The granddaddy of French rap is starting to feel it.

[Video]
[6.33]

Cédric Le Merrer: MC Solaar, once poet laureate of French hip hop turned sell out to variété, has disappeared long enough for the rehabilitation process to take place. Now France is ready for him to do a serious song about growing old, with an old school beat and all the trappings of his early stuff. It’s not bad per se, but age did not make Solaar wise. We didn’t need him telling us “shit, I guess I’m an old now” when his flow already made that clear..
[4]

Stephen Eisermann: MC Solaar approaches his first solo single in a decade, an ode to getting older, with conviction. He’s introspective, sure, but he sounds determined, as he starts the song listing all that is wrong with an aging body, only to later find a sort of redemption and second wind. It’s powerful, and although I’m not sure the minimalist composition works in the song’s favor, MC Solaar’s voice is really all this track needs to feel empowering.
[6]

Jessica Doyle: It’s less grand than the video implies, and better, as he ruefully recounts his prostate exams and wishes he could be permanent like the Ku Klux Klan. The lament is less about mortality itself–maybe he’s going to heaven, mainly to hell, either way he’s keeping calm about it–than time’s arrow: not that he is an older man now than that he’ll never be a young man again. The sentiment feels true to me, and so does the song.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: Hearing MC Solaar rap about prostate exams and hearing aids over a Herbie Hancock score from a lost 80s cop movie makes The Blueprint 3 look even more embarrassing in retrospect.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: The wordplay is charming, the delivery is smooth and sincere, but the hook sounds like a hastily-assembled parody of something else (just what is that dry, pathetic-sounding little synth line trying to accomplish?).
[6]

Iain Mew: Solaar goes rapid and technical enough that it could be showy, but instead he remains perfectly measured and leaves all the flourishes to the eruptions of synth and strings and song around him. It’s a journey full of beautiful twists and turns. Realising that the retro-futurist sound is the perfect fit for rapping about getting old and pining after youth makes it better still.
[8]

Björk found this dressphere at the La Brea tar pits.

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Will Adams: A study in musical pools. The verses read like fragments, like notes scribbled before they escape the mind. They sink into the arrangement’s depths until they’re no longer visible in the murk. Rising up, however, is the plea of “I/You care for you/me,” a devastating summary of the reciprocal nature of care. With “The Gate,” it’s easy to forget that it’s pulling you in with the well-worn slow build formula because the resulting churn of emotion is too captivating to ignore.
[8]

Eleanor Graham: For all it reveled in minute-long string jags, towering and disintegrating tangents from recognisable melody, and general, you know, Björkness, Vulnicura was a bracingly direct break-up album. Shrugged “Lionsong”: “Maybe he will come out of this loving me – maybe he won’t.” Cried “Stonemilker”: “Show me emotional respect!” This song is not a departure, hanging all its hopes for emotional resonance on four agonised words – “I care for you!” – repeated against synths that exhale rattlesnakes and ghosts and inhale Disney panpipes and computerised bubbles. Ultimately, “The Gate” suffers the same fate as “Black Lake” in that there is too much emptiness in its sprawling sonic wasteland. The latter at least was a thing to be felt; this is just a thing to be admired. Its desolation/infatuation/desperation is apparent but lacks urgency. As far as stirring church-y atmospherics go, Susanne Sundfør accomplished far more in under three minutes.
[4]

