Baby just say… no.

[Video][Website]
[3.00]

Alfred Soto: Why this country quintet left on the caps lock when thinking of a name is a mystery unanswered by the lethargic well-intentioned dude-ism of this weeper. 
[4]

Edward Okulicz: I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell whether this was, is, or could have been, the greatest love story ever from the dude’s voice. Could have been about a particularly nice whiskey for all I can hear in the delivery. The quick script-flipping at the end is told as if the band’s under heavy sedation.
[3]

Ramzi Awn: A fine country verse with a cringeworthy hook, “Greatest Love Story” is impressively devoid of passion, and the in-between that it tries to find between old and new falls on deaf ears. 
[3]

Iain Mew: The careful, gentle arrangement leaves lots of space for the song’s emotions to spread out in. Which is a problem when they fail in delivering any, taking the most prosaic of stories and failing to give it any spark, or even to keep it internally consistent through the first verse — she wouldn’t touch him but she was going too far with him? The only reason the proposal doesn’t feel like the most undeserved thing at the end is because it’s sharing space with the leap to calling this the greatest love story in the world.
[2]

Will Adams: At first I scoffed at the title’s lofty promises, but after a few listens it made perfect sense. The “Greatest Love Story” it is not, but it is a great distillation of all the more interesting ones into their essential building blocks. He, a cookie cutter nice guy, and she, a soft silhouette of chasteness, have a fling and grow old together through a deep connection that exists because the script says so. It’s not taken to a satirical level, though, so the result is a truly bland narrative that wastes its delicate arrangement.
[3]

Josh Langhoff: Like a nostalgic camera, one LANCO, a new country outfit lolling around Nashville’s corner offices, limns a normative, contemporary occasion — Love! Affiancing? Nuptials? CONSUMMATION??? — over lazy anecdote. #NeverChange, outlaws.
[3]

Sharing is caring, Tamara…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Alfred Soto: Tamara Lindeman sings as if she keeps her secrets close; the whorls of strings do the hinting. After a couple minutes the reticence feels like a vise. 
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Tamara Lindeman’s attempt at self-restraint to save, not share aloud her feelings is a thing to admire in this day in social media culture, though it’s a practice not entirely kept as she commits them to record here. Her crystal-clear folk song reminds me more of the liberation felt from typing up a draft of what I want to just blurt out, only to delete the post right after it goes live. She rushes through like so as she recites her string of lyrics, naked and jumbled like tweets out of chronology. But even if the music make her alternative to modern heart share seem more easy-going, the last bittersweet lyric reveals it’s anything but.
[7]

Alex Clifton: I hear shades of Joan Shelley’s rich voice, Belle & Sebastian’s sunshine pop and First Aid Kit’s instrumentation in this song. It took me a while to find who The Weather Station were, though. It’s pleasant and kind of springy — there’s definitely nothing wrong with this song at all, and Tamara Lindeman’s voice is lovely to listen to — but I can’t differentiate it from much other modern alt-folk.
[5]

Tim de Reuse: Lindeman’s lyricism is honest and physical — love as an object with heft, a new beginning as a new body, faces as “unfamiliar assemblies.” Unfortunately, the rest of the song doesn’t give her metaphors near enough room to breathe; it’s uptempo to the point of feeling rushed along, and the mix is dense and thick with flavorless strings. All the intricate little details that could’ve added up to something terrific fight for attention and end up thoroughly un-memorable.
[5]

Ashley John: I’ve been trying so hard to place myself in a new city, to blind myself with the dazzling lights and go deaf in the whir of traffic. The world is so bright and beautiful on the outside that it’s easier or more polite, maybe, to swallow back all my noxious thoughts. I mold them instead like clay, work them into prettier shapes and then let them harden in late October’s cool air. Tamara Lindeman sings of the muddy clarity of choosing to build such an exterior. With a folky guitar she leads us through a tale of misguided thinking that if we choose to pull away from the world it is noble, only because we were steadfast and independent in making such a choice. But its dangerous clay crumbles and cracks, as Lindeman notes, when it eventually gets too heavy and the pieces cannot be rebuilt. 
[7]

