang, and I’m okay with that. Starts a bit too much like a power ballad for my taste, but gains steam as it goes, and the chorus is great.
[6]

Oliver Maier: Some really lovely details in the first verse, torpedoed as the chorus rolls around and “More Hearts Than Mine” reveals itself as a baffling preemptive guilt trip. I’m no expert lyricist but surely there are better ways of teasing out nice details like the overenthusiastic sister and tsundere dad than tacitly threatening your partner with how sad they’ll all be if things ever go down the toilet. The melody and Andress’s performance are pleasant enough in isolation, but telegraphing this much post-breakup bitterness (“I’ll be fine“) with no breakup apparently in sight is nothing if not a huge red flag. And the drums sound dreadful!
[4]

Isabel Cole: What makes this is the performance: Andress’s voice, lovely with an occasional lonesome creak like a familiar floorboard, sounds so sorrowful it imbues the song with all the tentative hope and secret fear of realizing you’re crossing the line past which you can no longer escape unscathed, so that the titular line comes across as displacement for everything left unsaid in the lie, “if we’ll break up, I’ll be fine.”
[7]

That’s what we do here at The Singles Jukebox…

[Video]
[6.17]

William John: Having been awed by “On My Mind” and her appearances on Drake’s More Life, and underwhelmed by everything since, it’s pleasing to hear Jorja Smith do away with lethargy. Burna Boy was always going to provide an adrenaline rush, but Smith’s tumbling pre-chorus alone is enough to inject “Be Honest” with a spirited warmth.
[7]

Oliver Maier: I find both Jorja and Burna so likeable as to occasionally be rather boring, but they both do pretty well here. Jorja exhibits some Rihannesque sensuality and echoes of Corinne Bailey Rae in the way that her accent slides in and out and livens up her delivery. She’s trying too hard to sell effortlessness though, and it’s Burna Boy who convinces more, gliding as he does over the sticky beat and not being saddled with the tedious chorus.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The baleful influence of Solange extends to Jorja Smith’s uncompelling clenched-teeth delivery of this plaint. I mean, that guitar arpeggio deserves a complement.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: A kneading guitar melody opens the door, with Jorja gently reclining on a smoothened, slim drum track while yearningly asking for the very simple level of honesty, which loops slowly under her feet as she begins calling UberEats. The UberEats driver desperately tries to escape Burna’s massive feet as he immediately starts smoothly and gently crooning half truths, one of which destroys the UberEats drivers engine, which makes her angrily stomp to Jorja’s front door and throw the jollof on the doorstep, but it simply floats right into the room, through the slightly ajar door.
[8]

Michael Hong: Jorja Smith’s voice glides with intense heat while Burna Boy’s flow trickles like syrup across the dancehall beat combining to make something refreshing — like a hot summer day spent floating lazily in the pool.
[7]

Iain Mew: The call to be honest comes from an interesting position of mixed weakness and strength. It says “I’m here pleading to you” but it also says “I know your secrets.” Jorja Smith wrings out the tension from that gap, and it makes the song a little more than insistently middling. That and the cool rat-a-tat percussion punctuation.
[6]

Partirò means partirò…

[Video][Website]
[4.00]

Ian Mathers: All I can muster for this turgid pile is “great voices, beautiful voices”.
[3]