Leah Isobel: Vulnicura was one of the most heart-shattering pieces of music I’ve ever listened to, direct in form but utterly despairing in content. It was my gateway to Björk, and introduced me to the dizzying emotional heights she can scale within a pop structure, but its sense of sheer hopelessness keeps me from returning to it much. “The Gate” goes in the opposite direction. Arca’s production lights up like one of those freaky deep-sea fish, but the electronic edges are blunted, leaving only the eerie neon luminescence. Björk, meanwhile, lets her voice unspool a patient melody that seems to float in the ether. I like the slow development on the theme, and her candid admission that she wasn’t always “so needy,” but I’m more excited by the implicit promise that better things are to come – both for Björk-as-song-narrator, and on her upcoming album.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The spaces between the verses, filled with glacial movement and rigorous, almost minimal electronic declarations, make the proposal of caring not one of warmth or of love but of difficult obligation. She sings “care” somewhere between a phrase book and a declaration of unpleasant moral necessity. The song is easier about caring than how she sings about it, but it is still cold, and a little lonely. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: Years experimenting with the expositional and dramatic use of space and spare synth string effects culminate in “The Gate.” I haven’t heard so many nuances wrung out of the word “care.” But by the four-minute mark Bjork has reached the limits of nuance, drama, and exposition.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: Bjork’s vocal performance takes center stage, as it often does, but an equal star here is producer Arca’s production work. It’s a marvelously unfriendly backdrop, as icy and alien as any take from his solo work: arrhythmic, woody kick drums, dramatic faux-orchestral trills, moaning detuned melodies, uncomfortably high clicks fed through oceans of reverb. This instrumental is fragmented and difficult to keep track of, with only a vague overarching trend of growth, and it’s just as temporally disorienting the whole way through as Bjork’s freeform lamentations. By totally refusing the listener basic metrical or structural points of reference, its individual sections feel slippery and formless in memory, and it makes a bright blur of an overall impression even as it’s difficult to recall exactly how the beginning differs from the end. That kind of effect doesn’t always pan out in a song’s favor, of course, but every piece of this song’s construction seems to have been tweaked to accentuate this effect; a jumbled, half-ordered cloud of dramatic, interrelated events floating in a bubble of space. Listening through it is like trying to remember a fantastic, weird dream.
[9]

The National may be one of the most consistently scoring bands on TSJ.

[Video][Website]
[5.88]

Tim de Reuse: Oh, Matt, you’ve always had a tendency to lay down tightly rhyming verses next to each other based on associational dream logic, but here it seems like you’ve reversed your approach; the message is compelling and clear, but the delivery is loose and unsatisfying, like you’re following a karaoke machine that’s going in and out of sync. The second verse, in particular, sounds like it was written before anyone had worked out how many syllables would best fit in each bar. There’s no law that everything by The National has to have an easily memorizable singalong structure, but, well, I don’t think this change of focus revealed any hidden strengths; the verses are too messy to stick in your head, and the chorus is a tacit plea that repetition might make the heart find some kind of gravitas in a flimsy eight-word mantra. There’s not a lot to like outside of Berninger’s baritone, either. Bryan Devendorf’s drums are atrociously overproduced, and serve as a constant, thumping distraction from the things that actually work; they belong in a thoughtless, sanitized DnB track by a bedroom producer who spent the week previous memorizing every YouTube tutorial on “punchy, professional snares” released in the last ten years.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Not that I don’t find this perfectly pleasant, but The National’s mumble with busy drums and fidgety guitar chords was perfected on Boxer‘s “Apartment Story.” There’s a bit of frustration, as moments of emotion shine through and then get snuffed out when the guitars chime in like they’re the chorus. With the caveat that complaining about a National song shuffling to zero volume without having resolved its feelings and narrative is like hating kittens for being adorable — it’s just what they do! — something about this one made me want a bit more.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I’m sure at this point plenty of fans would take “could basically fit in on Boxer” as high praise for a new song, but while they’re always going to need a couple of (relatively) high tempo ones to goose the sequencing a bit, if this gets people it’ll be for the same reason some of their ballads do: I just don’t know that many songs in any genre that have hit on this particular situation/emotion so squarely and sharply (in this case, having a relationship with someone so ambivalent and long-running you feel like it’ll never end but you’re not sure how it could survive; if you’ve never had one of those, no, you’re not missing out). Pretty sure the battle lines on these guys were drawn a long time ago, but if there’s something worth loving them for (aside from the music, which is always going to be a matter of taste/genre fondness) it’s the fact that I am 100% sure that Matt Berninger knows exactly how simultaneously true and false, fair and unfair he’s being when he sings “Don’t do this, I don’t do this to you”.
[7]

Cédric Le Merrer: Everyone, pay attention to the famous U2ish sad sacks’ breakup song. What an edgy casual domestic violence allusion! This poet really tells it like it is. But also, somehow, it has to be about America, right?
[3]

