Non-Controversy candidate…

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[6.33]

Josh Langhoff: Straight up brick and mortar pop/rock, more new wave than EDM, this song has always existed and will always exist. The lead guitar, buried beneath drums and synth, squeals because lead guitars have always squealed and will always squeal. Enrique’s “Escape” remains a constant threat.
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: The gulpy, breathy verse here reminds me of early Britney–which is some of the highest praise I can give, honestly–and the soaring euphoria of the chorus had me smiling about halfway through the first repetition. I don’t know what Dulce Maria is singing about, but she’s clearly very happy, and the music does an excellent job of communicating that feeling.
[8]

Alfred Soto: It moves with the confidence of a new decade Kelly Clarkson hit, but the mix lets it down: the guitars and synth details get plowed under.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Dulce’s frothy enough to not need that cod-Schon guitar — and as timid as it is in the mix, that’s not hard. The off-rhythm pulse at the beginning lies about the destabilization to come: the pneumatic drums and disco guitar are fresh out of the packaging.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: “Either you do it or I will” is the most natural translation of the title; fed up with a boy who stares but won’t say anything to her, she’s promising to take matters into her own hands if he doesn’t get a move on. It’s a standard pop premise, and the music is standard pop/rock to match, as machine-tooled and unspecific as that non-genre invented for the convenience of record stores.
[6]

W.B. Swygart: Likeable in an undemanding kind of way, even if it feels like it’s missing a bit of saxophone every now and then.
[6]

The perfect fall track.

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[6.71]

Katherine St Asaph: Foreboding nocturnal stuff whose idea of portent is vague koans about control and whose idea of vocal portent begins and ends with Daft Punk — of course I’m into it. Could do with more omen, more and bigger creepiness, more Covenant maybe, more standing on a moonlit clifftop crumbling loud around you to we will be the life you’ve always wanted, but this will do.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: A slightly moldy serving of kitschy NDW-infected pap that serves to stretch and twist itself out from getting too particular.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Ominous deathbots get lonely too. 
[8]

Will Adams: Dance music this dark is especially exciting to hear in 2014, a time where it seems like everyone on the radio is having the same fever dream of fist-pump positivity. “Skulls” is more nightmarish, hulking in place while granulated vocals float overhead like locusts. And as it keeps building, I’m invited more and more to move along, to become the monster.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Computer World-era Kraftwerk hearing Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” mechani-shuffle and liking it.
[5]

Brad Shoup: This reminds me of mid-2000s Ulver, with those timbres to pin you to the wall. But it’s a bit more ambient than that, declining at every turn to play up the clatter. Imagine what a really chilling Random Access Memories hidden track would sound like.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: This does not work as a single. As an intro, leading into the new version of “Monument”, perhaps it would, but in itself it leads nowhere. And yet they centre it around the possibility that “you wanna ride”! Is it an elaborate joke at the expense of the album and its antiquated approach to adventure?
[5]

Both take title seriously.

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[6.67]

Thomas Inskeep: I wish this were the first single from Kendrick’s new album rather than the snoozefest called “I.” Rapid-fire jazz dipped in d’n’b apparently brings out the best in Lamar and gets him at his lyrically nimblest. Plus, Thundercat thwacking the bass — always a plus. This is reminiscent of the Robert Glasper Experiment, particularly as it’s pinned around a superb piano riff. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: There’s novelty in hearing jazz fusion so compressed, and Kendrick’s Lamarmouth can keep up. “Proficient” sounds about right. Context is all, so if I hear this on Y-100 and/or breaks top forty I’m bumping the score.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Steven Ellison’s journey from so-so loop provider to avid J-Dilla biter to the leader of a campaign for instrumental hip-hop to go prog in all its ambition and downright insufferability (as opposed to just the insufferability; does that make DJ Shadow the rap Procol Harum?) is a crazy one. One minute his unique sense of glitchy-rhythms and esoteric melodies can seem to suggest a whole new realm of music… The next, he’s bogged down in portentous fusion bits with Thom Yorke sobbing about the relationship between krill and the sea or whatever. Here, we’re treated to his blend serving as backing to the vocal equivalent of black prog in rap, “your conscience who goes by the name of Kendrick Lamar *Lost In Space vox*”. Truth be told, it’s a match made in heaven, with Kendrick weaving poetical about mortality through the elastic slurricane of the Flying Lotus overload longtime fans are accustomed to. There’s wild solos, a terrible attempt at a juke breakdown, and a vicious pace until for a moment, the post-Sa-Ra glamorous ‘hook’ suggest a moment of pop euphoria and clarity, before descending back into the tempestuous nature of his ADD.
[6]

