We, um, return to this Argentinian singer…

[Video][Website]
[6.12]

Alfred Soto: Another Patagonian singer with a penchant for synthetic percussion tricks and gurgles for the sake of a clever conceit. “Boomerang” is closer to an album track than a single, though; it doesn’t return to slap me in the face.
[6]

Josh Langhoff: An elaborate giganto-pop mashup of skittering trap beats, Mustardcore “hey!”s, the string hits from a Bad Boys movie climax, and a chorus of Lalis, none of whom manage to create any interesting high harmony parts. The whole thing works anyway. Somewhere in there lies a simple invocation of karma, giving shape to the whole mess like a magnet covered in debris.
[6]

Juana Giaimo: The previous time we covered Lali, I defined her as the filler of a blank space in a country where national mainstream pop is generally undervalued or, actually, almost unexistent. However, all of us who have critized her, who filled their TV shows talking badly about her and who didn’t trust in her project are being kicked back by our own boomerang. Because this time Lali is truly embracing her position in the scene. She is self-confident without feeling the need to show off her skills as in “Único,” and, instead, she is in full control of the different intensities of her voice and melodies over a steady patterned background. She immediately catches your attention with that powerful beginning, but her pleading tone in the chorus portrays her as a victim while she can also be ironically playful in the prechorus. It’s probably here where the most important line of the song is delivered: “Everything about me breaks your conscience; everything about you made me lose my innocence”. Indeed, she can also keep a rational and moral tone in the verses, but is it me or does she suddenly sound so much serious than last year? 
[8]

Tim de Reuse: I should say that the main melody based entirely on an orchestral sting sample and the unrelenting faint sixteenth-note ticking in the background are several flavors of obnoxious. I was not prepared for how fantastically sing-song catchy the track ends up after a few listens, and how well-rounded the production is despite its questionable sound design decisions. Built around such a well-developed, well-delivered earworm, the whole package seems less “garish” and more “confident,” you know?
[8]

Ryo Miyauchi: Lali doesn’t change the script on her anti-haters pop. She holds her head high above the shit talk and sings a hands-up type of chorus to channel strengths to others feeling the same. That stomping brass, though, really makes the record feel indestructible as Lali’s trying to make herself out to be.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: The string hits draw a little blood, but the chorus feels perfunctory, like Lali’s retreating despite being the one who’s armed.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: A great deal of pomp ushers Lali into this chorus, but when she arrives, the effect is deflating. Not even the laser-lit middle eight is able to release the weights tugging this song down.
[4]

Will Adams: Like if “We Can’t Stop” actually had enough fight to go all night, or at least gave a shit.
[6]

Dirty Projector makes her debut…

[Video][Website]
[5.17]

Katherine St Asaph: On the scale of retro ballads from artists you wouldn’t expect them from, this is no “Love on the Brain,” definitely no “Creampuff.”
[4]