Alfred Soto: The avatars of genteel boredom in fitted shirts return with a skyscraping guitar hook and the kind of angst that makes grown men stick their heads between the speakers. “Day I Die” aims for the anthemic but remains a second side, song four track (it’s the second track). “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” felt as if Matt Berninger and his colleagues had choked on ashes.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: The National’s nerve-rattling rock aches and sighs and mutters too much for it to suggest that they wear critic-given praise of long-term consistency as a badge of honor. What’s good in enduring if you live long enough for people to disappoint you? Matthew Berninger pisses away that inevitable fate in “Day I Die” with self-deprecating sarcasm as usual, though he knows he’s got to sit with it eventually. Based on how little The National has grown in sound, his next few decades will go by even slower. And taking in just how long he’s got to endure make me nauseous.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: Why does his voice sound like an aural JPEG artifact? How is this different than whichever song off Billboard’s alternative chart we’re mocking this year? Why aren’t the drums in a less identikit song?
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: A crankier, weirder spin on the dinner parties and family gatherings of “Blank Slate”, “Tall Saint”, and “Lemonworld”. Even if the production is not as dense as something like “Bloodbuzz Ohio”, as nothing is (for better or worse), this is also the most immediate the band has ever sounded. Matt Berninger’s vocals float above the mix as if he’d already become a ghost, and the Dessner brothers U2 better than U2 just did with their reverberating, Lanoisy guitars. If Matt was incomprehensible on “System”, he’s lucid here – “young mothers love me/even ghosts of girlfriends call from Cleveland” is both an amusingly petty humblebrag and sums up the feelings that sometimes come with reunions, specifically the knee-jerk reactions – Why has nothing changed? Why do I still have to deal with all of you? On top of that, because this is a National song, there’s an overarching need to escape the room or the body altogether – but straight-up leaving is rude and you do not want to disappoint anyone. Matt does get tempted during the frantic bridge, his musings about old Val Jester only increasing the id’s influence during an inherently superego-driven event, but even imagining leaving the place makes him feel bad. It’s this tension between keeping it together and losing your shit that fuels “Day I Die”, bringing the smallest moments of dissonance and anxiety up to scale.
[9]

Sad for the summer :,(

[Video][Website]
[5.83]

Crystal Leww: French Montana is 0 for 2 on adding any sort of value to quiet bangers this year, but that’s okay — Stefflon Don plays the Swae Lee role on this, and makes those steel drums sing and cry at the same damn time. “Hurtin’ Me” won’t be nearly as massive as “Unforgettable,” but it’s a shame. This is a post-summer fling comedown worthy of cooling weather. 
[7]

Stephen Eisermann: This breezy island jam follows Rihanna’s “Work” outline a little too closely for me to comfortably enjoy. Releasing songs that are this reminiscent of huge singles is fine as long as you manage to be as good or better, but this is neither — it’s just louder. 
[4]

Ashley John: “Hurtin’ Me” sounds like summer dragging on too late. The beat is warm and light, the melody is sweet, but the song feels like it lingers without a strong purpose. French Montana’s verse passes without much value, and the song is over before you have enough time to form a solid opinion about it. While I tend to enjoy vulnerability set to a catchy beat, this one feels so hollow that it passes along in a final burst and fades away just as quickly.
[4]

Julian Axelrod: Stefflon Don shoots for a breakup anthem, but can’t be bothered to flesh out the relationship beyond “One time I made you breakfast.” When the musical and emotional highpoint of your song is a French Montana verse, you know you’re in trouble.
[4]

Will Adams: The pang of the strings and steel drums, delicately layered together, hit like tears pattering on the floor. Stefflon Don’s hurting, sure, but the loneliness comes through stronger, as each repeated “me, me, me…” tries in vain to shift his attention back.
[7]

Ramzi Awn: A simple tune with layers to match, “Hurtin’ Me” breaks out of the hip hop pack, in large part due to Stefflon Don’s voice. And the lofty synths aren’t hurtin’ anybody either. The single brings The Stutter back a bit too early and still manages to do all the right things.  
[9]

Who got the power? Little Mix still, apparently…

[Video][Website]
[5.57]

