But would we invite this family for dinner?

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Thomas Inskeep: From the first listen to Puff’s MMM mixtape — a top ten of 2015 and better than expectations suggested — this was the highlight, leaning more on the side of ’80s funk than ’90s hip-hop, with a bass line to die for (and Puff knows about epic basslines). Ty’s slickly-manipulated vocals are perfect for this groove, which damned near could’ve come off a 1983 Midnight Star album; Gizzle fills the role of Ma$e (tell me I’m wrong, I dare you); and Puff knows (or at least thinks he knows) how to make the ladies swoon. 
[9]

Micha Cavaseno: Puffy knows, man. Satan hasn’t been the king of pop-rap-auteurism (SORRY YEEZY) for this long. So he gets Ty Dolla $ign and says “No, I don’t need you to craft a ratchet-type record for the clubs… I need you to be my Carl Thomas.” Meanwhile he has some kid named Gizzle sounding like Black Rob if Black Rob had to be as much of a soft-hands as every rapper is expected to be these days. Meanwhile, Puffy gets to play hedonistic maniac goof in a way Kanye doesn’t let himself do without being stern and sour apples every other second. It’s the rare-refined pleasure of this weird boogie groove getting a sloppy celebration from people who have the confidence to construct a banger that has no place in the self-aggrandized nature of rap in 2015.
[7]

Brad Shoup: I’m happy as anyone for Sean’s mid-career renaissance, but I have to draw a line at funk bass over an atomic puppy of a beat. Also what man in his forties says something like “I brought drugs to the party”? A narc, that’s who. Ty channels Kells while saying things Robert would never say; everything here sounds like shit recording artists thought would have sounded cool the night before.
[5]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Puffy’s name may come first in the credits, but it’s Ty Dolla $ign who owns this 80’s-indebted, nocturnal funk track. Cody ChesnuTT’s clattering “Boyhood in America” beat is beautifully enhanced by TM88’s spacey Disco production (and that bassline is enormous!), and while Gizzle and Puffy sound a bit disoriented at times in their verses, Ty’s amazing soulful breakdown in the end makes up for those inconsistencies. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: For Puff to mimic fellow non-rapper Drake makes sense. To sweeten the deal, he non-raps and non-sings over slap bass and harmonica like it’s 1984. Ty is alright.
[5]

Cassy Gress: I have known Puff Daddy as “the guy who did that song I HATED” ever since I was 18, and in a fit of pique deleted “Bad Boys For Life” from my “everything I ever heard on the radio” mp3 collection, because I was so annoyed at the way the guitar riff drags a bit behind the drums.  Drove me nuts; I wanted to buy him a metronome.  So, here I am, now 32, thinking, “It’s silly that I’ve held a grudge against Puff Daddy for so long over a song I had to look up on Wikipedia to even remember what it was. I should give this an honest chance.”  NOW THE SINGER IS DRAGGING BEHIND THE BEAT. I give up.
[3]

Anthony Easton: Quiet, repeats, doesn’t become hypnotic, yet isn’t quite dull. It’s a curious attempt at making less from more. 
[6]

And Josh mentions Exposé’s most obscure top ten.

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Mo Kim: Mirrors “I Feel You” in several ways: the ’80s throwback concept for an aging Korean girl group, the title, the way the first four measures of each take time to announce themselves. But where “I Feel You” reveled in the smooth, sensual pleasure of desire, “Someone Like U” oozes with a joyful contempt instead, from the tongue-in-cheek name-drop of Brave Sound to Rap Kween $erri’s squawk of “HEY GO-MEET SOMEONE STUPID LIKE YOU.” The cowbell has no qualms about announcing itself; the horns sound like they’re being blasted out of a cereal box; the vocals move from chanting the chorus in a stadium-ready middle eight to slinking across the dance floor in the final moments, tossed off rhythmically but a little pitched, as if you’re yelling across the room to your friend about how little you care about it all. It’s all a bit garish, a bit oversaturated, but catchy as hell and in my early running for “best songs of 2016 to walk to in a huffy-puffy manner.”
[9]

Madeleine Lee: The elements are great: the use of the “Think (About It)” break for the intro, the little horn and vocal riffs scattered throughout, and of course that chorus — which is the only part of this song that I can reliably summon up from memory, and the rest of it turns into “I Feel You.” I don’t know what it is that makes these great sounds evaporate when they’re not directly in my ears, if it’s the flatness of the non-chorus melodies or the sheen that Brave Brothers puts over everything blending it out, but given the general enthusiasm I’ve seen this song receive otherwise, I’m willing to say the problem is me.
[6]