A.J. Cohn: I’ll admit to being a sucker for just this sort of thing — self-empowerment jams for depressive types, and there are really so many things I love about this song: the pretty, poignant vocals, the nearly weightless arrangement, the touching faith in the power of singing and story-telling to heal — but even I find the almost six-minute length wearying.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: To be doing doo-wop in 2016 implies pastiche, and that’s OK. There’s a lot of fun to be had within these bounds. But Amber Coffman is a tough proposition for me. Her kinda-R&B song “Stillness is the Move,” for instance, was an enjoyable extra-genre sojourn that in the hands of Solange was nudged into more traditional if, curiously, not necessarily more enjoyable territory. (Hint number one that Coffman’s perversions have purpose.) “All to Myself” meets my resistance: I think Coffman’s voice pushes against its melodies, setting itself needlessly at odds with them. What a doo-wop song might sound like in the 21st century isn’t merely theoretical: Garbage did it with “Can’t Cry These Tears”; Ariana Grande did it with “Tattooed Heart.” Both of those are more formally rigorous than Coffman’s, and, not coincidentally, are better. But that doesn’t mean the muddy contemporizings of indie rock are without merit: as an example, I’d point to Mirah’s absolute wonderful girl group reimagining “Don’t.” That song reconfigured orchestral studio-pop into lo-fi winsomeness in an organic way: the translation was by necessity and attained worth through the same. Coffman, I feel, hangs outside the expected course of her song’s direction for little more than deliberate obtuseness. It feels like hard work for the sake of it.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: It’s a moving story that writes itself: musician turns her lack of inspiration as inspiration to  get her mind working again. As a first single, though, it feels  exactly as the process she sings about. Her words pour out directly on paper, but it sticks so literal, it starts to sound too twee. As much it winds around the ears, the backing croak can’t quite save the rough draft.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Like if “A Whiter Shade of Pale” were arranged by Imogen Heap, and quite lovely, but it’s also bloated length-wise, and Coffman’s tale buries itself like she buries her own voice in layers of itself. What should have been inspiring instead feels impenetrable.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The insistent background vocals bear the impress of Amber Coffman’s former band Dirty Projectors, and when she joins them for harmonies “All to Myself” undercuts its title with the gentlest irony. Five minutes, though!
[6]

More like Groupgrudgingtolerance…

[Video][Website]
[4.60]

Katherine St Asaph: I like this a lot more when I pretend it’s 1997 and my babysitter’s playing this after “One Headlight,” “Semi-Charmed Life” and “MMMBop” on our way to the pool.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Hannah Hooper sings “we’re back in business/you’re such a big mess” like she’s trying to turn it into a Katy Perry hook by sheer force of will. In fact, she’s fairly successful at the same time as annoying. The majority of the song crunches by in the same way any ’90s alt-to-pop crossover did, and I’ve got marvellous memories of afternoons wasting away to such frivolities. The chorus yields one killer bit: “it could be YOUR FANTASY!” and the optimism matches the nostalgia.
[6]

Will Adams: Grouplove’s freewheeling SoCal vibe has always resonated with me; they’ve got the kind of sunny disposition I found listening to Sugar Ray on the radio on hot summer days in Orange County. From their sophomore album onward, they’ve upped the electronics, and though the results of that don’t always work, they can do little wrong with a chorus. On “Welcome to Your Life,” it’s as anthemic as the title suggests, with Christian Zucconi’s signature yelp portraying nothing but that sincere sunniness.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Pop has lately experienced a lacuna in mass appeal indie rock hits — the kind of modest but melodic and easy to enjoy radio singles made by acts you didn’t have to care about but were welcome additions to a party playlist or festival line-up. (What happened to them? My guess is that the industry adjusted its expectations so that they could become, like Lorde, real stars, or like Twenty One Pilots, unbearable.) “Welcome to Your Life” is hummable and inessential: its diffidence to craft concealing some smart flourishes. The bleeping, drum machine-driven verses suggest those three MGMT songs that were the ne plus ultra of this genre in the late 2000s, while the chorus has a guitar crunch that calls back to the lesser alt-rock hits of the mid-1990s. I’d point as well to the canny youth-oriented lyrical content, but unfortunately Grouplove exists in the 2016 of Halsey and the Chainsmokers, and this is no “Closer.” Thematically, but also melodically: a sharper hook would push this a point or two higher and immensely improve its durable value as future nostalgia fodder.
[6]

Katie Gill: This is the song that soundtracks the montage where our Generic White Boy Protagonist and the Girl Who’s Played By A Supermodel Trying To Act For The First Time fall in love. He’s driving the car and she sticks her head out of the window, hair blowing in the breeze. They run through the aisles of the grocery store, so carefree in their actually-twenty-something-but-playing-high-schoolers love. He tucks her hair behind her ear. They run down the dark streets holding sparklers. He reaches out to gingerly touch her fingers before they tenderly clasp hands, and so on and so forth. If Libba Bray or Maggie Stiefvater ever have a movie in the works, they need to call up Grouplove.
[4]