Patrick St. Michel: EXO lean in all the way on the corniness a song like this demands, and they end up all the better for it. After the dentist-drill trap failings of “Ko Ko Bop,” hearing something so content in its awkwardness — huge choruses! borrowed Daft Punk bass! lyrics about music being great and important! — is a nice change of pace, even if it doesn’t have much staying, uh, power.
[5]

Madeleine Lee: Is it already time for EXO’s Super Junior “we’re funny now” years? It is nice that they seem to be having a genuinely good time for once, even if that good time sounds like how the music at the club blurs into generic synth noises right before you decide you’ve been there long enough.
[4]

Alfred Soto: It goes on and on, its makers in the throes of a fever heat: they know they’ve got a strong hook and they ain’t letting go. Songs about the radio and a song’s capacity to move you, though — EXO understand. 
[7]

Will Adams: Shamelessly gratuitous electro belch that’s dazzling enough upon first listen but loses its luster the more I realize it’s just an over-accessorized version of Deorro’s “Five Hours.”
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: The wildest thing is that the electropop of the beginning of the decade is at one point going to get nostalgicized and feel like the unfinished future we left behind for dozens of other phases of pop. Here it’s actually just reminding us that EXO have been running a little long, and it’s surprising to hear them put out a song that easily could’ve been from when they were a younger and more fledgling group.
[3]

Mo Kim: There’s a lot I could critique about this song. There are about three too many choruses; the rap break (“WE TAKE SHOT” and all) is clearly kiddy-glued right into the second verse; Jason Derulo would reject some of these lyrics for being too on-the-nose. Everything about this is oversaturated, like plunging a fist into an ice cream cake and shoving it into your mouth. But listen. Sometimes you forget your Lactaid, and you know you’re going to wake up to a throbbing stomachache in the morning, but you also know in your heart of hearts that the only way to make it through today is with cookies ‘n’ cream dripping down your chin onto the sidewalk, volume up to full blast, mouth forming a mantra to live by: “I GOT THAT POWER! POWER!”
[9]

Alex Clifton: By itself, “Power” is objectively not a great song. The chorus of “we’ve got that pow-ER, POW-er” is sticky enough, but everything else evaporates in thin air when we hit the verses. There’s no ease here the way there is in “Ko Ko Bop,” nor do we have the same vicious joy that coursed through “Call Me Baby.” What we do have, however, is a music video that elevates this song from obscurity. Evidently the entire budget was used for terrible CGI and none was left for a director, so we have a group of boys playing with random electro/space props with no idea why. (Check the way they shoot at evil knock-off BB-8; rarely do they all shoot or look in the same direction.) Combine that with a bizarre surprise twist that set me cry-laughing for a solid five minutes and we have a winner for Goofiest Music Video 2017. I can’t say I’ll seek out the song itself, but I’m going to play this video at every single party I host over the next year, and that alone is worthwhile.
[5]

We’ll Score The Songs.

[Video][Website]
[3.00]

Katherine St Asaph: That’s cool. I’ll be here with: my own (pen) name; a fantastically named cat; money I’ve found (OK, that one’s unrealistic); a partner nevertheless, who doesn’t expect all-nominally-matchy everything; enough funny to find “more than the garden will grow” deeply, unintentionally hilarious (how it’s right next to the rooster crowing because get it, or how he buries it in the mix, as if at some level he knew it was a bad line); and enough smarts to reject both complementarian bullshit and the anodyne glurge it comes in.
[3]

Josh Langhoff: Musically, it’s a straight-down-the-middle fiddle country tune, built for modernity with some syncopated R&B (or at least “’80s Mercedes”) cadences in the second verse. Lyrically, it’s a tight-assed complementarian manifesto masquerading as easygoing dude’s dude coochie coo, maybe the prime example of the form since Pastor Mark Driscoll fled Seattle.
[4]

Katie Gill: Shelton’s innate goofiness and a catchy chorus can’t save a song that’s essentially Boring Stereotypical Country Music Heteronormativity. How many songs of “you’re a pretty girly girl, I’m a muscular manly man” do we really need?
[4]