Iain Mew: Making something this simultaneously light and heavy is a delicate dance. It’s one that they move through beautifully and fluidly, keeping the extent of the dark frustration within as a slow reveal, the better to hit harder.
[7]

I mean you’re not wrong there, Win…

[Video][Website]
[3.75]

Alfred Soto: Nothing they touch these days is immune from the declamatory arrogance, so even a gesture of empathy like “Creature Comfort” plays like what a friend calls performative wokeness. The Mellotron washes and sequencers don’t help: they evoke a cross-generational mishmash in which ’60s pieties about community and the way in which acts in the early ’80s used technology as distance. Whatever ails you, kids, Arcade Fire will save you, the song says.
[3]

Claire Biddles: It’s such a shame that the same people who were capable of distilling existential regret into “Children don’t grow up/Our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up” have regressed to corny, inelegant observations of human suffering. Someone hire Win Butler an editor.
[2]

Iain Mew: Arcade Fire songs which sound great but are dragged down by their lyrics is not a new thing, but “Creature Comfort” takes it to extremes. Musically it’s the fullest realisation of their album’s taste-agnostic collage approach, decontextualising and assembling anything that sounds good and immediate, to dazzling effect. And as long as they’re singing about everything and nothing — on and on and on and on — it works. But applying the same scattered approach to Serious Issues just doesn’t work, with their baggage that much harder to cut away and that much more likely to become as crass and jarring as this gets.
[6]

Alex Clifton: “On and on and I don’t know if I want it” sums up Everything Now-era Arcade Fire. I had hope for Disco!Fire, especially as I was one of three people who didn’t hate Reflektor, but it turns out it’s possible to ruin disco by preaching. There’s no fun in this song; it’s a labour to listen to all the way through, from Regine Chassagne’s screechy harmonies to Win Butler’s unsuccessful speak-singing. I guess they have a point, that we’re slaves to capitalism and social media and trends, but honest to god this sort of song is not the way to deliver that message. The sad thing is that this is one of the better songs on the album. One point given as the actual backing melody is decently catchy, but I’m livid that this was okayed for release.
[1]

Hannah Jocelyn: Nick Hornby has this essay about how he has no use for “Frankie Teardrop” when he has enough anxiety to deal with on his own, and the same applies here. A friend of mine went to an Arcade Fire concert, but singing along made her cringe, because who gets catharsis from shouting “SOME GIRLS HATE THEMSELVES”? There’s no subtlety anywhere, but it still feels muddled. For starters, the central motif of “wait for the feedback” has too many radically different interpretations to register — like, from a guitar? Is this another bitter social media commentary? And don’t get me started on the “first record” line. Maybe the band could explore the pressures of having people connect with you so intensely, but even then Twenty One Pilots handled that pressure in a more personal, less moralizing way on “Guns For Hands.” What saves this from being a total mess is the brutal production, the drums and synth stabs as devastatingly swaggering as the lyrics are indecisive.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: The reductive ways in which Win Butler hollowly lists personal trauma is one condescending attempt to connect with whoever he wants to speak with. And how self-obsessed can you be to write a scene of a girl about to take her own life and focus the scene on a lame, self-deprecating attempt at a punchline about how critics don’t love you as they used to?
[5]

Anthony Easton: Straight boys singing about girls in the most cliched way, with absurd semi-pyrotechnics in the background, made even more egergious by how it’s all about them. I’m kind of exhausted of Butler’s shit. 
[2]