Lilly Gray: When I got to the chorus I really wanted this to be “The Golden State,” and it’s not, despite having the same splendid chord progression. I’m a fan of the Killers-reminiscent bridge, which pops back in as a deranged revving in the latter half but this guy’s voice makes my hair stand on end when he’s not kicking the door open with “faaaantaseeeee,” so win some, lose most. 
[4]

Hannah Jocelyn: The verses are twee but affecting, more so after learning that it was written for Hannah Hooper’s newborn child. Then her husband, Christian Zucconi, takes over and his nasally voice takes away the “affecting” part. Then the chorus is just kind of obnoxious, but the laid-back nature is a welcome departure for this band. Back to the verses, though; the way Hooper sings “But I love you, yeah I love you!” is lovely enough that I can see myself coming back to this song just for that part. In fact, it’s lovely enough that it manages to lift up the not-as-endearing sections.
[6]

Josh Langhoff: Faced with a depressing lack of roundabouts and slumber party pillow fights, Christian Zucconi compensates by burrowing deeper into his Wayne Coyne impression. My own life may indeed resemble the band’s faceless, droning guitar parts, but it’s wrong of them to presume.
[3]

Jibril Yassin: When they sing about being in love with a big mess, are they talking about this song? 
[1]

Alfred Soto: “I thought you were a big breakfast,” I thought the chorus said, and this mishearing happened way before the year’s whiniest male vocal comes down like cold oatmeal on what it thinks is fun.’s market share. 
[2]

Californian-Chilean electro-pop.

[Video][Website]
[7.43]

Juana Giaimo: It’s all in the music video: Francisca in hotel halls ready to spend the night awake, goofying around the city, but still knowing how to be seducing with those spasmodic body moves and intense glances at the camara. It’s different to the reassuring glance of Carly Rae Jepsen in “Run Away with Me”. Francisca instead looks at us like a hunter and a victim at the same time; observing and being conscious that she is observed too. Her voice is too cold and sententious, with words tangled up but delivered with such confidence as if she expects us to understand her insinuations. The music builds aroud her like a fortress: the beat introducing the chorus is an electro shock and the synths at the end of it burst straight out of her voice letting her grow. But behind that fortress, she can’t hide how yearnful she is. In the bridge, her voice gets out of her control while singing: “I shamelessly follow you to see if I can get a little bit of your crumbs that stop my hunger, that leave me warm”. And still, she knows that she is the one who could make you shudder — if you don’t believe me, just look at her final glance. 
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: That stuttering drum machine before the chorus explodes is right out of the Heaven 17 playbook, which itself was right out of the Motown playbook; but Valenzuela’s performance is neither doomily sardonic nor desperately joyful. Instead she plays the aristocrat taking all this swirling electronic luxury as her birthright, speaking in the third person about her own capacity for reducing strong men to jelly.
[9]

Natasha Genet Avery: A dark, foreboding take on “Knock On Wood” I didn’t even know I needed.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Valenzuela’s pointed, syncopated delivery skips in little jagged patterns over the rolling synth triplets, and when she gets going it’s a very lovely one-two-three push and pull that forms the catchiest element of the track. The sound design is artificial and jittery, like it was all composed on a cheap keyboard, but, hey, it’s front and center and sincere enough to be stylish — I’m not totally sure that it’s quite as sexy as the lyrics would like it to be, though.
[7]

Peter Ryan: “Estremecer” falls somewhere near the middle in my Tajo Abierto rankings, but that’s only because the other tracks set the bar so high. Mediocrity usually isn’t packed with this many goodies — synth arpeggios that skitter like arcing power lines, haunted robot backing choirs, the triumphant “whoo!” that kicks off the outtro’s fevered panting — all in service of a grand seductive threat: “I knew very well how to make you shudder.” Valenzuela also knows how to write a climactic hook — see the bridge — and this could use more of a chorus. But for a most-likely cycle-closing victory lap sixth single, this is not bad at all.
[7]