David Sheffieck: This sounds like Kendrick still working past the wall he ran into earlier this year, when every verse found him devolving into a furious, hoarse, monotonous delivery that quickly became self-parody. He’s showing some flexibility here, though that voice is still apparent, and just by providing some contrast he manages to make his performance twice as interesting. Conceptually and sonically, it’s a bridge between “Radioactive (Remix)” and “i”, and hopefully, it’s a signal of a return to form after a brief stumble.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Even set against this massacred drum’n’fusion, Lamar sounded more engaged on “i”. Maybe the obvious flip was a kind of mandate to be interesting. Here, he’s just gotta maintain that Adult Swim bumper feeling. The bass starts popping, and he starts to sing.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: For a couple months a couple years ago, Flying Lotus’ Until the Quiet Comes was my go-to writing soundtrack; full of enough interesting textures and shifting dynamics to keep the back of my mind interested, but unobtrusive enough to leave the foreground alone. In that same period, good kid, m.A.A.d. city was my driving-around music, an example of what good writing about the modern world could be. If this collaboration is underwhelming, maybe that’s because I’m the one who’s drifted away from inhabiting their worlds.
[7]

We kinda like rock sometimes!

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[6.33]

Micha Cavaseno: Fucking Mastodon: a band who go from an aspiring sludgy prog band to the unlikely cult metal band of an era to an even more unlikely source of hard rock jams. “Steely” Brann Dailor, arguably his generation’s greatest and once most masturbatory rock drummer and the former expulsion-artist turned sneery and yowling bassist Troy Sanders are so radio ready it’s undeniable. And the Thin Lizzy worship that these kids would go ON AND ON ABOUT, even back in the Leviathan-era, is now the holy guts of guitarists Bill Kelliher and Brent Hinds’ work. Is it as unusual as hearing “Ole Nessie” for the first time and thinking “Holy shit!”? Nah. Is it nice to see these goons are still going to make unnecessary amounts of money and maybe 5% of their fanbase will discover Today Is the Day and Neurosis? Sure. Will people jam this one? I suppose.
[5]

Brad Shoup: This would slay at my local bar: Tool timbre with Staley/Osbourne vocal drone, run through the wringer of ally politics. The wah gets a workout but everything stays tight; the solo is introduced almost grudgingly, fending off a second, hornet-sounding lead. And I’ll always be a sucker for drummers pulling double duty with aplomb.
[8]

Anthony Easton: This is more inspirational, more mid 90s grunge, and less ambitious than their other metal work. I want more songs about whales and fewer bland reassurances about how things will turn out. 
[4]

Will Adams: The extended instrumental bridge is the prize; the harmony really starts to darken, the stereo-panned guitars moving in parallel with mounting intensity. When the final chorus returns, there’s an extra boost that felt missing from the first half of the song.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Sonically this is almost exactly like the Christian rock that certain of my high school classmates in the mid-90s fervently insisted was the most lyrically meaningful and musically interesting listening choice possible; change a few pronouns and the lyrics wouldn’t be far off either. Which, for me, only emphasizes the gulf between who I was then — a homeschooled nerdatron trying desperately to catch up with the pop culture I had missed during the first thirteen years of my life, willing myself to like angsty hard rock because I didn’t know how to embody anything with more verve — and who I am now. I still don’t know how to embody anything with verve, but I do all my own brooding; I don’t need Mastodon’s help.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Mastodon, Atlantan tech-metal progressive Melville nerds, finally wrote the soundtrack to a Teen Wolf movie. They never saw this in their career goals: and yet here we are, at “The Motherload” in all its posi-riff glory. High five and hug someone to this.
[9]

Is Brawny hiring?