Tim de Reuse: Specificity and energy prevent this song from falling into pointless nihilism; a great many works of art attempt to address the psychologically harmful side-effects of the modern age (for whatever that term is decided to mean — the symptoms are usually the same regardless) and end up tedious exercises in existential dread, while “Creature Comfort” is all punchy, emotional glitz. The trouble is that its insight into its subject matter isn’t terribly deep. With its references direct, its metaphors unpoetic and its tone sing-along anthemic, it’s got the uncanny atmosphere of a hamhanded first act tone-setter from a future broadway musical drama about the early 21st century. I’m sure it’ll be a hit when it opens in a half-century or so, but for us stuck in the present day, it’s not quite as incisive as it thinks it is.
[6]

Turkish Got Talent contestant graduates to the pop charts…

[Video]
[5.83]

Leah Isobel: I love the cascading melodies and the way Aleyna Tilki uses her voice. She sings with a bit of a slippery quality, a waver that counters her strength. The song’s windswept soundscape is pretty but static; the whole thing is rather slight. It’s like a sudden feeling that blows away in the wind.
[7]

Ashley John: The instrumental interludes in between the verses and the chorus give this track more excitement than Aleyna does, but it sounds like she’s aware and secedes power intentionally. That back and forth in “Sen Olsan Bari” makes for a surprisingly fascinating TV talent show produced pop song, especially after multiple listens. 
[6]

Iain Mew: It’s cool to hear the same marshmallowy synth textures as are all over Anglophone pop music — there’s even a pulsing trop house bit, too — put to use to such a different sound, especially when the results are this lovely and haunting.
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: Despite the style bringing some warm, inviting beats, moombahton has become a popular platform in pop to express heartbreak in the past few years. Aleyna Tilki’s Turkish takes joins the list where not only are the glistening groove and the vocal-like beat hook a familiar staple but also her plead for her feelings to be toyed. The digital wheeze before the beat drop adds a nice touch like a watermark that this is a re-fitted yet unique take on an ubiquitous sound.
[6]

Anjy Ou: The beat is too plodding to be danceable, and the singing lacks genuine emotion.Technically solid, but doesn’t move me. 
[5]

Stephen Eisermann: “Sen Olsan Bari”‘s ability to so seamlessly incorporate a Middle-Eastern guitar riff into the chorus is it’s strongest asset. I imagine that people hailing from Turkey, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries enjoying this in the same way my family would enjoy a good trumpet or Spanish guitar. The problem, then, is that these lyrics (and the subsequent translation I found) don’t do much except repeat a simple premise about how Aleyna could be the girl that some guy is looking for, but there really isn’t much to go off of. Also, she sings the song pretty straightforward without any vocal tics or intricacies — at times, it even comes across as robotic. When listening to music in languages I do not know, I turn primarily to composition, singing style, and emotional conviction for my reviews, but this only managed to deliver on one front.
[4]

Not as challenging as finding Waldo…

[Video][Website]
[4.50]

Alfred Soto: Fresh off playing mildly queer in Kingdom, Nick Jonas returns to the profession that has made his dilettantism remunerative. The serpentine guitar line recalls “Am I Wrong”; the vocal recalls nothing at all.
[4]

Will Adams: Before “Waves”-wave, there was a tiny subset of trance producers who occasionally made light, guitar-inflected dance pop that was more wistful than vibe-y. “Find You” falls more in that realm, thankfully, but the real treat is hearing Jonas pull back from the feigned swagger of “Jealous” and “Bacon” to occupy the sound this well.
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: Nick Jonas journeys away from gesture-heavy body talk to get in tune with his serious side. And he somehow figured he could mine emotional blues in the beach-side blandness of Robin Schulz’s remix of Mr. Probz’s “Waves.” Like the remix, “Find You” drifts too gentle to feel any genuine release nor is it burdened enough to suggest suffocated pain.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: In a natural progression, Nick Jonas recognizes that his soft-rock masquerading as R&B is not a bit too gauche and too in your face for the contemporary audience. Instead, he’s moved to that soft edge of tasteful continental house-pop (see: Robin Schulz) and married Posner-style melancholy to it with relative ease. Say what you will about how slight and anemic the record feels, he’s proving time and time again that he knows just how to put himself perfectly on the cusp of the now without having to be as garish a chameleon as other artists when they force themselves to occupy the exact definitions of the here and now.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Fairly lovely as far as its exhaustingly popular and insidious genre goes, and Nick Jonas sounds lost enough that I can believe he can’t find himself, let alone the titular “you.” The verses have a nice melody, although the repeated “where to find you” scans clumsily, like it’s too many words to be normal English or a natural fit for the song. The “try, try, try” hook isn’t big enough to justify the swell that accompanies it. But overall, this is miles better than the average Robin Schulz song, so.
[6]