Iain Mew: There’s a bit of an uneasy match between the dark gothic styling of bits of “Estremecer” and just how eagerly galloping it is, which Francisca Valenzuela doesn’t quite tie together in the way Susanne Sundfør might. Still, raw force isn’t a bad alternative and the punchy drums are a thrill of their own.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The dramatic synth string arrangement is a result of people studying the British Electric Foundation and The Knife, and Francisca Valenzuela stands at the center of an electronic storm. Indeed, I wanted a faster track.
[7]

The trop house structure needs work.

[Video][Website]
[3.67]

Iain Mew: Dance-pop so slick that it can incorporate sad duck noises (possible relatives of Stromae’s seagulls) and make them sound as cool as everything else about it.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Remember how noxious those whistled hooks were a decade ago? This steel drum-meets-organ preset is as bad.
[4]

Natasha Genet Avery: Lewczuk’s vocals are wasted on this trop house paint-by-numbers: we’ve got bouncy xylophone synths, kazoo, handclaps, and a post-chorus drop. Will this summer ever end?
[4]

Claire Biddles: Yet more fuel for my campaign Ban Synthesised Noises As Replacement For Actual Choruses 2k16
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: This isn’t a song. It’s a 15-second sample of a hook for radio stations.
[3]

Tim de Reuse: A properly energetic delivery, ballsy enough production, third-act twist,  slow crescendo, or any number of things could’ve distracted from the fact that this song is based on an endless three-note loop. I mean, if this is really the route you’re gonna take, at least lean into it! But, no, this tune stands firmly in place with a glassy-eyed stare into the middle distance. It sits in my memory like a ball of wet tissue paper.
[2]

Let’s put Kendrick Lamar’s future kids through college, shall we?

[Video][Website]
[3.86]Alfred Soto: The synthetic spring effect and the lead singer’s decent falsetto are the only virtues in The Adam Levine 1’s new single. Whatever else their singles had more sonic spritz than a beat Desiigner would reject.
[4]

Katie Gill: The most recent episode of the phenomenal podcast Switched on Pop rightfully pointed out that SO MANY SONGS out right now have this same sort of bouncy, choppy rhythm for the instrumentations no matter what the vocals sound like. “Don’t Wanna Know” is one of these songs. If it had come out a few months ago, it would have sounded fresh and interesting but alas, it’s just another middle of the road song hitching its wagon to current trends a few weeks too late.
[4]

Natasha Genet Avery: I was doing some background research (has it really been 14 years since Songs About Jane!?) and was struck by the aptness of Billboard’s characterization of Maroon 5 as the “most reliable hit-making group on the planet.” Maroon 5 hasn’t done anything ambitious in the past decade, but has risen in prominence by being safely behind the curve (Exhibit A: releasing a ~tropical~ jam in October). “Don’t Wanna Know” is gonna get played at every spring wedding despite no one actually requesting it from the DJ — it’s pleasant, easy filler. I’m a little surprised that Kendrick’s biggest post-To Pimp a Butterfly appearances have been verses for Sia and Maroon 5, but I guess dropping into rote pop songs for 25 seconds is his equivalent of a 401(k) contribution. Reliably average all around.
[5]

Will Adams: I’d chalk this up to poor timing, seeing as some other tropical house song with this exact vocal rhythm (four sixteenth notes + three dotted eighths) got big right before this. It’s hard to be charitable, though, when Adam Levine’s voice grafted onto this Snapchat screenshot production makes as little sense as Kendrick Lamar’s paperclipped presence.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: This tropical house number feels dinky, as if composed in an hour over a cheap keyboard in a dressing room or something. It’s one thing to be less good at this stuff than Bieber, but to come across as both a bigger douche and a bigger bore, that’s achievement and lack of achievement in one.
[4]