Jessica Doyle: That first verse is terrific. The last 45 seconds or so, when the singers drop back to ooh-ing and aah-ing us out, is catnip to those of us whose impressionable minds were too firmly molded by horns back in the actual 1980s. The middle is where the overstuffed cake collapses on itself. (Make the second verse either fast and squeaky or conventional, but not both; and if you’re going to give Subin half the chorus, make it the first half and let her build up; coming in at top speed following Woohee, she sounds strained.) Blame Brave Brothers, and bless Dal*Shabet: they don’t have the name recognition or Big-3 backing of Wonder Girls, but this has three times the energy of “I Feel You,” the substance where the earlier pastiche just offered form.
[6]

Cassy Gress: One of the best late ’80s pastiches in a while and a surprisingly vicious kiss-off song. Serri’s rap is sharp as hell; the male voice doubling hers lurks menacingly.  And her voice just explodes on “ije jinjeoriga na! I don’t freakin’ need you, ni geojinmare soreumi na!” I almost feel bad for whatever I did to piss her off.
[8]

Josh Langhoff: One Saturday morning, shortly after I’d started listening to current pop radio, Shadoe Stevens played Exposé’s “Tell Me Why” on his countdown and everything about it — the collisions of all those voices and synth lines and thwap! beats in syncopated patterns, locking and unlocking, daring me to guess their next moves, thrilling me when I guessed wrong — took over my body and sent me bounding across my bedroom. I know this couldn’t have physically happened, but I have a clear memory of running up my wall and sticking out from it, all perpendicular-like. This song is like that song. Only faster.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Many times in the last decade I’ve resisted eighties sounds because I don’t wanna be Jann Wenner with his beloved sixties. The horn and beat syncopation sure is punchy in that 1987 freestyle-influenced way, no question, but unrelenting too: it never lands.
[6]

Anthony Easton: This moves quickly; even the spaces that are supposed to be rests are unrelenting. Ending with a cymbal crash is punctuation to a specific, ordered excess. 
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Cover Girls divided by JJ Fad equals further evidence that K-pop is killing it right now. Max Martin ain’t got nothin’ on this.
[8]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The similarities between this and anything on REBOOT are enough for me to realize how much ahead of the game the Wonder Girls are. Still, the unusual vocal harmonies (particularly, the processed, slightly dissonant voices in the pre-chorus and the low-key male voice accents) are splendid, and the synth-brass lines are nice (although i still believe real brass would work much better here). Other than that, “Someone Like U” doesn’t offer much, but that semi-rap at the beginning of the second verse will get this one an extra point. It was quite a pleasant surprise. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Disney party disco, with the whiny rises and pitched-down vocals of current chart pop. Can’t say the latter would ever improve on the former.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: When the Amen Break kicks in at the beginning, I’m not necessarily prepared for Debbie Gibson bops. Nonetheless, the production here by Brave Brothers (a crew whose work on singles I’ve never been fond of save for Sistar’s “Ma Boy“) is consistently leaving little earworms, whether cowbells, drum breaks or cavernous backing vocals. A straightforward track, notable for the retro-feel and the persistent energy, but in being so streamlined Dal Shabet manage to have a significantly solid pop roller that holds more than a few surprises.
[8]

A.W.E.S.O.M.E.

[Video][Website]
[8.00]

Will Adams: This song makes me want to writhe violently on a jungle gym for hours, and I hope that makes sense because I really don’t know how else to describe it.
[8]

Iain Mew: The rhythmic intro synth line makes me picture dashing footsteps, and the track lives up to their promise of action big time. Repeated listening hasn’t unpicked the lyrics’ tight knot of horror, thrill and diffidence, but it’s perfect over such a non-stop thrill ride of a track. There’s no space to catch a breath, and it leaves behind a sequence of images that adrenaline hasn’t allowed to be processed yet.
[9]

Alfred Soto: How you respond to “Kill V. Maim” depends your tolerance for Claire Boucher’s vocals at its pipsqueak best, fucking with gender like the Raincoats did with “Lola” to incarnate a dude who thinks that riding Franz Ferdinand riffs (played by Boucher) gives him the right to do what he can.
[7]

Cassy Gress: It warms the spiny cockleburs of my heart to hear a tiny pixie voice screaming about the ever so sad plight of men who have to take responsibility for their actions. And man, when she loses the squeakiness at the bridge, along with the drums and guitars and most of everything, she suddenly turns into a 90s trance vocalist, and it’s perfect and wonderful and I just, yes, this song.
[10]