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[6.43]

Juana Giaimo: The charm of “Mountain Man” lies in its unseriousness. The question “Ain’t this romantic?” can’t be serious when his plan is to “grow you a big ol’ bushy beard” and his preparation was to be a beaver scout. That’s why the lighthearted melody and the playful banjo suit the lyrics well, and everything together can lead us to think if he’s maybe even making fun of the masculine stereotype.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The video shows that this is intended as ironic, and it could do with the woman in question talking back to Brody’s mocking — but think of it as a meta-text in Canadian self-mocking, and things add up to a certain joy. Extra point for how enjoyably smooth Brody’s voice is, and another for bragging about how to cook bannock — a skill every Albertan youth learns during scout camp or in their grade five unit on Metis culture. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: All those declaratives without anything to back ’em up beyond “I used to be a Beaver Scout” — this is comic country, right? The first time Brody sings “I’m a mountain main,” the guitar plunges into a mood. You start to think he’s more into growing that beard. The hammerclaw’s made of fiberglass, but the mindset’s fleshed out enough to compel. Plus, who’s singing about bannock?! 
[7]

Alfred Soto: “We can pick berries in the moonlight/I know which ones to eat” ho ho. Amiable and uncreepy, helped by banjo riffage and Brody’s commitment to acting the part of a politician eating fried racoon for the sake of a few votes.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: What exists in the space between Mumford and bro-country? Why in God’s name do we have to find out?
[4]

Will Adams: I’d like to live in a world where “girl/squirrel” is a far more common rhyme than “girl/world.”
[6]

David Sheffieck: It isn’t a surprise that the novelty song still exists in 2014, yet every time I encounter one I’m unaccountably happy: in our era of precision-targeted music, how can something so goofy survive? This is structured like a joke, or series of them if you want to be generous, and while the punchline wears out its welcome by the end, the level of commitment to the bit that Brody displays is winning nonetheless.
[7]

Put a blurb on it!

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[6.67]Luisa Lopez: Every inch as good a comeback as any wild-eyed sucker could have wished.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: Why is it here? Sleater-Kinney was always a band I missed in their prime, but I was OK with that. Wild Flag worked wonders for my curiosity, and the discography had a feeling of, “Well, this was something that reached its end.” So I’m just wondering that for a band who’d definitely reached the point of finality, why try to make something out of the ashes? And such a crude attempt to rouse us too.
[4]

Tara Hillegeist: This is how rock legends end: The Woods was a self- and everything else-lacerating spitfire, angry, tired, and full of the righteous fury of a band that gave every inch of their love to the art of noise and, finally, had enough of the art’s diminishing returns. It was an explosion made to be walked away from, and until now, that’s exactly what they looked to have done: Corin Tucker to a more personal rock and roll, Carrie Brownstein to a career as white Portland’s funniest television personality, Janet Weiss as indie rock’s most reliable session drummer. To those inclined enough to rockism to believe a band could be your life, the only right thing to do in that situation is to kill the project dead. Sleater-Kinney used to strike me as the sort of band to believe in that fully. So what does this un-death do to that legend’s ending? A reunion announcement is often to the band-as-ethos like a vampire’s kiss: sure, you’re shambling around again, but at what cost to the life you used to be? Queer and female and making it even past your middle 20s is reason enough to feel like you’ve suffered at the hands of a resurrectionist. You look back and there are dead bodies behind you. Dead friends. Good friends. And all you have to show for it are the monstrosities you wasted your lives giving all your best loves to, leaving nothing behind for yourselves but depression and dismissal. You wonder how you survived; maybe you didn’t. You want something to give it meaning, you dig inside the holes where your hearts, a succession of them, cavernous and giving, used to be. You look like you need a hero but you just want love, and the worst of it is the monster’s already there inside you, and love isn’t going to save you from this. You can’t bury friends you already lost; you don’t have what you don’t have. A song, a movie, a story, another person’s life is not a cure, your heroes are just as lost and stunned as you are. Is this a reunion that will finally be worth it? That’s too much weight to lay on a single song, though, and at day’s end that’s all this is: a song. Like none of it ever mattered at all. There are no more legends, and maybe that’s for the best. Our lives are too diffuse for it. Look back at your life and ask yourself this simple question and see if you can give it a simple answer: are you glad you’re not dead? Sorry, that was a trick question. The answer doesn’t matter, because you’re still here. All rise.
[7]

Will Adams: A rip-roaring three minutes of punchy, fuzzy rock that unexpectedly unravels in its final seconds.
[6]