Stephen Eisermann: Neotraditional is a good sound for Blake. This is his strongest single in a while without question, and his voice is the primary reason for that. Blake has always been a great vocalist surrounded by heavy production, but with a more laid back approach in the studio,  the warmth in his voice is given the opportunity to cradle lyrics like “sing you a song out there with the crickets and the frogs.” He provides color to what is otherwise a pretty bland country track. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: He’s a feistier singer than when he sported a mullet. Anger suits him. Now that he’s calmed down he’s back to peddling bullshit like “You’ll be the pretty and I’ll be the funny.” Blake, I’ve heard your jokes and idea of wordplay. 
[1]

Edward Okulicz: Shorter Shelton: I have rigid gender roles and am a cornball. The song bounds along like an eager-to-please puppy, but lines like “you be the pretty and I’ll be the funny” make me want to kick it in the face.
[3]

Alex Clifton: I’ll steal those dogs if I have to listen to this song ever again, Blake. You don’t deserve them.
[0]

Former Wonder Girl, not so wondrous reception…

[Video]
[6.67]

Alex Clifton: If you’re looking to do a vengeance track, this is how you do it. Sunmi laments an ex leaving her but remains entirely in control: she’s far from being victimised. The question “why are you leaving me?” starts as accusatory, but it ends as a delicious taunt. “Gashina” evokes the feeling of showing up to the club looking phenomenal while your ex stands in the corner in a slubby shirt, spilling beer on themselves. It’s walking past them with your head held high, never bothering to look back, knowing their eyes are on you. And it’s the satisfaction of having left them alone in the dust while they crumble in your shadow. Burn down the town, Sunmi. I’ll be right behind you.
[10]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The Teddy/Sunmi tandem makes so much sense, both on paper and in practice, it almost makes you forget how much having a drop instead of a melodic hook can damage a track like this. When she leads, “Gashina” is captivating; this is the right setting for her to shine. Too bad she spent half of that time fighting her own beat. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: What’s going on in the chorus I can’t say, but the track makes a helluva racket.
[6]

Ian Mathers: “[Her agency] said that her song title 가시나 had three meanings – 1) To have thorns, 2) Are you leaving me?, 3) a group of beautiful flowers”, and certainly going by the English subtitles on the official video the writers have done a good job of marrying just about every line to one of those meanings in a way that feels accomplished rather than forced. At first the two-part (three-part?) chorus feels a bit lacking, but it’s surprisingly quick to hook you in, actually earning the moments when the bass bins boom so loud they threaten to overwhelm the rest of the track. Those bits feel so good you wish they’d done a little more with that element.
[7]

Jessica Doyle: It’s not that Sunmi does a bad job, sounding simultaneously confident and vulnerable, but this could have been billed as Lia Kim ft. Sunmi, for the amount the choreography has contributed to the song’s rise. I don’t find Teddy’s contribution terribly interesting.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: The instrumental has plenty of detail, but there’s little weight behind its airy guitar strums and obligatory distorted hook; it dutifully buoys Sunmi from point A to point B with little sign of exertion or effort. Her delivery is forceful and direct; unfortunately, what she’s singing over isn’t quite as convincing.
[6]

“neck deep in bloom”: a Welsh pop-punk band and their single, and also a bit of prose to borrow…

[Video][Website]
[5.71]

Alex Clifton: Is it 2005? Have we a Welsh version of Yellowcard on our hands? While lacking perhaps some more of the more skillful lyrical precision I like in pop-punk (see also: all of Pete Wentz’s wordplay, Jesse Lacey’s searing and intimate agony), this is a nice little tune. A relationship breaks apart at the roots while we’re treated to a deceptively upbeat, catchy melody–the best trait of pop-punk. There’s also a fine bit of guitarwork in the middle eight. I can’t say that I’d be able to blindly pick Neck Deep out of a lineup of ’00s pop-punk bands after hearing this one song, but they do their thing well enough.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: What a museum piece this is — mall-pop-punk smack bang in the middle of Yellowcard and Funeral For a Friend — and yarled and played with such enthusiasm, escalating subtly to a friendly shoutalong.
[7]