Jessica Doyle: If “Artangels” is Exhibit A in People (Who Are Done With This Precious Shit) v. Grimes (“Everything I love becomes everything I lose”: the likelihood of someone making such a statement is inversely proportional to the likelihood of its being true), then this must be Exhibit B. Over a relatively bland background she poses, struts, growls, shrieks, cheers, swoops, all for the sake of — what? Damned if I know; I’m too busy rolling my eyes at that “B-E-A-J” part. Which I have heard a lot lately, since I keep playing “Kill V. Maim” while walking around, tolerating the shrieking and swooping to get to that chorus, in which her voice sounds like it’s shredding the very air around it; and then to her whispering we can make them all go crazy like it’s a promise just for me.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Art Angels was one of the best albums of 2015 because any album whose sheer force of aesthetic can make a song about Al Pacino as a gender-switching, spacefaring vampire into something that large swaths of people adopt as, to paraphrase a style writer I follow, “part of them before they even knew them,” *has* to be one of the best albums of the year. And any song that combines female-fronted power-pop, steely sequencers and cheerleader chants is almost guaranteed to be one of my favorites. (I literally just got what the B-E-H-A-V-E was riffing on, and I *was* a cheerleader. R-E-S-S-I-V-E!)
[9]

Danilo Bortoli: Reading, a few months ago, what a colleague of mine had to say about Studio Ghibli films — and, incidentally, fantasy in film in general — he convinced me of the veracity of a very weird idea for me until then: fantasy is not exactly “surreal,” an escape from reality, as most people tend to believe. It’s the opposite: fantasy and creativity are, more often than not, indicative of the abundance of reality. God knows the world is a mysterious, cruel place and not even a million years of hard, dedicated study will make us able to understand even a grain of sand and its overall meaning. So I admire artists like Grimes, whose art is the musical equivalent of that long lost feeling of sincere fascination for the unknown. Which is why Claire Boucher has always been accused of appropriating scenes and cultures when, in actuality, all this time she was reframing a particular vision of herself and her identity, best seen in “Kill V. Maim,” a power pop song dangerously close to post-Treats era Sleigh Bells and thus in search of a pop identity: Fools Face circa Tell America? A pop song Billy Corgan only wishes he could write? And in a way, “Kill V. Maim” is interested in the ridicule: Boucher reaches a guttural tone in her voice, messing with whatever people consider Perfect Pop these days. Grimes has already made this pretty clear, but it should be good to say this again: what makes her work so amusing, and now, by looking at the best tracks off Art Angels separately, “Kill V. Maim” such a blast is the way it treats pop with reverence and indifference. She stopped focusing on the abstract (go listen to Visions now). Instead, Grimes uses her superhuman creativity to strip reality bare. What’s left is catharsis. And, above all, the fantastical.
[10]

Brad Shoup: It’s funny; if anyone wanted to do Oneohtrix Point Never songs right, it’d be Grimes. I guess I’m thinking of that growl, which hits an emotional tone we don’t hear enough. The propellerhead bits sound like a demo for Shampoo, the chirpy vocals work at pure sensation. She smuggles in what sounds like an indictment of male artistic entitlement, which I guess is a synecdoche.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: She got the balance right.
[8]

Cut off one head, two grow back…

[Video][Website]
[2.67]

Will Adams: What I wrote a month ago remains true: pop music continues to compost every PR- and radio-vetted genre into aural mulch that could sound appropriate for as many situations and syncs as possible but mostly sounds like nothing. Flashes in the pan that acts like Andy Grammer and Milky Chance may have been, there’s always some “fresh” newcomer lurking around with one of these everything-but-nothing tunes; now it’s this shitpile of a song’s turn. Never mind Coleman Hell yowling some vague devotional bullshit, the production on “2 Heads” is a nightmare to listen to, a multi-headed beast of poor decisions that are never committed to. Garish banjo flutters in only to fall into a lazy lo-pass filter, synth pulse lightly suggests house before kowtowing to a Rednex drop, and live drums bumble around, scattered in the stereo field and way too loud in the mix. This is the kind of music that gets tucked into a variety of curated playlists, flying enough under the radar that even sharp listeners will miss that it’s fucking terrible, and the cycle will continue.
[0]

Katherine St Asaph: POLL: Is Coleman Hell: A) noun, large congregation of last-name-first-named bros: “I’m heading out, this place is Coleman hell.”? B) The echo of Shawn Hook, who was the echo of Shawn Mendes, in a long unending chain of echoes of Adult Hits? C) Being very generous with that [2]?
[1]

Edward Okulicz: Coleman Hell isn’t real. He’s like a straw-artist. Listen! His voice is actually a composite created by a computer and he’s… wait.. it’s doing a Sting impression during the chorus. This is a spectacularly ugly sounding record whose basic beats, cheap synth string presets and “country” “instruments” don’t work together at all. 
[2]

W.B. Swygart: You know that one friend you have, who’ll sometimes get really, really drunk, and they’ll very excitedly start telling you something they’ve realised that they think is really very important for you to hear, but their sentence fizzles out midway through, so they start telling you again, then fizzle out again, then start again, and this happens like six or seven times in the space of one evening? Well, now they have a banjo!
[3]