Claire Biddles: It pains me to say this, but Maroon 5 definitely knows its way around a hook, and Adam Levine knows how to deliver a charismatic performance when given the right material. Which is why I’m disappointed in “Don’t Wanna Know” — its chorus especially is meandering and aimless where songs like “Moves Like Jagger” or “This Love” were so tight. Going through the motions for the first single from a new album seems like a waste. Even Kendrick’s 10 second cameo feels thoughtless and tacked-on.
[3]

Scott Mildenhall: One day someone will figure out a functioning Matoma/haematoma pun, and no matter how bad it is, it will still be too good for this lukewarm mope. Adam Levine is presumably supposed to be protesting too much, yet it really does sound like he doesn’t care. Everything about this is so monotonous that listening to it is like drinking flat Lilt, and the dregs of a set-aside empty can at that.
[4]

Derulo feels and boyband feels…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Peter Ryan: Fisher’s delivery is still too nervy-musical-theater-kid, and “Lookin’ Like That” definitely forces him into an awkward nasal range for too much of the song, but underneath the histrionics there’s a sturdy-breathy quality to his timbre that shines through better when the arrangement gives him a little space. There’s a lot of sonic frippery trash-compacted into the chorus here, but it has good bones — lithe bassline, horn bursts, multiple cowbell breaks. I’m won over a bit more with each listen, and a good round of edits would probably push it into irrefutable bop territory.
[6]

Crystal Leww: Jordan Fisher is the best case for the influence of Jason Derulo. His EP is packed front to back with solid, template pop. “Lookin’ Like That” could have been a Derulo single, and probably with the Derulo name, would have been huge, but Jordan Fisher is still rising and already great at doing something very similar. I dig this.
[8]

Juana Giaimo: In a year in which Zayn has been on the radio all the time, “Lookin’ Like That” will inevitably be overlooked. Jordan Fisher’s voice isn’t as affected as Zayn’s and he even tries to be playful, encouraged by the light beat and and brass — or maybe it’s just a brass-sounding synth? However, he has too much energy — his eager raspiness, the verse lines starting with a falsetto, the abrupt post-chorus hook — that seems to be out of his control.
[6]

Alfred Soto: The Jason Derulo of “Want You to Want Me” inspired descendants. Cross Wayne Casey horns and you’ve got an electropopper that might soundtrack a young man’s quest to gel his hair just so on a Saturday night.
[7]

Cassy Gress: “Lookin’ Like That” sounds like a late-era N’Sync song, but performed with way more machismo than any of them ever mustered. That’s not really a compliment; Jordan Fisher sounds a bit like he’s being smothered by his own muscles, and that makes me wince at those falsetto C’s in the verses.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: It’s got the funk, in the same way 5ive did, or.. maybe DNCE currently does. Which is to say not especially, and the “lookin’ like lookin’ like lookin’ like” hook of the chorus feels awkwardly underwritten. Yet Fisher’s so eager to please and putting in enough effort to power a low-wattage boy band that I’m really quite charmed.
[7]

Anthony Easton: Boy band 90s revival, made with a kind of soul breakdown — its market driven aesthetics are seamless, and it’s not a bad time. 
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: When I was in 7th grade, a boy who had a crush on me gave me a 98 Degrees CD. It had a scratched out bargain bin sticker on the front of it, the jewel case slightly cracked. I took it home and listened to it skeptically. I’ve never liked boy bands and never gave the slightest indication that I’d like a present like that. Still, a gift is a gift, and I gave it a chance. I had to admit that it had a certain charm. Sure, it was not at all my style, but as I read the album booklet, I ruminated on the fact that these guys had worked very hard on this project and they made these bland pop songs for SOMEone to enjoy. That person is not… gonna be me. But points given, as always, for the effort; for the sheer fact that somebody somewhere is trying to make a thing, even though I find it vapid and recycled.
[4]

Where’s your ambition, guys?