Hazel Southwell: This is absolutely not my bag on any level but it extremely is the bag of the massive demographic that both listen to musical soundtracks and love The Killers. It does what it does with almost cynical precision and both Bocelli and Goulding deliver performances that are the opposite of career-defining but craft the theatre expertly. Prepare to hear it as the soundtrack to many, probably very happy, first dances.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: For years, Sarah Brightman was my favorite musician, yet virtually the only intersection she ever had with the world outside my laptop speakers was the Andrea Bocelli duet “Time to Say Goodbye,” which I despise. The song is not single-handedly responsible for wrenching classical crossover away from the likes of Malcolm McLaren and The Fifth Element and other actually interesting music — for that you must blame the Three Tenors, or the advertising industry’s ’80s trend of mass-commercializing arias. But the song compounded that tranquilizing, balladizing, McMansion-gala-with-fake-columns-izing, desexing (ironic because it’s removing the sex from opera, doubly ironic because one big name was a sexual harasser for decades and another has been whispered about for years), and adult-contemporizing effect, a hollowing out of the genre that will persist as long as the boring stuff has a relatively massive audience, which it still does. Ellie Goulding has another, largely separate massive audience, and a separate musical style — these days, more like five. So you’d think “Return to Love” would be the sort of futile grab for Adult Hits radio play that the likes of Céline Dion or Renee Fleming occasionally attempt. But no, “Return to Love” is a return to standard Andrea Bocelli, and here Ellie Goulding in particular sounds startlingly like Sarah Brightman in pop mode. It’s an act that sounds like it took a lot of conscious effort, and you can hear the spots where Goulding’s voice slips (like the sudden shipment of avocaydies in the first few notes of “no, I’m still afraid”). I’m sure it’ll get her the “wow, she can really sing!”s she undoubtedly seeks, although given how low she’s mixed, maybe not. The arrangement takes no chances, but that’s only half the reason why I despise “Time to Say Goodbye” and dislike this. Like the earlier duet, this is a presumably dramatic lyric, only given a dramatic arrangement for like thirty seconds, mixed like everyone’s ashamed the strings started sweeping and the music started swelling and the beat started to almost exist. It’s classical crossing over to Christina Perri; I would legitimately rather hear Andrea Bocelli ft. Juice WRLD.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Ellie Goulding’s chalky yearning works fine. The problem is the star’s overqualified pipes, quashing the banalities of what he might think is mere pop. When the reverse happens — see Donna Summer’s “I Will Return to You” — the results are better. 
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Return? When you said partirò it sounded like you meant it. In fact, nothing here really suggests you’ve changed your mind.
[3]

Stephen Eisermann: Like a duet from a Disney animated film, where it’s very easy to tell who the professional singer is and who the professional actor is. Ellie doesn’t sound bad, she just sounds oh so out of place. 
[3]

Alex Clifton: So you’re telling me this isn’t an advert for PBS’s winter music specials? From a technical standpoint it’s quite good, but it’s a long ballad to slog through and I don’t have the patience to return to this song again.
[3]

Perfume ads are made of this!

[Video][Website]
[6.00]Edward Okulicz: Less a song than a collection of sounds stolen from 80s teen-pop and early 90s dance. Of course, it’s a collection of wonderful and kinda underused sounds in today’s climate. Just the rapid-fire pre-chorus and the cheeky hints of “Push It” make this worthwhile.
[7]

Tara Hillegeist: A veritable human league of eurythmic proportions, at Hollywood levels of glossy, plastic perfection in its pursuit of the pleasure principle. Are Dal*Shabet trailblazers for a new romance, or just trying to sell me a new perfume?
[8]

Anthony Easton: Sometimes too much is not enough, and sometimes too much is too much. If this was cut in half and everything was stripped except for the “oh baby, oh baby” chorus, I might be in love.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Massive intro synths and metronomic percussion augur a track of video game precision, capped by the English cry “I can’t take no more!” The results are closer to Sweet Sensation than Exposé.
[6]

Jessica Doyle: This is one of two retro-gloss female-group songs with an English phrase repeated after every line currently getting attention; the other is Spica’s “You Don’t Love Me.” And Spica got the more cohesive (albeit less interesting) package. “You Don’t Love Me” is slower, in a style with much more room for call-and-response. That’s harder to pull off in something so synth-driven. Here the chorus takes advantage of the informal Korean word for “you” (, or neo) and strings it to make na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, and it’s great! The momentum is building in a way to make Pete Burns proud — and then they have to stop to hit the b’s. It’s okay. It’s pretty close to awesome. But not quite there.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Just imagining the windup to the triple-time bridge made me throw out a pack of cigarettes. It’s still a nakedly desperate move to spike a club-pop xerox. At the end, though, they let a phrase go on a couple beats too long; that’s where the distinction was hiding.
[5]