Anthony Easton: I’m in Boston tomorrow, on borrowed capital from friends who have real jobs. This is my life, living in places, having other people pay, using people so I don’t starve. I have student loans from two degrees that will never result in careers. I have friends who live these barely sustaining career — from contract to part time to freelance to temp to another part time. No one writing is making money, no one making music is making money — but I still do it, we still do it. I am sure that Carrie Brownstein is making more money that she ever did in Sleater-Kinney, but I am not sure that Janet Weiss is doing well at all. Considering that she is the best rock drummer of the last 30 years, the world is profoundly unfair. So what do we do? We follow the advice here, through the intricate grid of guitars. The second global depression and the failure of social capital to make capital capital means everyone who isn’t selling shit to the very rich or pulling shit out of the ground is broke as fuck, and, “We are sick with worry these nerveless days/we live in dread in our gilded age.” Sleater-Kinney’s politics have never been as explicit or as clean as the other Olympia women, or from the Anglo-American punk precedents; they aren’t as personal as some of the bands on Merge, but they are brilliant at working the optimistic desire to continue despite the odds. So I am going to Boston, but when I am doing the daily broken grind of write, read, edit, speak, write, read, edit, speak, the chorus will continue to sustain me, into and back out of the woods.
[10]

Alfred Soto: They’re not back in the game just because the new gilded age has pissed them off. “This dark world is still precious to me,” Corin Tucker reassures listeners, and when words fail there’s still Carrie Brownstein’s effect pedals, brontosaurus riffs, and second vocals. A Yeah Yeah Yeah-esque middle eight compensates for the muddy mixes they’ve preferred last time out. Welcome back. Please stay.
[7]

JUKEBOX ALSO LIKES JAMIE T MORE THAN RETRO K-POP, SEND HELP NOW

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[5.17]

Madeleine Lee: Around the time Ailee debuted, people were still bickering over which idol singer deserved the title of “the Korean Beyoncé.” As expected, the answer was basically “nah,” and since then Ailee’s moved on to being the Korean Back to Basics-era Christina Aguilera, so often that she can now stake a claim on this sound in her own name. All that stomp and sequins is boring in aggregate, and god does this song drag when it hits the chorus, but it seems to be working for her.
[6]

Sonia Yang: A friend of mine often burns mixes of recent K-Pop hits to listen to in the car. This year has seen a glut of watery, limp ballads, a pleasant but forgettable background to our conversations, but when this song came on, it stopped me mid-sentence. What starts off as Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” turns into a sassy stomper as soon as the chorus hits. Instead of pining over a lost love that could have been, Ailee shows the ex-lover the door — and kicks him the hell out for good. She’s really bringing it vocally, belting full and fierce during the hook and dialing it down to a subtly sultry tone in the bridge. “Don’t Touch Me” is packed with attitude, and the retro-inspired arrangement sounds like the producer took cues from Postmodern Jukebox. 
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Just typing the lyrics to “Look Out! Soul Is Back!” by Nation Of Ulysses might be enough here, but just in case: It’s louder, harder, and sounds fine. But it’s boring as hell.
[2]

Brad Shoup: The claps are deployed so peculiarly, always silent on the one, sometimes missing the four. (Having people chant “clap” is way better; I wish more people would try this.) Clearly this split isn’t a hoedown. Ailee’s working a piano-soul raveup by way of Carrie Underwood. But Underwood gets to sing in the spirit of final judgment; Ailee’s broadcasting her anger and tears both.
[6]

Iain Mew: Its unrelenting angry force feels like being hit by a hurricane, and when Ailee is using controlled power to represent unmediated emotion, it’s powerful stuff. The disorienting thing is that it tries to be a song proclaiming eventual triumph at the same time as being in the moment of tears and uncertainty and unleashed fury. The dual contexts end up like a spoiler that everything will be fine, introducing a sense of detachment that the music isn’t able to do anything good with.
[5]

Jessica Doyle: Weirdly overstuffed, trying to be angry and peppy and disconsolate and rousing all at once. (It’s “clap, clap” in the background, right? But who’s supposed to clap? Not the boyfriend in the process of being jilted; and if it’s the other ladies, the unseen audience, why are they being called to clap over Ailee?) For all my grousing about “U&I” being a “Crazy in Love” knockoff, I’ve spent a fair bit of time listening to it in the time since — because at least in “U&I” the tempo slows down in the chorus just enough for Ailee to build some momentum. Here she never quite seems to be in control, and given that the song is built to sell her as a powerhouse, that’s a significant flaw.
[5]

Surprisingly, we like this guy more than Gwen now…

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[5.29]