[Video][Website]
[7.14]

Crystal Leww: Almost the entire debut album of Rae Sremmurd is better than “Black Beatles,” and yet, when the DJ dropped this over the weekend, I sang along to every single damn word of the chorus. 
[6]

Kat Stevens: The wistful strumming complements the singing, though the rapping feels a little uninspired in places. I feel Rae and Gucci missed a trick by not wiggling their heads together at the microphone and going “Oooooh!“
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: While the remove of Swae Lee’s voice lets the “get you a man who can do both” meme slide in like a phrase of rock-god poetry, he pins John Lennon as merely the aesthetic behind the design of his glasses. It’s a prime move from a duo whose hits pull so much on the now. And the Sremmurds treating the symbol of rock music legacy ephemeral as yesterday’s internet joke — or the latter as eternal as the former — is the real audacity behind “Black Beatles” beyond mere self-comparison to the Greatest Rock Band of All Time. Not afraid to break the rules of past tradition to set the standard of today’s cool: to me, that’s rock n’ roll as fuck.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: What’s a black Beatle anyway? (We’ll disqualify Kanye’s answer.) What black artist would be permitted the level of universal, uncritical, pan-cultural acceptance awarded to four English interlopers who took a black artform, used it to attain incomparable fame, influence, and wealth, and then — as Elijah Wald cheekily suggested — destroyed it? Rae Sremmurd are only black Beatles in the space of a pop song, but in their dazed self-asssurance, they sound giant-sized, like their tune has been beamed from a dimension where African American Mississippian twenty-somethings could be welcomed as the same musical geniuses a quartet of wisecracking white Liverpudlians were in the 1960s. Mike WiLL Made-It’s beat, heady and cosmic, is appropriately space-age.
[8]

Alfred Soto: this duo’s music is the giddiest approximation of adolescence I’ve heard  in years: they don’t want to grow up because after an RIAA-certified  debut gave them the exposure and dough to try yoga, chinchillas, and  fuck knows what else they regard as “exotic” they’re ready to get down. I can imagine a scenario in which meeting women who do more than give  good brain crumbles their pleasure dome. For the moment, I’ll savor the  smarts that use a variant on the original, dirtier opening line for “Day Tripper” as the sharpest hook in “Black Beatles.”
[8]

Adaora Ede: “I eurostep past a hater like I’m Rondo” > The Beatles
[9]

Madeleine Lee: The specific reference to “Day Tripper” is a good one, as a reminder that the white Beatles weren’t interested in singing about much more than drugs and girls themselves. Rae Sremmurd continue to be great at hooks and okay at memes (“get you somebody that can do both” sounds like it’s being read directly from Swae Lee’s Twitter feed), and Mike Will Made It’s beats continue to be slightly forlorn and uncomplicated in the best way, but the injection of energy Slim Jxmmi gives to the song at the end is both surprising and welcome.
[6]

Actually it is his real name…

[Video][Website]
[4.33]

Alfred Soto: That name can’t be right! If he were “Roscoe Strumchord” no one would blink.
[3]

Anthony Easton: I love his voice — it kind of slides into a insouciance that is completely unbelievable. The central pun is a groaner, but that he can kind of slide through the heartbreak with a wink and an admission of heartbreak is some of the best of country. He is also cribbing from Eric Church, and as successful as Church as been for as long as he has been, few people have followed. Combining both doesn’t make an original contribution, but a charming one. 
[7]

Katie Gill: There’s no way around it: Beathard has a grating voice. It’s too twangy to be rock and too whiny to be country. He interprets every “oo” sound as an “eww” that Jimmy Fallon would be proud of. I’ll admit that the “rock on” twist at the end of the chorus was cute, but that doesn’t save a song that’s half play by numbers, half godawful “you’ve changed and ~you’re not country enough~” borderline sexist rhetoric.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: This feels like more of a straight ahead rocker than a country record — 30 years ago, this might’ve been a hit for Bryan Adams — but then again, that’s where a lot of country is these days. That said, it’s a great song with a clever lyrical conceit, a double-use of the phrase “rock on” (which I won’t spoil), and Beathard has a very unique voice, thin and raspy and somehow perfectly suited to this single.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: I’m not here for a yarling dude in love with his own average wordplay and a girl who’s over him. You can build a song around a single line, sure, but you can build a wall with just bricks and no mortar and both are unlikely to stand up to much.
[3]