Cassy Gress: I had a 2 1/2 octave Yamaha keyboard when I was 8 that had a very similar banjo sound to this, and the fact that it’s so clearly a synthetic (or at least heavily processed) banjo sound is very distracting. The melody on “I turn to you / you’re all I see” reminds me strongly of the chorus on “Suddenly I See”, and he sounds like his singing tempo is just a tiny bit fast on the line “if only I could live forever.” If I sound nitpicky, it’s because this song didn’t inspire me to bop my head, grimace, laugh, wonder, roll my eyes, or do much of anything. I wiggled my toe a little, I think.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Well, he shouts a lot over piano and banjo, mewls if you want him to, and for remix potential the beats rise to the obvious climax. In short he realizes his moniker.
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: Why does this not burst into “Witch Doctor” like it patently should? (The Cartoons’ version, of course.) Coleman Hell’s preference for self-seriousness makes it more silly than that would in any case, contributing to a reasonable approximation of what might have happened had Alex Clare grown up listening to country. The semi-bosh is at least more interesting than the Lost Frequencies technique; coherent pronoun use might have been too much to hope for on top.
[5]

Megan Harrington: Earlier this week I read Dan Wilson’s thoughts on John Seabrook’s The Song Machine. I haven’t read anything in favor of the book, and Wilson’s is one of the more emotionally charged negative stances I’ve come across — rightfully so, since the book sort of attempts to break his livelihood down to parts. What grates Wilson is an idea Seabrook traces: pop music grew meaningless through the domination of a Swedish powerhouse songwriter-producer who favors melodic syllables over meaningful lyrics. Seabrook’s narrative moves from instant disgust to grudging respect. Wilson is horrified. I don’t think there’s much more to “2 Heads,” lyrically, than there is to “Right Round” but there’s an added component of instability in its unclassifiable genre. Coleman Hell isn’t a country artist, but he’s willing to lean heavily on those tropes — not to connect with any country fans open to pop persuasion, but to conjure up an atmosphere. This isn’t a case of rap becoming pop music through mainstream success and crossover hits, this is window dressing. And I guess, though I like a potentially meaningless word salad, it strikes me as crass to paste a little bit of everything to your production. Coleman Hell is a massive cipher, not so much an artist or performer or even a talent as what’s cobbled together from all the useless scraps. He’s the petroleum jelly of the music industry’s oil farming. 
[2]

Brad Shoup: What a terrible stepdad.
[4]

Y2K calling…

[Video][Website]
[5.57]

Alfred Soto: The piano and stuttered vocals recall late nineties Rodney Jerkins, but the fluency with which the vocalists slip from Korean to English is their own.
[7]

Will Adams: The opening piano figure brought to mind the breezy early-00s R&B template of producers like Cory Rooney or Irv Gotti. What followed was less beholden to nostalgia, with more modern elements — hi-hat skitters, vocal whoops, whistling — either lifting up or weighing down the track.
[6]

Cassy Gress: I hear Ja Rule and Ashanti all over this, or any of a hundred late ’90s duets, except instead of Ja’s gruff charm, we got LFO or something. The instrumentation is sweet and inoffensive, and Ailee’s voice is sweet too, and it’s so jarring when here come the Seventeen members loping in after her, dudebro-ing it up. I find that I have increasingly less and less patience for “yo brah we’re so dumb around girls amirite?” If this is the general path they’re aiming for, they’d do well to look at a group like Big Bang, who have swagger coming out their ears a lot of the time but have learned to balance it with a cheeky wink.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: Endlessly charming, this sweet bonbon of a single comes across like if Britney and Justin had recorded a duet in 2000, at the heights of their TRL powers. The video takes it to further levels of cuteness, too. This ain’t challenging or remotely boundary-pushing — Seventeen are no BTS, at least not yet — but it’s a sweet sugarlump of a record.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: There’s something to be said that in reducing the amount of members on a track, Seventeen are really able to function and offer some fun for the listener. A pop song as cute as “Q&A” shouldn’t feel like the Royal Rumble of “NAW GIRL PICK MEEEE” that “Mansae” turned out to be. But that being said, the best little moment of this record might be Ailee’s little “yoo-hoo”s on the chorus, a teasing carrot on the stick that makes the playfully competitive energy of Seventeen’s singles all the more apt. Every song becomes more and more of a chance for each of these dweebs to stand out and prove why we should care. Its almost like a mini-idol competition, which is bad news for the guys who aren’t showcased in “Q&A”‘s song/video, ’cause that was a spotlight they juuuust missed out on.
[6]