Julian Baldsing: There aren’t many things more depressing than a hookless song scrambling for a makeshift earworm, and “Find You”‘s attempt with that “try, try, try” bit makes me want to sit under the shower for a few hours.
[1]

We begin the week with dessert…

[Video][Website]
[4.43]

Julian Baldsing: The words that come to mind when listening to “Unsigned” are the same sort of descriptors your non-mutual crushes use when they very politely try to turn you down without grinding your sense of self-worth into the dirt. Nice! Cool! Pretty! Most of “Unsigned” is that particular brand of unremarkable that’s more inoffensive than it is uninteresting. Its production is the best thing about it — delicate and (at first) quite arresting, but there’s just not enough going on to make a lasting impression.
[5]

Iain Mew: From the ice cream chimes to both of their tones, it’s one of the sweeter realisations of this kind of sound. Telling someone you’re into them via talking about all the other girls you’re considering dropping is a really tall order to make sound sweet though.
[4]

Anjy Ou: I get that the UK is having a sort of locally grown afro-pop/afro-hip-hop renaissance, but there’s been a new version of this song on the Nigerian airwaves every month for the past 4 or 5 years. Add in the lyrics asking me to audition to be the side-piece to dudes who can’t tell me one thing that genuinely makes them a catch, and I can’t be bothered to hit replay.
[3]

Alfred Soto: Using an ice cream van melody dooms your song, to my ears, and the mumble-mumble sex-rap offers nothing we haven’t heard,
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: The reformed cad confession on the hook is unconvincing, but the R&B flow One Acen uses to deliver it reveals his real intention. On first impression a rather cold song, the ice cream truck tinkle ends up less eerie — as such chimes are wont to be in the hands of more grime-oriented artists — but instead summery. Caprio’s blunter tones help dispel the conconction’s eventual trend towards sickliness.
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: The sunny bells and One Acen’s smooth talk convince the primary mode of “Unsigned” is soft-boy pop rather than the player rap Hardy Caprio tries hard to make it be. The latter’s break into song, serenading about “be my rider, be my baby, be my company,” fits more genuinely as it fades away his tough-guy facade of dialing side chicks.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Ah, even on a track as determined to shoot itself in the foot — best typified by ruining its tinkling opening by reminding the listener of ice cream vans — it can at least lean on UK hip-hop’s underrated weapon, the “oo” vowel sound, which elevates any couplet it’s in. Can’t make it any more than waffle overall, though.
[4]

Roofies are bad.

[Video][Website]
[3.67]

Kat Stevens: CONCORD, NH – An area woman was overheard last Friday night to be sorely unimpressed with the quality of classified substances available for purchase in her local area. “She was standing right by the DJ booth, so I heard every word”, remarked DJ Dave Camelphat, 46. “I think she said something like ‘it’s practically all baby powder’, or something like that?” A regular provider of repetitive beats to the musical community, Camelphat claimed the woman arrived with friends and immediately bought a soft drink, but then decided after approximately 10 minutes that she would opt for something stronger, as she was not ‘feeling anything’. “I just think she didn’t even give it a chance to kick in. My beats were sick – but her attitude was the unhealthy one here.” When pressed, Camelphat admitted his view may have been coloured as the woman had not paying attention when ‘the drop’ (a lull in the music designed to cause a build up of suspense) arrived.  “I mean, what real music fan says ‘fuck it, I’m getting a vodka Red Bull’ – right in the middle of my set? Come on!”
[5]