Alfred Soto: No one would have blinked twenty years ago if this neat pop-punk had duly peaked at #8 on the modern rock chart and disappeared until its eventual appearance on a ’90s one-hit-wonder comp. Thus the strange phenomenon of a song twice worthy of mind wipe.
[3]

Tim de Reuse: Presumably, some kind of musicological study in faithfully reproducing that brand of emo-pop-punk that echoed through every American mall in the mid-aughts. Considered on that level, it’s impressive — they nailed the astringent guitar tone, the snappy, barely-present drums, and the straining, tense vocal harmonies. I can’t fathom any reason for this song’s existence other than historical interest! It sticks far too rigidly to a formula that popular culture thoroughly exhausted ten years ago, and while its execution is competent within that framework, it makes no convincing argument as to why the listener shouldn’t just stick with the bands that it’s so faithfully ripping off.
[2]

Hannah Jocelyn: My high school history teacher became a fan of Chvrches because, to paraphrase him, it revived an ’80s sound by only taking the best parts of acts from that era. I feel a similar way about this song and early 2000s pop-rock, taking the “voice inside my yedddd” and leaving “catching things and eating their insides”; taking “if I could find you now, things would get better” and leaving the dated sound of Yellowcard’s verses. The lyrics are mature in the way they play around with irony (“I can do this on my own” followed up with the insistence that “This will be the last time… I wanna crawl to bed”) and half-advocate for introverted processing, regardless of whether that’s the right thing to do. What really pushes this over the edge is seeing the credits; Neal Avron has worked with the two bands I mentioned, and getting the king of that sound to mix your pop-punk pastiche is inspired.
[9]

Ryo Miyauchi: The chorus and verses could be two separate songs, both suitable for Neck Deep’s zippy yet super-earnest power-pop, for better or for worse. The finger-pointing in the chorus could have made yet another entitled brat punk song if given a set of whiny lyrics to follow. But it’s the sincere embrace and the confrontation of neurosis in the verses that makes “In Bloom” as good as this genre can make.
[6]

Eleanor Graham: Wild how this instantly transformed me into a 14-year-old kid standing in the road with my bike in my clapboard Malcolm In The Middle neighbourhood, watching the girl I liked wander off into the dappled September-afternoon light. Lucky how it falls into a chorus melody strong enough to make me forget how annoying it is, how there’s just enough guitar to fill my head, how my brain chemistry is no match for those piano touches. By turns obnoxious and infectious, brattish outburst and perfect catharsis — unpredictable, but in the end, right.
[7]

*types “sports” and “feuds” into subhead, gets 100000000 pageviews*

[Video][Website]
[3.36]Mo Kim: “Cartman is introduced to Katy Perry’s songwriting staff, who turn out to be a group of manatees. The staff, who live in a large tank, pick up “idea balls” from a large pile of them, each of which has a different animal, quote from direct-to-DVD sleeper hit Bring It On 4: The Bringing On Of The It, or what is what. The president decides to pull the new Katy Perry album before its release. Cartman feels victorious, but Taylor Swift shows up, saying that she just convinced the president to tack a 2014 Nicki Minaj verse he found in his Recycle Bin onto the end and release the damn song anyway.”
[2]

Thomas Inskeep: If you thought “Look What You Made Me Do” was petty, you haven’t heard nothin’ yet. Clumsy lyrics, a bad early ’90s house retread track, a guest verse so phoned-in that Minaj sounds bored doing it, and worst of all, Katy Perry herself, the saddest virus in pop music. Fortunately, it seems that pop fans have developed an immunity to her, based on the pathetic chart performance of her current album and its attendant singles. That sound you hear isn’t a “swish,” it’s Perry’s career circling the drain.
[0]

Ryo Miyauchi: Genius insists with all its investigative power that this hater-pop is personal, but Katy Perry throws limp jabs that rings anonymous as the dance beat behind her. At least Duke Dumont’s wheelhouse is more reliable to entertain.
[5]