Brad Shoup: “Shining Diamond” — one of my favorite singles from last year — was direct, triumphant, and featured about a million boys. “Q&A” is knotty, obsessive, and makes use of only three. With Ailee it’s a four-person weave; everyone takes turns being coy, then pleading. “21 Questions” is referenced, but the vibe is “Still Not a Player” with Joe swapped out for Ashanti. Maybe it’s all the Scritti Politti I’ve been listening to, but I feel generous.
[8]

Jessica Doyle: WOMEN, with their QUESTIONS, amirite? I don’t know if the laziness Digipedi shows here (“and then we’ll have some broken television sets lying around.” “Why? “Because we always have broken television sets lying around!”) is due to being spread too thin or because the song — in which Ailee doesn’t sound like Ailee, and the men’s voices disappear under a film of plinky pianos and awkward transitions — never sounded like something worth spending much time on to begin with.
[3]

If you seek Hailee…

[Video][Website]
[4.10]

Lauren Gilbert: And from the paint-by-numbers electropop of “Love Myself”, Hailee Steinfeld shifts gears to…  this. It’s very Radio Disney, shying away from even saying the guy in question was a dick. It’s also reminiscent of all the songs I listened to a tween — I would swear I’ve heard that shout-along chorus somewhere before. I can picture 13-year-old girls singing along to this in the car, and their parent in the driver seat, hoping against hope that they don’t have to listen to it one. more.  time. Unfortunately, I’m with the parents here — while there is good music made for and by teenagers (Alessia Cara, Taylor Swift’s “Fearless”, and of course, Lorde), this feels lazy, a commercial cop-out by an artist who didn’t exactly have much street cred to lose.
[2]

Alfred Soto: I’d checked out before the well paid chorus joins the banal title gimmick. Steinfeld’s character-free voice doesn’t honor the decision to emphasize the penultimate syllable in the verse. While, yeah, about that title gimmick: in 2016 this coyness doesn’t even work for Meghan Trainor anymore.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: I absolutely, positively detest this cheap, stupid lyrical conceit. And the cheerleader-chant effect doesn’t help.
[0]

Iain Mew: The chorus is very close to being the same gimmick as Haley Georgia’s “Ridiculous”, but the difference is everything. Haley essentially sang “you’re a dick, you’re a dick” then pulled back for plausible deniability; Hailee sings various things that only tease the plausible possibility that she might have been about to sing “you’re such a dick”. That mode of bait and switch can work — I like Brand New’s “she’s probably only looking for s…o much more than he could ever give”, but that has its hissed “s” and is a one off rather than a big chanted chorus. “You’re Such A” leans in heavily on the trick and politely fluffs it. It’s ultimately a song in which someone repeatedly fails to sing “you’re such a dick”, and about as fun as that makes it sound.
[3]

Will Adams: Hailee Steinfeld thinks she’s being clever, but I can see right through her trick. Clearly she’s trying to release a royalty free song (tags: happy, handclaps, ukelele) as an actual single! Almost got me there.
[4]

Anthony Easton: This is kind of great, with the sing along chorus and the fantastic drum beat. Extra point for the call out to silly vaping.
[8]

Brad Shoup: The production is a fun-sized “Roar”, and the omitted cuss works: it’s an exasperated pinching-off. Steinfeld’s in complete sing-song mode, even when there’s not much to sing along with. Extra points for the verse about e-cigarettes, because I’m not complicated.
[7]

Cassy Gress: If the chorus weren’t so jaunty, this would have scored lower. In the verses, she sounds like she’s both belting and sleep talking at the same time (something about her enunciation, or maybe I suspect her facial expression is pretty flat). But then it got to “DAMN YOU’RE SUCH A did you think that I would let you”, and then a bit later the stompy drums came in and elevated the handclaps, and then the vocals just turned into “la la la”s. And it would have all come together nicely if she didn’t fall back asleep again on every “I know the truth”. Wouldn’t it have worked better if that was an actual melody rather than just a sort of half-hearted interjection? Demi Lovato could have done this better.
[5]

Danilo Bortoli: I’m with Lindsay Zoladz when she asserts there is no conceivable way of understanding Hailee Steinfeld’s path to pop stardom. It’s hard to pinpoint the reasons why she would go this way, but I’m afraid that this is not the best question to be made right now, nor the most honest. Even if you (misleadingly) consider her path of choice to be a fabricated one, there is still room for other inquiries concerning, like, the music itself. Leaving all this behind, it becomes easy to see that “You’re Such A”, much like last year’s “Love Myself”, is not necessarily covering new territory in pop right now — the kind of pop music that gets promoted by Popjustice and nowhere else, that is. In this context, “You’re Such A” is more than simply competent at what it aims to do. A thumping beat that never quite goes away, a piano which appears at the right time just to support the bridge, a chorus sung in unison. Hailee, somehow, ends up proving that, while we might be way too concerned about finding out more about her voice and what is supposed to make her more unique, we might be, instead, forgetting about the music itself.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: She’s got the eye of the tiger, the fire / she saw you be brave there / the saddest things in modern pop / are the rips of Grizzly / barely works as a gimmick / last seen in The Hot Chick / and yet, somehow, Rob Schneider’s kid / made a song that’s far less / demographically cynical / saps the energy too / I will admit I liked True Grit / but the single’s kinda
[2]

Career-maker for country guy?