Rebecca A. Gowns: Quite frankly, this is triggering. The lyrics seem to be celebrating slipping drugs in a girl’s drink without her consent — some commentators suggest it could be MDMA, but it sounds so much like a date rape drug. She can’t tell the difference yet?? What the hell else is that supposed to mean? I found a Dutch interview with Camelphat where he slyly says it’s really about “a girl who’s so drunk that she can’t taste the difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola,” an excuse that’s so stupid it makes me angry. The music matches the lyrical content, loping and trippy, making the whole experience extremely unpleasant. You want music to evoke feelings of nostalgia, not PTSD.
[1]

Ian Mathers: Here’s the thing, my dudes: when I have to look up the full lyrics to your track because I’m not sure whether the refrain (“she sips the coca cola/she can’t tell the difference yet”) refers to someone getting roofied/dosed/whatever or not, and then I’m still not sure either way after looking up those lyrics, it literally does not matter whether it is a “good” song or not because chances are pretty good I am never going to play it again. Yes, it could easily also be about a woman who has put something in her own drink and is waiting for it to take effect (or… whatever, a dozen different meanings I haven’t thought of), but the lyrics don’t clarify it enough for me to feel like I know which is is, and life is finite and I’m going to die with thousands of songs unheard and nearly all of them don’t have that particular problem, so. I would leave this unmarked, but that’s not how we play, so I’ll split the difference between what I think I’d give it otherwise and nothing at all.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: The way this pulses menacingly gives me the awful feeling that the character in this song is the one who wants there to be a difference when she sips the drink, because he’s put something in there, something stronger than a little rum. The detached tone is one I associate with a patient observer, a villain who doesn’t think they’re a villain, and that’s a worry. I mean, if she’d put a little something extra in her own drink, there’d be some frustration, or some excitement, or something, for a narrator to report. It’s a shame, because it’s fairly hypnotic, but I can’t close down the places my mind goes when I hear it.
[3]

Iain Mew: It’s such a pleasure to once again hear patient, dynamic, deep dance music in the charts that it almost overcomes the weak vocals and nothing narrative.
[5]

Will Adams: I love when house gets sinister, but too often “Cola” slips into the wrong side of unsettling. The music is there: a polyrhythmic pulse spanning the crisp beats between an eerie chord progression arching its back and hissing at you. But the lyrics present a distasteful image of a dude alternately sneering and leering at a woman who’d rather just sip her drink in peace. A past version of me would simply advise to pay no mind to the lyrics, but as has been painfully made clear the past few weeks, ignoring problems like these has damaging, long-lasting effects.
[5]

That’s a good way to miss the ball, Shania! Perhaps you should open your eyes!

[Video][Website]
[5.71]

Scott Mildenhall: “I’m swinging with my eyes closed” ranks alongside “snapping her fingers and shuffling her feet” as a description that conjures a more bizarre image than was probably intended. Quite a bit about this seems confused: celebrating summer in northern hemisphere autumn? Doing so with a suggestion of reggae? Once the latter aspect is buried in the mix, things improve, but the song’s biggest failing is its un-Twainian blandness. This sounds dangerously close to a party for one.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Shania crafts one deceptively daunting summertime anthem in “Swingin’ with My Eyes Closed.” Mighty as those guitars ring, she doesn’t build much of a sun-kissed fantasy. Instead she stares down a long stretch of a road where nothing’s certain but the season’s staples of beer and country radio. The chorus scales a mountain, though it’s unsure whether she finds any glory in it.
[6]