Scott Mildenhall: Not so much a zombie as a survivor of the ’06/’07 Mockney microboom. That was aeons ago though, and again, far from a “post-teen”, he’s nearly 30. It’s a swift and welcoming invitation to a Swiftian market to corner nonetheless; an ambling, bittersweet acknowledgement of general rubbishness. On and along it chugs, and down and down it devolves into a man laughing at the nothing in particular he has to think about. Where Graham Coxon was “Freakin’ Out”, Jamie T just cannot be bothered.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: The title already suggests the lack of pulse implied by this sack of post-mod redundancy. In a post-Archy Marshall world we’re more than good, but has anyone really loved Jamie T? This kid’s attempts to fuse The Streets and Arctic Monkeys have always sounded like Michael Franti meets Gorillaz if you’re lucky, and now it’s just become a lot more traddish and dull than ever before. Oh well, maybe one day he’ll find one little subsect of Britpop where he can do more than just the cliches.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Keep your chord changes and Vincent Price sound effects. No one said a thing about singing like one.
[3]

David Sheffieck: The intro is almost painful — I came close to just turning it off when the vocal cracked on the “apart” — but Jamie T recovers well once the song kicks into gear. This is a tightly-oiled machine of a track dressed up as a ramshackle affair, and it’s surprisingly convincing in that disguise, a professional makeup artist showing up to a neighborhood costume party.
[7]

Anthony Easton: This gets very boring very quickly. If I thought he was being cleverly meta-textual, I would have liked it more. 
[4]

Brad Shoup: This is exactly the sort of mod bullshit John Peel would’ve given a 19 out of 10, but the mixture of King Krule anti-nunciation, power-pop formalism and modern melodic sense overwhelms, eventually. The romanticism of the bridge practically chastens the refrain.
[8]

Dan MacRae: Starts out drippy, veers into goofiness, ultimately plants its feet in some nicely glazed guitar-pop merriment. “Zombie” is about as revolutionary as a Clash pin on a 9th grader’s backpack, but there’s mild thrills to be plucked out.
[6]

The second video this year your editor owned an entire outfit from already (guess the first)…

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[4.10]Micha Cavaseno: While you were busy complaining about Sia, the worst voice in music has finally returned to the kingdom, bearing gifts in new hideous “exotic” accents. The return emerges with assumptions of wisdom, yodeling grotesqueness, and her usual colonialist bullshit.
[2]

Alfred Soto: On her first two records she treated genres and producers like items bought with a ten-dollar bill at a rummage sale, and good for her. Now she’s hoping for a Rihanna-Sia top five hit.
[2]

W.B. Swygart: Sassy Ellie Goulding And 27 Other Halloween Costumes That Aren’t Worth The Effort
[2]

Will Adams: Or, How Not to Do a Comeback. Reheated dancehall and Stefani singing like she’s auditioning for the role of Sia in a high school production; it’s not even worth the melodrama of a line like “if we give up, then we’re gonna die.”
[4]

Anthony Easton: This is weird. The sound is not anonymous — Rock Steady inspired, pop infused, brilliant production (see how she sings that line about getting warm) — but for someone who has one of the most distinctive voices in pop, “Baby Don’t Lie” just doesn’t sound like her. I want like a dozen other voices singing the lyrics in the midst of this updated remix of a Slim Aarons luxe-in-Mystique tropical production.
[8]

Dan MacRae: It’s a shame Gwen didn’t trot out “Wind It Up” again to see if it might fly in 2014. “Baby Don’t Lie” just strikes me as alarmingly plain. It’s the sort of song I imagine was pumped out in a cubicle to pair up with an also-ran YA film adaptation. “Check out Gwen Stefani’s new single in the trailer for Travis Crumbler: Defiler Of The Warlock’s Pastels!”
[3]

Kat Stevens: If you told me this was Serbia’s 2015 Eurovision entry I would absolutely believe you, and absolutely put money on it failing to make it out of the semi-finals.
[4]

Josh Winters: Never has Olympic ceremony-level jubilation been so misplaced, or forgettable.
[5]