[Video][Website]
[5.75]

Thomas Inskeep: Swindell is one of the hottest rookies in country music right now, after earning four top-two Hot Country Airplay singles (including a pair of #1s) from his debut album. But this right here is his career-making song, his “Friends In Low Places,” his “Forever and Ever, Amen,” his “Jesus Take the Wheel.” “You Should Be Here” is a close cousin of Luke Bryan’s “Drink A Beer,” right down to Swindell’s vocal delivery; it’s a heartfelt ballad celebrating the life of a friend who’s gone too soon. The production is classy and shows restraint, and the lyrics are sweet. It’s not amazing, but neither is it offensive, and if it catches you at just the right moment, it might get you right there.
[6]

Josh Langhoff: After the failed booty call “Hope You Get Lonely Tonight,” Cole Swindell changes wooing tactics. He decides to throw a sad party and win his girl back with a song of good old fashioned pathos and guilt. He also starts listening obsessively to Sonny Sharrock’s Guitar album and sends his pianist down to the cellar to record (“for atmosphere, y’all”). Song completed, he hits “send.” Unfortunately the song turns out to be about death.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The gold standard, of course, is Alan Jackson’s “Drive,” in which the singer-songwriter commemorated his dad with the kind of simple images that the obtuse would call obvious. Cole Swindell’s voice without trying oozes syrup, though, and the rawk guitar solo siphons the emotion in a way the song doesn’t need. But it could’ve been worse.
[5]

Anthony Easton: This is so fucking pretty, with that overly elegant piano over a voice that hits me like the most lachrymose Luke Bryan ballad. I am on board despite knowing it is most likely terrible.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: I don’t begrudge anybody the sentiment, but for me this must be the sleepy song people hear in “Hello.”
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: The occasionally disjointed lyrical lines have me bewildered as all hell, and for all the heart-warming fondness that Cole is draping, its dramatic climax on the final chorus oddly triumphant despite the themes of death and loss, I’m left cold. But the best moment is the morbid notions of Swindell’s own mortality when he remarks about seeing his father’s face making everything perfect. It’s a heartbreak that sonically he can’t convey with either his thin voice or this plain production, but in that little moment, to make the end of life hold meaning in such prospects of reunion, Swindell manages to place himself as a young man for whom the big gesture and the odd detail are well at home beside each other.
[5]

Will Adams: My five-year high school reunion is this June, and thinking about it spins me on an emotional wheel. It’ll be amusing; I’ll catch up with all the bros who lived in my dorm and see how they turned out. It’ll be strange, too, when we meet, and we have to acknowledge that one of us isn’t there. I never know how to grieve online, so I just don’t do it. Hearing about the death is both instantaneous and steady: one vague status update, hours of denial (it’s just a rumor it’s just a rumor please say it’s just a rumor), then slow confirmation as profile pictures change and more condolences trickle into the timeline. “You Should Be Here” sounds too chipper to be what it’s about, what with the sunkissed guitars and warm backing vocals. But that’s the point; Swindell wants his father back to enjoy the party and the cold beer, not simply for the sake of being alive. I don’t know if Mark ever drank. Even if he didn’t, I’d want him to be at the reunion, for both the pomp of official welcoming events and for the frenzy of afterparties, when my friends and I will stand idly in a crowded hotel room, popping open cheap bottles and looking at everyone around us.
[8]

Brad Shoup: He would have turned 28 on Friday. I know this because Facebook told me. And when I clicked on his name, I saw tributes from the people who already knew this: updates on what Rob Lowe’s doing lately, a photo of a forgotten photobooth strip found in a book, pics of all his sisters preparing for a wedding. I didn’t know him that well. He was the little brother of someone I had a crush on; I’d drive to her bookstore and make terrible conversation: I was a creep, and I figured that out eventually. I “mentored” him in the summer between my first couple years in college, which meant we’d grab burgers and just hang out. I don’t think I was expected to talk about discipleship, and I wasn’t qualified to tell him about it. We just had fun. A couple of years later, I was back in Austin, playing chess with a friend in a coffeeshop. He ambled over, we talked, he unzipped his backpack to show me the white wine he’d smuggled in. All those years, I didn’t learn anything about his battles, about the close calls and the hard work put in by his friends and family. Even so, when he left it leveled me. The sentiment of “You Should Be Here” — I thought it was about a lover, but Swindell hints at no such thing — is gutting, because Swindell’s not shivering in a bar, he’s out with friends, enjoying everything as best as he can. Not because he’s young, or he has an obligation to his loved ones, or because he’s a Warner recording artist, but because he’s compelled to live. It’s not everyone’s burden.
[7]