Leah Isobel: There’s so much happening in this song that I had to listen to it twice to even start figuring it out. Shania’s always been an ambitious musician, her warmth and charm belying the subtle brilliance of her cross-genre experimentation; “Swingin’” takes a go at adding reggae and Celtic strings to her usual melange of country and arena-rock. It doesn’t totally work, since there’s basically a different section for each style she’s including, but the end result is a lot of fun anyway. Chalk it up to her presence, the way she can still joyfully wrap her voice around words like few other singers can.
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: This doesn’t sound like a Shania Twain song. This doesn’t even sound like… music? There’s a ska beat in there somewhere, buried under the 200 compressed synthy sounds and the approximation of a “voice” that I can only assume is a bot who’s only been fed Shania Twain voicemails and spit this out.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Shania Twain’s comeback is the year’s most shattering disappointment: weak material, nip and tucked singing. This album opener promises a heady experience — a tour through Twain’s musical collection, from reggae and Def Leppard  in grandaddy mode to classical. When she asks “Can you taste the  freedom?” it’s one of the few times on Now that the song supports what she says.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Now is a dispiriting listen because Shania’s voice is ragged and unconvincing and every instrument sounds stilted and incapable of conveying much joy or movement or wit or charm, things her music formerly provided in insane, addiction-causing concentrations. This comes out of the creative process and factory settings applied to the songs on the album better than most because it’s not really a country song, so its artificial pineapple flavour doesn’t go down too badly. Shania sounds like she’s lobbing at the words with an eye to hitting you in the face with them, like when she adds the almost tossed-off “SWINGING!!!” at the end of each chorus, and it’s endearing. She’s only partially connected with the ball on this one though.
[6]

Julian Axelrod: When you think about it from a purely rational perspective, monogamous romantic relationships make no sense. While they satisfy our basic need for companionship, they tend to create more problems than they solve. We all know couples plagued by jealousy, or boredom, or never-ending arguments, or a million other issues big and small — and those are just the people who haven’t gotten married or had kids. When you know the dismal divorce statistics and you’ve heard more brutal breakup stories than you can count, why risk giving away years of your life to one person who might break your heart? What drives us to make that leap? I’ve been with my girlfriend for two years, and I’ve fallen down this mental rabbit hole in many anxious moments. This is the longest relationship I’ve been in, and definitely the healthiest, but I can’t help thinking of ways I’m going to fuck it up. Yet when I hear Shania Twain (a woman who’s no stranger to heartbreak) belt, “I’m swingin’ with my eyes closed/Only God knows how far it goes,” it’s a beautiful reminder of the inherent bravery in taking chances. The reggae-tinged verses, goofy as they may be, recall the bubbly excitement of first love, but that titanic chorus is the rush that comes when you take the plunge. Love can be shitty and painful and soul-sucking, but it can also be enriching and exciting and life-affirming. You’ll never know if you don’t give it a shot.
[8]

It’s not even allergy season tho!

[Video][Website]
[4.83]

Kat Stevens: Get these lads some Lemsip, stat.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Keith Ape’s relationship with rap represents a lot of people’s relationships with rap this decade: parasitic, condescending, hollow. “It G Ma” was a sea of hollow cliches by a kid who had management who recognized the inane Tumblrwave orientalist visual mess and sonic drivel of Yung Lean and the One-Note pun of OG Maco would be totally suitable for a media savvy teen from Asia to pimp out, to the point music press didn’t bat an eye at how obviously patronizing a kid shrieking “BITCHES IS BITCHES ‘CAUSE THEY BITCHES” is for anyone who cares about making subtle distinctions in who’s actually trying in as redundantly misogynistic a genre as rap can be. I mean, I deliberately eat Taco Bell instead of proper Mexican food and the intestinal shredding I end up with is perhaps due justice for my willful desire to ingest trash, but you’d like to maybe imagine someone has regrets about letting this kid cook as long as he’s done. “Achoo!” is slightly better because its a showcase for Slump God, one of the more nimble tongued of his phase of rap; a kid who is supposed to be peers with Yachty or Rich The Kid but always accidentally reminds me more of P.E.A.C.E from Freestyle Fellowship for all his inane babbling. Theoretically, someone will look at Slump God who hadn’t heard him before, and he’ll make fans. Last time Keith didn’t even bother to be so charitable to whom he made look like a bad joke.
[2]