Brad Shoup: She cut a big ol’ portentous blanket out of Maroon cloth, the sort of pounding, yearning New Wave track that probably should have started with that synth/human hybrid hook. The taunting bridge refers to her Neptunian pop peak, but there’ve been a lot of less interesting voices warped a whole lot weirder since then.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: I don’t know what pop radio sounds like anymore; as someone who used to keep a notepad by her bed to record every song the DJ played and now makes non-trivial income from writing about the stuff, I probably should. But I only know what pop radio sounded like in cars in the late 2000s. It sounded like despair, a determined minor key, and it felt like drive — death drive, the kind of drive best felt while actually driving. Listening to those hits produces almost a synesthetic response; each song teleports me to specific NC interstate exits. Junior year, temping at a custom-publishing company: that lonely curve of sprawl and strip malls that leads from Wendover into Burlington on which hits like “I Gotta Feeling” and the inescapable dratted “Down” felt like zombification music for dead-end commuters. Senior year, interning at the Winston-Salem paper: “I Made It” for flying smug down the power-plant parking lot expanses past I-40’s Death Valley at commute-in-the-morning with a job ahead of me; “OMG” for slumping the hour home through dry windshield heat and traffic jams, sneaking Blackberry sudoku moves and classmates’ tweets from NYC sites and DC parties that felt so distant from the stranded car and void of a love song. In Chapel Hill it was “Take It Off” and “Rock That Body” and “LoveGame,” music for determined dancing with three drinks as sunk costs and disaster at the end. In Durham it was “Tonight,” “Blow,” and “Till the World Ends,” music for relationships and jobs already rotting on the stems. Even radio’s mainstays were bleak: “Say It Right” and “Sweet Dreams” and “Disturbia” and the pinnacle of this sound — Dave Moore calls it the “Rihanna death drive“: “Don’t Stop the Music.” Gwen Stefani predates all of this, and the pop zeitgeist is too scattered to sustain a coherent mood let alone this one, but “Baby Don’t Lie” is practically a time trip. The beginning echoes the xx sample from Rihanna’s “Drunk in Love,” the spoken-word interlude its one concession to Gwen then; the rest could have been played on the radio anytime from 2009 to 2011. It would have been bleak filler back then, but I miss back then, and I miss bleak filler.
[6]

pls lmk ok…

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[7.29]

Alfred Soto: Confident and glittering, with a full-bodied production, “Let Me Know” goes for the Keyshia Cole market and succeeds. Future is less obtrusive than he sounds the first couple of times.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: An interpolation of Lil Jon’s “Lovers and Friends” plus a chipmunk’d sample from Aaliyah’s “At Your Best (You Are Love)” times an assured, sexy vocal from Tamar Braxton equals grown folks’ R&B that yet sounds youthful. The only negative here is Future, who’s not bad so much as slightly in the way — and not needed. Toni’s youngest sister can more than carry a song on her own, as she proved on her fine last album and, by all appearances, is about to prove again. 
[8]

Megan Harrington: An assist from Future is one way to hoist yourself out of the contemporary R&B well you’re drowning in, but, as usual, Braxton’s timing is all wrong. Future’s recent appearance on the peculiarly hateful “Pussy Overrated” has him on the opposite side of this lover’s anthem. He’s thin, autotuned, and faking it on “Let Me Know,” made even more incomprehensible next to Braxton’s full-throated emoting. She deserves better. Braxton wants to modernize her sound and appeal to younger audiences, but she’s not a risk-taker. “Let Me Know” didn’t have to be this unbalanced. Wasn’t Ty Dolla $ign available?
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: Is it really so ingrained in us that the male has to be a subject and not an object that we are giving half a moment’s thought to Future’s “contribution”? He’s a hook singer, pure and simple, aural decoration exactly the way thousands of women have been for songs about dude feelings. Tamar is the star here, and she knocks it pretty cleanly out of the park, taking Mariah’s signature pileup of overdubs and emotions to deliriously baroque heights.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Between the new-wave guitars cresting upon the shore while the gulls call out the memories of Baby Girl, with Nayvadius dancing around the stars (who, by the way, has been killing the R&B feature department of late)… I just want to lay down and let the tide pull me off. There’s some rarefied joy in this moment, and Tamar knows it too well.
[8]

Anthony Easton: The call and response is super tight, and her voice is exquisite. I love how public it is, and how it moves from the pleasures of emotion to the pleasures of the flesh.
[8]

Will Adams: The whistle register that pops up at the end lays bare the aspirations of this passable piano-laden midtempo number. Tamar Braxton is more emotive than Mariah Carey has been in this past decade, but Future’s presence feels unnecessary, like gilding a lily.
[6]