Madeleine Lee: It’s at 2:40, after the false ending, that “B.B.B.” gets weird: the middle eight’s pitch warps in and out like a damaged vinyl, the vocal effects sound hand-cranked, and when the beat comes back, that’s when you start noticing the Depeche Mode darkness in it. It has the desired effect of making you replay the song just so you can be pulled in by it again, and the undesired effect of rendering the first 2 minutes and 39 seconds tedious, to say nothing of the awkward speed-singing.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Nothing but K-pop retromania, but nothing but the hits: Salt-n-Pepa, New Order, early Madonna and a pinball machine that just flashed a jackpot.
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Like last year’s GLAM single “I Like That,” here a South Korean girl group takes on the pep of freestyle and gives it a dose of relationship worry. “I Like That” was a manifesto for post-relationship independence and accepting the terror of singledom; here Dal*Shabet map out the moment a relationship begins to sour, making it the precursor to GLAM’s mini-hit. It sticks closer to the freestyle template than GLAM did, but finds space to modernise it — scrunched-up speedy deliveries, passages of brief atonality in the middle eight — without betraying its immediate charms as a parade of outré dancefloor moves.
[8]

Strings? Stevie Nicks?

[Video][Website]
[6.50]Scott Mildenhall: There are so many brilliant individual lines in this, two words in particular summing up how almost everything about it directly hits the spot: “sacred simplicity”. You can go a long way with such a succinct sentiment as “no place I’d rather be” as a hook, and when you add in the violins, the piano, and those rhotacisms of Glynne’s, you do go even further. Clean Bandit know exactly what they’re doing.
[8]

Iain Mew: The first thirty seconds of “Rather Be” is divine, a state it largely achieves through restraint. It’s there in the perfectly placed silence and in the brevity of the string figure before Clean Bandit reconfigure it into floating bubbles of synth. Most of all, it’s in the way Jess Glynne makes “a thousand miles” sound buoyed by love to be just as light. When it builds into a neat but more conventional pop song and she sings “we staked out on a mission to find our inner peace”, I want to reply that they already found and lost it.
[7]

Alfred Soto: “Sacred simplicity” is Jess Glynne’s mission as statement, connecting string samples and 808s and house pianos. It’s such a nineties throwback it even evokes affirmative crap like “You Gotta Be.”
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Oh, those strings are so unnecessary besides surface-level sophistication. Yet “Rather Be” is nice dance-pop that doesn’t need to be muddled up by such sounds.
[5]

Megan Harrington: I know this song is using bloopies and violins and Jess Glynne to manipulate me into feeling like my life is a commercial for the McDonald’s breakfast menu, but I’ve been feeling for weeks (or since her Stevie Nicks-officiated wedding) that I really miss Vanessa Carlton and that whole Starbucks pop gang. As long as “Rather Be” is playing I’m ok with pretending that I have the golden bang:face ratio and I’m telekinetic with my cat and I have a boyfriend whose glasses match mine and strangers think it’s super cute. I like this fantasy world filled with major chords, slightly soulful voices, and dappled sunshine. Believing in the utopia of true love and togetherness for four and a half minutes isn’t so bad.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Love the combination of Glynne and that piano; they lean into that chorus with the same vigor. It’s forceful and light, a rush of assurance and lovingly tendered violin. I’m not sold on the verses (at least the parts not backed by strings), but maybe they just suffer by comparison.
[6]

Been listening to the radio, she has…

[Video][Website]
[5.00]David Sheffieck: Disappointingly generic for Kylie, with “I’m still here holding on so tight” only the first in a string of lyrical cliches and the strings that follow shortly after one of many weak production choices. This is a solid song, but it’s a solid song from someone we all know is capable of greatness – and someone whose last single was a delicate and strange departure from the dancefloor that prominently featured múm. I didn’t expect “Into the Blue” to be a continuation of the sound she explored on “Whistle,” but I expected at something least slightly in sync with its sense of adventure: “Into the Blue” is catchy and Kylie’s vocal is typically strong, but everything else here seems like a decision was made to avoid taking anything approaching a chance.
[5]

Anthony Easton: I am impressed at the sheer longevity of Kylie’s career, and how her shifts have been relatively gradual. There is an argument here against the radical or the chameleon, as well as the oldies nostalgia circuit. But I wonder if the latter really exists.
[7]