Crystal Leww: How is it that Duke Dumont is credited as a producer for basically taking Maya Jane Coles and Fatboy Slim production and then somehow making it bad?
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: “Walking on Air” was the best track on Prism, and I’m still not sure how Maya Jane Coles isn’t everywhere for how much she’s influenced pop, so the synthesis was bound to be both good and ascribed to no one involved. “Things have changed from true believers of the music to a more commercialized version of what used to be,” said Roland Clark about his infinitely sampled “I Get Deep,” so I’m sure he’s just thrilled about his words trickling up uncredited, via Fatboy Slim via Duke Dumont, to a Katy Perry song. (He’s not disowning it, at least.) If you’re very charitable you might see this as Duke Dumont trying, as all pop-house producers do, to prove he Knows His History, but perhaps not, given the aforementioned infinite samples and how Katy’s team uses it as a reaction GIF. But at least it belongs in a house track — unlike the hook (probably Starrah), which belongs in a track that draws out its menace, or the verses (probably Sarah Hudson; evidence), which belong in Pink’s “Can’t Take Me Home” and in the care of several more editors. (Editors one and two: “what the fuck?” Editor three: “And every bad lyric has nothing to do with basketball anyway. If you’re going to keep glomming onto sports because they’re now the monoculture that music is not, at least stick to the metaphor.” Managing editor: “STOP BEING MUSIC GEEKY.”) Everything suggests the kind of song that only coheres with the memes and fake context. Yet somehow it works: the unsweet tea to Meghan Trainor’s Arnold Palmer of “Me Too,” a machine that looks inexplicably polished.
[7]

Madeleine Lee: Finally, a pop single with a house beat that I don’t like! I mean, the beat is fine, but I can’t enjoy it over the lyrics, which are supposed to be fierce but just sound silly in their mix of bizarre analogies (my personal favourite: “a tiger…don’t need opinions from a shellfish”) and parroted clapback phrases. Even the robo-voice sample is bad — that long pause inserted before “what the fuck” is the sound of an air ball.
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: A thin, slipping bassline over flat drums. Katy sings blandly. Nicki spits a sharp-toothed verse that is there and then gone.
[5]

Frank Kogan: Swish kiss plish, wish the lyrics were different from this. Aside from them, the sound is weird and emphatic and grabby as if she were a Rick James protégé, and jolts me to happy attention. Of course Teena Marie, the Rick James protégé, would’ve run a thousand rings and wings and epicycles around this. But this track is great for using just a touch of Teena and then continuing to bear down on that little touch, getting all it can out of its little somersault.
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: The “dance like dubstep” line by Nicki is the perfect thing to overstate as to why both artists have been failing to hit their marks. In Perry’s case, there’s been an insistent attempt to change what’s working for her and mimic other people’s successes when, considering how the personality-bleached “Rise” was a home run for her, that’s the last thing she needed to do. And Minaj’s verse-by-numbers, complete with unnecessary sung outro and dustbin bars, feels like someone who’s been sleepwalking since 2012. It’s a bitter irony: someone desperate to change who never needed to, and someone too stubborn to recognize how antiquated they’ve become. Plus, this bad Duke Dumont hijack of Maya Jane Coles doesn’t even sound like anything plugged into what was hot at any particular time. From the melodies to the cloying attempt at a catchphrase, it feels so disconnected from any real attempt at a hit to the point you wonder why this was released as it was. Greater songs have been kept out of sight.
[2]

Will Adams: In the aftermath of Perry’s promo campaign for Witness, a fever dream of live streams and awkward celeb collabs in feeble support of Katy’s Great Awokening, “Swish Swish” doesn’t look so bad. On first glance it seemed as noxious as it read on paper: more references cherry picked from a position of privilege smooshed together with more reverse engineered memes, from Backpack Kid to the cameo sopped video. Yes, the song itself still isn’t great. There’s still too much reverb, and there’s still some unfortunate scansion and even more unfortunate use of the English language. But the sonic references make a difference; Maya Jane Coles’ continued influence on pop is a trend I warmly welcome, and if “I Get Deep” needed to get a reboot for the mid-late ’10s, keeping it tied to its house roots is a thoughtful choice. “Swish Swish” is at its best when the excess surrounding it is ignored.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Apparently this is an “anti-bullying” track! It’s not my job to learn intentions, not when “Swish Swish” is a mishmash of incongruous and unhappily cobbled samples, strange vocal choices, and an inapposite Nicki Minaj cameo.
[2]