Alfred Soto: The cacophony’s as loud and the word play as bizarre as on a random Migos track, with a similar intention on drilling its programmed hook into your brain.
[6]

Ramzi Awn: The repetition doesn’t do any favors for “Achoo!”, which attempts to reinterpret an early aughts hip hop styling that doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it wants to. 
[4]

Leah Isobel: The beat, combined with Keith Ape and Ski Mask the Slump God’s overlapping ad-libs, feels at first like an onslaught in a good way, a pleasantly pulverizing sort of thing. By the third listen I was bored. I like this kind of momentum but there’s no space to breathe and no contrast to set it off.
[3]

Julian Axelrod: In a post-Thugger world, trap has become an eccentric’s game. Only the most left-field rappers stand a chance at transcending the Soundcloud scene. Luckily, Keith Ape and Ski Mask (“please, Mr. Slump God was my father’s name”) have weirdness to spare. The throwaway intro line “Woke up on a cloud of sauce” is the perfect distillation of their spacey, aggravated vibe, especially on a song that feels like riding public transportation at rush hour while zonked out on cold meds. The duo’s oddball charisma and dizzying flows obliterate the language barrier — by the time you reach Keith’s verse, words have lost all meaning. No matter your state of mind, it’s impossible not to get on their wavelength.
[7]

I’d give “Addictive” at LEAST this score, honestly…

[Video][Website]
[6.57]

Anjy Ou: “So he broke up with me and I was a mess for DAYS. I mean, I lay in bed just crying. Didn’t eat. Monday came and went. Tuesday… Wednesday… then Thursday I woke up like ‘Why the hell am I crying over this fool? I’M AMAZING!’” This is one of my favourite stories ever told to me, and this song is basically the musical version of it – that aha moment when you remember who the F you are (100% THAT BITCH). So freaking liberating. 
[7]

Cédric Le Merrer: Lizzo doesn’t need a man to be awesome. She doesn’t even need anything more than whatever beat is on sale at Shutterstock Music, apparently.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The attitude, the air of manipulated amateurish, a few unexpected images — the material’s there. But Lizzo’s habit of emphasizing the first two syllables of verses gets wearying. 
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: This song is a real crowd-pleaser, isn’t it? Really, though, “Truth Hurts” fits much better than “Phone” did, with more eccentric production and lyrics. I’ve accepted she’s probably not going back to the Big GRRL Small World sound any time soon, and that’s disappointing, but I’m happy to see her settle more smoothly into her new persona. 
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: It’s hard to tell which reason exactly explains the lukewarm response from Lizzo’s opening line: is the title “bad bitch” overplayed in 2017 after being claimed by artists from Kehlani to Cardi B to even Demi Lovato? Or does her punchline just run flat? Both comes to show there’s a slight air of performance to play that Bad Bitch from Lizzo here in her take of “IDFWU.” The boneheaded voice doesn’t quite fit her, though at least she’s having fun with it.
[5]

Stephen Eisermann: With the seemingly endless revelations of sexual assault, “why a man great ’til he gotta be great,” is one of the most relevant lines of the year. In the context of this song, the line refers to a failed relationship, but rather than go the jaded and petty route, Lizzo flaunts her effortless confidence by serving some grade A swag. “I don’t play tag, Bitch I been it,” is a revelation in lyrical form and I challenge any listener to play this once and walk away without at least a smirk and a pep in their step because this song is that damn good.
[9]

Ashley John: Lizzo gives us an endless string of potential Instagram captions, and in 2017 that’s just enough. 
[6]