Tara Hillegeist: Considering she’s done so well at retaining her name as the queen of exactly where that strain of popcult you may as well call “electropop” has been and gone for so very long, it feels very strange to say this, but I’m pretty sure Kylie Minogue’s farts are more listenable than her attempt at mimicking Ke$ha and Katy Perry on “Into the Blue” turned out to be.
[2]

Alfred Soto: In 2007 the syncopated electronics would have suited the times, and to Minogue’s credit she ignored the times and released “2 Hearts.” Now she plies this generic EDM with little but the memory of a polyurethane insouciance.
[5]

Brad Shoup: As a more modest take on “Unconditionally” (thanks, Jake; that was killing me), it’s already a winner. Not so much as the union of classy strings and EDM headache. She slipped from blue back to RedOne.
[5]

Megan Harrington: My assumption is that this was greenlit as the single based on its compatibility with the greatest number of radio formats. You could play this before or after almost anything and be assured its algorithmic blandness would never nudge your listener back to consciousness. But radio, pfft, right? So how many Beats Music playlists do you think this qualifies for?
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Strings! An instrumental version of this alone would work very well, the sort of thing that would be perfect for round-ups of all the latest curling action in Sochi (likely dull, given it will of course have to be played to Russian “tradition”), but the glory of the chorus and its swell into the title add something vital. The standard issue First Phonics space-fillers are a slight drawback, and some of the verse lyrics are a bit lacking, but that that’s so easy to overlook says a lot.
[8]

Will Adams: “Nothing to lose,” indeed. With such little risk taken, there’s virtually no payout. Pretty melody, though.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Sophie gets the drippy late-career languor, Kylie gets the backing vocals from a Cobra Starship demo. Does longevity count for nothing anymore?
[3]

Back after three years to make her third appearance on the sidebar…

[Video]
[7.45]

William John: The most enthralling Ngaiire moments are when she launches like a rocket, fearlessly, reminding the listener of her awareness of dynamics and the way that power can be wielded for dramatic effect. “Shiver” shuffles along moodily, until the cup runneth over with about a minute left and it hits you “right between the eyes.” Here, Ngaiire throws her head back and commits to a howling loop befitting the song’s haunting subject. The result is enough to blast any unwelcome demons out of sight, and to at least raise the eyebrows of any friendlier spirits in her company.
[9]

Hazel Southwell: This is every deep tone, keyboard like a threat under the bubble of the vocal. It’s a crush you know you ought to fight, it’s the electric thrill of making some new decisions that people would tell you not to, it’s the prickle of feelings springing like green shoots where you’d been carefully curating fallow husks. It makes me want to go and misbehave.
[10]

Joshua Lu: “Shiver” is a slow burn — it slinks by, with Ngaiire’s steady coos pushed by an incessant snare drum and faint handclaps. The chorus lies past the three-minute mark, and it hits like the song’s coming up for air, as the vocals quicken in pace before gradually fading into melodic wails. The payoff isn’t as powerful as what such a buildup warrants, but it’s still enough to make you shiver just a bit. 
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I like the series of repeated synth notes that occasionally appear — they cut through the song’s pleasant atmospherics. Sadly, “Shiver” lives up to its title: you can feel something when it happens, but I’m not left thinking about it after the fact.
[5]

Alex Clifton: Smooth as a good glass of wine, and makes me feel just as buzzed. A lovely song with a wide range that never feels showy but makes you feel disappointed to hear silence once it ends; I immediately played it again, and I hope you do, too.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: A verse of low, doomy piano and palpable tension, there with the best of those; I can’t tell whether the rest of the song delivers on it or lets it die, but at home in flannel pajamas isn’t where or how I’m going to figure it out.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Less manic than “Diggin’” and “Once,” this track by the Papua New Guinean singer doesn’t shiver so much as simmer, thanks to a beat that alludes to “Matador.” Too low-key for its own good even if I’d known nothing about her. 
[6]

Julian Axelrod: When’s the last time you heard R&B this antsy? The synths mutter like a migraine, the percussion putters like impatient fingers, and the backing vocals battle the main melody like a mind at war with itself. The only constant comfort is Ngaiire’s voice, which is as incredible as every other blurb is sure to mention: clear, controlled, and strong enough to crush a crystal. She’s the truth.
[7]