Remember the ’90s? No, the LATE ’90s…

[Video][Website]
[4.64]

Will Adams: Wait what, I thought I liked trance.
[4]

Madeleine Lee: Maybe they’re just giving the people exactly what they want, but I can get behind old K-pop groups like Turbo and Koyote coming back with more or less their exact ’90s sound. It’s a sound so specific to its place and era that new groups aren’t already filling that niche, and all the old songs sounded the same anyway, so what’s another one? The number of plays on this video speaks more to the global popularity of Kim Jong-kook and Yoo Jae-suk’s show Running Man than to wild demand for Turbo’s pummelling boss battle techno, but no matter. This isn’t innovative or anything, but it’s very fun.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Objectively bad displaced Euro-dance! Now there’s a genre I don’t hate at all. At least until I exit Winamp and re-enter reality.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: This is K-pop crossed with some crazy hi-NRG Ian Levine stuff, and boy oh boy is it fast. Unfortunately, that’s about all it is.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Its late nineties techno overtones and caffeinated rush suggest ‘N Sync after a couple cans of Sprite. The best part is the barked whoa-whoa-whoas.
[5]

Iain Mew: The barely musical turbo synths remind me more of Dempagumi.inc than any K-Pop we’ve encountered. On the potential plus side, Turbo add competent vocals; on the minus side they’re lacking in ideas to keep up the energy past the end of the intro.
[4]

Cassy Gress: I went into this thinking “Yoo Jae-Suk is in it. This is going to be something like ‘Gangnam Style.’” But it went the other way and was a 90s comeback + Running Man thing, and I am stupidly pleased about that. Musically, it would fit right in at Eurovision, or in DDR, or as one of those “international sporting event get everyone pumped” kinds of songs. But really, this gets a [7] because its existence makes me too happy not to.
[7]

Brad Shoup: For better and worse, the South Korean pop complex is a hall of mirrors: the 8-bit Euro-dance of “Again” stacks up perfectly flush to “Black Cat” or “Love Is” (minus the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” transposition on the latter). But there’s a strain here, a concession to a serious modern chart climate. The programming pushes and pushes, wiping out the funky trill of that intro synth riff. All Turbo can do is grip tight and hang on.
[5]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The production is crisp and the synth layers are lush, it kinda sounds like a fun song to dance to at the Pump It Up Machine, but everything feels stuck in the late ’90s, and not in a good way. Well, this is coming from a group that released an album called “E-Mail my Heart”. 
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: “No, No, No” to this amount of pointless exertion, dated electro-goofiness and sloppy rapping. 
[2]

Patrick St. Michel: It boasts a bit of a contemporary sheen, but I’m glad Turbo didn’t stray too far from the Euro-glazed pop of their ’90s heyday, conveniently available on YouTube. As an energetic throwback, it works well enough.
[6]

I’m still reckoning with Charlie Puth co-writing “Bombastic…”

[Video][Website]
[4.67]

Andy Hutchins: “Someday,” Bonnie said, putting the finishing touches on her latest not-as-cool-as-Charli XCX, not-as-big-as-the-stuff-she-wrote-for-Katy Perry stomper, “John Hughes is gonna make another movie, and I’m gonna be on the soundtrack.” No one has the heart to tell her the truth.
[5]

Megan Harrington: No one likes you when you’re over 22.
[3]

Alfred Soto: I tell student journalists to avoid leads with “They say ‘An apple a day,’ etc” phrases. Warning people a cliché is coming doesn’t expunge a guilty sentence, which surely the writers of this punchy non-descript empowerment anthem know — or maybe they don’t. 
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: I’m rooting for Bonnie McKee as much as anybody and probably more, but I just don’t know with this. Even setting aside the fact that pop-for-pop’s-sake, no matter how meticulously made, is not a career-maker by itself, “Wasted Youth” showcases as many of McKee’s weaknesses as her strengths. She’s probably the best vocalist for the song — a truly frightening thought is Katy Perry singing it. The instrumental booms and chugs like mobile artillery, and the “kids, don’t make my mistakes” undertone is potent even without its real-life subtext. But the songwriting rules McKee’s learned (her words, not mine) involve tossing a couple good images into a lot of repurposed pulp — in this case Pink Floyd, Springsteen and Journey, not explored beyond namedrops. You’d think leaving a major would free up McKee for more candor, but the extent of the youth-wasting here is sleeping with your shoes on. (Like, not even someone else’s?) But it’s too rangy and jaded for the Radio Disney audience that’d suit the lyrics, too Katy-polished for the Zara Larsson alt-pop types who’d suit the anthem. So who is it for? Those holding on till the next EP, I guess.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: You wanna know why McKee has yet to have a hit as an artist herself? Because she gives away all her good ones, and I use that term very loosely. “Wasted Youth” is essentially track 9 on a Perry album, the one you listen to two or three times before deleting it from your iTunes.
[2]