Cassy Gress: Tucker Beathard has a voice somewhere between Kid Rock and Jon Bon Jovi, and his debut single makes fun of his ex’s new look (the nudge and wink of “I don’t know about all dolled up like that”) while pretending he’s over her. The whole joke of the song is the dual uses of “rock on”, but “shoulda put a rock on” really needs an indirect object; obviously he didn’t want to say “put a rock on her” because then it wouldn’t be clever (and would also make her sound like a tree stump), but you put a kettle on, not a rock. Did we really need another one of these guys?
[3]

Maybe controversy?

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Hannah Jocelyn: “1 Night” is off-putting and kind of ridiculous, from the opening synth to the actual content and delivery of the lyrics. That campiness becomes almost hypnotic as the song goes on, and from the music video, it’s easy to tell that nothing about his absurdity is lost on him. However, the slickness and modernity of “1 Night” prevent it from being as playful as Yachty and co probably think it is. Both the video and song still work, though, because they end up on the the right side of the line between stupid-but-fun (like everything DJ Khaled) and just plain dumb (like Antidote).
[6]

Claire Biddles: I can forgive a lyrical dirtbag if he makes up for it with his performance, or his charisma, or his sensuality. I eat up the fake-nice platitudes of Drake or the mean-spirited jibes of Matty Healy not just because they’re hot, but because they know how to charm me, despite my full knowledge of their faults — it’s the pop version of meeting a guy at a bar, rolling your eyes at what he says all night, then going home with him anyway. “1 Night” quickly establishes Lil Yachty’s douchebag credentials, but the sexual promises that are supposed to sweeten the deal are dead behind the eyes. His lyrics are definitely gross, but it’s his monotonous, lecherous delivery of them that make me retch.
[1]

Juana Giaimo: It’s very hard to listen to Lil Yachty’s monotone for four minutes. If this was a little bit more pathetic, I could have at least considered it a joke song. 
[2]

Katie Gill: First I listened to the song. Lil Yachty’s lethargic flow is definitely a unique style choice, one that obviously doesn’t work for the song though it works for me. Points for that lyric about the Four Seasons, which made me laugh. Then I watched the music video, and those four minutes of slight surrealism and purposefully bad aesthetics made me see the song in a different light. The song’s a bit of a joke. But does the music video show that Lil Yachty’s aware of that?
[5]

Iain Mew: I like that this takes its woozy aesthetic to such an extreme. There’s not much to it, but its lack of energy infuses it with sadness even as Lil Yachty goes for totally disaffected. At best, it feels like his fantasy lack of commitment and the inevitable fallout are both there layered over each other, uneasily coexisting without ever touching.
[6]

Jibril Yassin: Lil Yachty sounds like the prototypical little brother or sister singing along to rap music they don’t really get, and the effect is chilling. “1 Night” feels slight and pleasant, pad chords just tinkling away. Yet a smaller background seems all the more fitting for a breakout role like Yachty’s.
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: At first blush, the words rub me the wrong way, but as the song loops on repeat, it’s clear that the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek. It’s a pat on the head, yes, but it’s also a hair tousle; the annoying brothers who tag along with you and your friend, and you let them stick around because they keep making you laugh despite yourself. Burberry Perry and Lil Yachty have created a sound that is so of the moment, so irreverent, and so genuinely fun to listen to — echoing music trends from the past several years, yet infused with a freshness, a je nes se quois that keeps me listening to this over and over.
[8]