Kylo Nocom: Billboard equating the importance of the last time Ngaiire released music with the election of Trump is a bit much, but “Shiver” is a fantastically desperate dirge that’s best heard at late night or early morning.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Shuddering, slipping drums carry a arching, heaven lidded-drum track with loping, one-sided percussion as synth progression hops around with big owl eyes, and a warm, synth bass smothers it with slithering trance synths popping in. Ngaiire, on the other hand, slowly ladles her heavy, aching croon slowly through the verses, lifts it a bit as the chorus hits, then layers and drizzles during the bridge and outro. This little scalding drops from her higher register, which fades as she squeezes out the last drop.
[7]

Isabel Cole: I’m having trouble identifying what precisely I find so utterly captivating about this — something about the tightness of its structure, maybe, broken at just the right times with a lovely unspooling that mirrors the story being told of a desire that undoes you amidst the world’s unceasing noise; or how effectively the vocals layer on each other to fill up the landscape; or those deep dramatic piano notes anchoring the verses, and how they drop out for the smaller, tenser headspace of the chorus. I don’t know what the magic ingredient is, but I keep coming back to it.
[8]

With Lauv they made it wrong…

[Video]
[4.00]

Alfred Soto: I like the world’s most popular K-pop act when they record rhythmically complex tracks, not when they chill out into nothingness. 
[4]

Tobi Tella: BTS acclimates to the US pop music climate perfectly by making a chill pop song with no distinct qualities that I likely won’t be able to remember the melody of in a day.
[3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Lauv’s songs are frilly and vaporous, memorable for their simple earworm hooks and minimal instrumentation. It makes a ton of sense, then, to have him hop on a song that’s very much in his wheelhouse. The problem is that he sounds bored, and is generally unable to emote in the way that BTS effortlessly do (that’s less a knock on him as much as a note about his shtick being diametrically opposed to BTS’s). The original sounds like more than Sheeran-written schlock because BTS vocalize in diverse ways, each rapped verse and sung vocal suffused with drama to flesh out the song’s simple lyrics. BTS collaborations often reveal how little the boy band needs other artists to make their songs better; “Make It Right” is the most egregious example to date.
[3]

Alex Clifton: I was bored when “Make It Right” was released originally and I don’t think the addition of Lauv saves it. He’s there at the beginning and disappears, much like the Desiigner feature in the “Mic Drop” remix. The rest, I think, would be good for a band that wasn’t BTS, and I feel let down if only because I think they are capable of much stronger songs. Also it is co-written by our old friend Ed Sheeran, and while I am happy that BTS finally have the opportunity to work with international artists they love and respect, I really didn’t want an Ed Sheeran K-pop song, like, ever. The boys should stick with Steve Aoki, as he’s shown he can bring out both their rough and tender sides with nuanced production and an eye on each member’s strengths.
[4]

Michael Hong: The original version of “Make It Right” created the illusion of closeness through its close-mic intensity; however, it also reduced each vocalist into an echo of themselves and blended them into one identity. The rappers grounded the track with some seriousness, but it was V singing in his breathy lower register who gave the song its much-needed gravitas. “Make It Right” loses this by replacing the first verses with Lauv’s whine of an intro and crosses into insufferable.
[3]

Josh Buck: If 2019 wasn’t the year that BTS fully exploded to *NSync or Backstreet Boys levels of North American fame, it was the year they worked most shamelessly in that direction. And the results have been largely satisfying. Their collaborations with Halsey and Charli XCX are among the year’s best pop songs, and they linked up with Juice Wrld for a track that impressively showed off the boys’ range. Unfortunately, this link up with Lauv doesn’t reach those heights. Dusting off the most generic (but still smooth) Ed Sheeran-written track from their Map of The Soul: Persona EP and adding the equally generic Lauv, “Make It Right” never quite gels. Lauv’s verse feels awkwardly jammed in, and he disappears after the first hook, giving the whole track an unfinished, late-era Kanye vibe. It’s a clear play for US radio, but the result might be the weakest BTS track of 2019. 
[4]