Alex Clifton: Look, I tried to give this a point for Nicki Minaj singing “I already despise you” in the sweetest way, but I can’t do it. “Swish Swish” is the blandest Katy Perry song I’ve ever heard, which is really saying something. Much as I loathed “Bon Appetit,” at least that had, er, memorable moments. Nothing here stands out, a sin for a diss track: the beat is half-assed, the insults are weak (“you’re ’bout as cute as an old coupon expired” — what on earth does that mean, Katy?), and the delivery is emotionless. A song about being the baddest bitch on the block who kills people needs swagger, which has never been Perry’s strong point. Say what you will about Taylor Swift, but at least in “Look What You Made Me Do” she sounds icy and in charge. Perry doesn’t even have that going for her.
[0]

Stephen Eisermann: Nicki’s verse is a blast — quick-witted, fun, and catchy — and deserving of a much better song. But here, it’s just a silver lining on a dark ass cloud. Nothing about this song comes across as sincere — where Taylor’s vindictiveness comes from a place of actual anger, I just don’t think Katy cares enough to fight with her. And that’s totally fine, but there is no need to fake it! Also, the release of this song feels so weird considering she went on a reconciliation press tour earlier in this album cycle, no?
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: Swap the two artists around, replace the video with literally anything else, and it’s much better – all the pieces are there, including the Duke Dumont-produced beat, but the “old coupon expired” lines aren’t iconic; they’re dumb. Same with the video, which tries to be a mess and succeeds too well. At least Nicki seems to know what is what. Katy, on the other hand, does not know what is what. She just uses dated memes in her already overblown video struts. What the heck?
[5]

Google currently has over 440,000 results for “Finnish Bieber”. Let’s review.

[Video][Website]
[4.43]

Iain Mew: He was promoted at the age of 14 as an answer to a similarly-aged Justin Bieber, but, like, with skate-punk accents. Now he’s 19 and if anything the Bieber of now looms even larger as a model for the softly agonised EDM-R&B mix. Thing is it’s mixed with an unusually baroque take on the X Factor winner’s ballad sound. By the end of the clash between the two I’m still unclear which side was an un-needed intrusion on the other.
[3]

Anjy Ou: Obscured somewhat by a fairly generic pop instrumental is a touching goodbye to a person, to a relationship, or to a home. Robin sings from the the point of separation, where he is changing and is looking for more in life, while his other half has settled in place and doesn’t hear the call of the outside as strongly as he does. Often times people think that wanting to leave and experience new things means that you’re not content with what you have. The opposite is in fact true. Contentment does not always lead to stillness. And movement does not always signal discontent. Sometimes it just means that your heart is large enough to encompass many experiences, many homes, and many loves, and you’re just trying to keep your heart full. “Me Tehtiin Taa” (Finnish for “We Did This”) is a song that honours what has been, and makes room for what is to come.
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: Boyish voices like this in pop haven’t been too willing to accept fault as of late, perhaps using the big-bang chorus of “Me Tehtiin Tää” as his last petty word in the conversation. So it surprises me to find Robin handle his break-up so amicably despite just how tragically he spins such a defining relationship.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: Well it has a nice hop to it, which helps it rise ever so slightly above its forced drama. But right, this is about the voice and what it can do, so only slightly above.
[4]

Madeleine Lee: The chorus is an emotional rush, but one that doesn’t feel earned at first. The obvious strain in Robin’s voice as he pushes to reach that emotional peak doesn’t help.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Relying on a translation as I did, it was hard to reconcile the triumph/coronation feel of the song with the lyric regarding leaving a relationship that the narrator is growing out of even as he speaks/sings. Some break-ups are like this, but the chorus’s climax feels like forced passion for something that arouses none elsewhere. like at the end of it he’s going to shake hands, having agreed to divest shares in the girl’s company or something.
[4]

Will Adams: In the way that “Love the Way You Lie” had its chorus spun-off into a whole Rihanna-led single, “Me Tehtiin Tää” is what would probably have sprung from Charlie Puth’s “See You Again” hook. The punch-up in the form of inspiro-radio pop isn’t exactly the adequate elevation.
[4]