Will Adams: McKee’s at her best when writing about youth, whether bursting with hyper-saturated emotion on “Teenage Dream” or extolling American suburbia in “American Girl.” And as fun as it was to hear her detonate several crates of dynamite on “Bombastic,” I get the sense that stuff like “Wasted Youth” is her true home. The drums march on, the guitars crunch under their weight, and McKee soars above it all with a plea — to you, to herself — to hold on. A few years ago, pop urged us to make the most of this one night. “Wasted Youth” takes on a darker tone; there’s no telling when it’s all going to end, just “soon,” and the key word here is wasted. McKee acknowledges the past regrets but, in the final moments of carefree youth, lets them go to ride that last wave.
[9]

Micha Cavaseno: It’s like the midway point between Pat Benatar and Katy Perry, with all the swell and none of the excess, which is where the real fun is.
[2]

Cassy Gress: What is the percussion doing? OK, tick-tick-tick because your youth is wasting away, but it takes a full minute before there’s much of anything on the offbeat, and the bass drum doesn’t come in at all until the second chorus! It picks up in the bridge a bit and then… goes away again? I spent so long waiting for the song to get going that it almost felt like she missed the point of her own song. The fact that she can nail those high E’s and F#’s is pretty impressive, though. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: It’d be uncanny how much she sounds like Kesha here, except 1) she did it on “Bombastic,” 2) as a very successful songwriter she knows all about channeling and 3) I’m trying to channel all my thoughts about Kesha into wishing for a victorious resolution to her lawsuit. This song lives and dies with McKee’s range: when she tops out (which is often), it’s super-stirring. And it’s necessary: that crenellated bass drops out early, and the tom hits are going for arena but come off slurred. The most interesting part is the bridge, with its sustained guitar notes reminiscent of “Roar.” That was a McKee co-write, and I’m glad she’s still proud of the touch.
[7]

Only January and we’re already out of date here…

[Video][Website]
[5.89]

Alfred Soto: The guitar-big beat combination toughens the already expert harmonies. The thing’s expert already. These girls should keep updating their names.
[7]

Iain Mew: A slow dance that sounds filled with determination as much as any other sentiment, enclosed in a block of ice. The strings and synths add the touch of whimsy that suggests it might yet melt.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: In tenor if not tone, reminiscent of a midtempo Exposé track (I hear “When I Looked At Him”), only with more electronic bleeps and a bit more, well, tempo. 
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: The maudlin self-pity of the lyrics is made up for by the clear-eyed chipperness of the music, bubbly without being saccharine. Though a midwinter song, it sounds like spring.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Like most idol group music post AKB48, “Tsumetai Kaze to Kataomoi” hints at some really interesting musical twists and turns, but soon settles into well-worn territory when the vocals come in. Can’t even pretend to be disappointed when that’s how most J-pop operates, so let’s focus on the icy backing sounds, which find long-time producer Tsunku continue his interest in the softer side of EDM. The end result is an appropriately icy track complete with lonely drop in need of an overall more dramatic song.
[5]

Megan Harrington: Splits the difference between the heavy metal of a title like “The Cold Wind and Lonely Love” and the glittering synthpop of the intro with dark disco. It’s not entirely satisfying but it is theatrically moody.
[5]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Vapid voices aside, this song’s several layers of luscious instrumental timbres and the left/right channel interplay are impeccable, and they nail that long bridge with those riveting chord progressions. All those elements would have made a much better song if they’d offer something in the intensity department, but the chorus is catchy enough; it’ll grow on you. 
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Charitably, it’s a clear and longing melody, though uncharitably it’s pat like Tsunku was asked to give a less-distinguished song to one of the minnow countries for Eurovision. Then it was rejected, given a fetching middle section like a symphonic interlude from a 90s video game soundtrack, and then unfortunately given a squeaky performance by Morning Musume that betrays the icy intrigue of the backing.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The synth toots like a calliope, the rhythm guitar squishes like putty. Tsunku’s built a towering toy castle for MM15 to stand around. The chorus, as usual, is where it all comes together: a sophistipop collection of factory drums and soap-opera string approximations. 
[7]