Hazel Southwell: I think I probably find this boring because I don’t fancy anyone involved and there’s really nothing wrong with making songs that do something for someone who fancies you. So I absolutely don’t mean that as a criticism; if I wanted to bang any of BTS or Lauv then this would be a lovely crush-spiral of gorgeous seduction, all neon and sparkles in exactly that sweet-spot way that lights you up if it hits you right — and leaves you not exactly cold but definitely not having the same experience if it misses. Your feels may vary.
[7]

Not quite the complete package…

[Video]
[4.22]

Thomas Inskeep: Four-and-a-half minutes of cough syrup, with about as much to say. The woozy groove is nice enough.
[4]

Oliver Maier: “DHL” seems to disintegrate in real-time. This would be a riskier choice coming from anyone other than Ocean, who happens to know how to wield negative space to compelling effect. If the first minute and a half is a little ineffective — too close to the vibey anemia of A$AP Rocky’s Testing, perhaps — then the remainder is more successful, with Ocean’s gloomy triplet flow becoming more engrossing the longer he commits to it. Not that he uses it to say much.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Another year, another Frank Ocean track that we take seriously because in a career marked by adept self-presentation substituting for often maladroit songwriting he has written a handful of good to great songs. “DHL” emerges as another gesture, a series of discrete verses assembled atop a languid beat. The stream of consciousness names German delivery services, boy toys who give head like Hoovers, and career overviews. Compelling as description, not a listening experience, even if I grant him points for fading the track as it gets interesting.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: This probably makes me a hopeless old millennial, but back in my day Frank Ocean was a songwriter.
[2]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I was OK with the prospect of this being a mood piece; during the first half, Frank’s warbling is easy to stomach in this sea of hazy instrumentation. But then, for some inexplicable reason, everything recedes to make his rapping the main focus. And man, this dude cannot rap.
[2]

Kylo Nocom: You all posted Frank’s “Oldie” verse so often that he thinks he should start rapping again. A disgrace. If the opening seconds of retching don’t make you gag, you are a stronger person than I ever will be. His ability to make a song as numb, effortless, and formlessly horny as this and still receive relative adoration is a testament to how far name brand recognition can go.
[0]

Jackie Powell: Is this song simply Frank Ocean feeling himself? While Ocean’s delivery throughout the four-and-a-half minutes is indolent, he’s probably as confident as I’ve heard him, especially when he ends rapping: “Got my partner in the front, been my BF for a month/But we been fuckin’ from the jump.” I’m really tempted to read more into these lyrics, but I think this is Ocean sharing something rather intimate instead of substantive with listeners. And that’s a shift for one of the architects of modern Sadboi music. But on this track, intimacy and substance aren’t mutually exclusive. But how seriously do I take Ocean and his love for a German courier company? Apparently, there’s nothing sardonic about this obsession. The thrill to receive something new is an extended metaphor for a drug trip or maybe more? There’s no real melody here, but what comes closest is when Ocean leads with a sound that is reminiscent of a Peter Frampton voice box song over the lyrics: “Love that I, love that I give/That is not love that I get from you.” Those distorted vocalizations in the intro were probably the product of co-producer Boyz Noise, who gave this track a little more punch and a sizzle. Ocean is an album artist and so far this single, coupled with his new confusing queer nightclub, shows little synergy. But his track record leads me to believe that this era’s beginning isn’t meant to be the be all end all.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Wafting, apple-pie synths hide like ghosts being Frank’s ghostly wails as a thudding, limp drum progression rides on a flat pancake bass loop with acidic synth washers rain from the sky. It circles Frank as he turns, then walks into an open-mic night with a bass guitar and a loping drum loop playing from his MacBook Pro in Logic, while a small mouse pulls out a modular synth and starts fiddling with it. For some reason, they sound great together, and they start playing in turn, with the gerbils who own the club crowding around the stage and singing along… “I’ve got a pack!!”
[6]

Tobi Tella: Strange, disjointed, and more optimistic and carefree than we normally hear from Frank. It’s more Endless than Blonde, and while that might throw some people off, I’m intrigued to see where he goes from here.
[7]