Our writers will be back with new blurbs on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy:

• Thomas Inskeep wrote in his blog, Oh Manchester, So Much to Answer For, on the state of R&B radio in 1992 and the “top 40 magic” of Chicago radio in late 1982.
• Inskeep also wrote about Christmas-themed singles by TLC and Tom Petty for his blog Merry Christmas Music. (Here’s his introductory history of recorded Christmas music, originally published by Maura magazine.)
• For Popmatters, Hannah Jocelyn reviewed the new Black MIDI (the group, not the genre) album Schlagenheim.

That’s not us…

[Video][Website]
[4.83]

Will Adams: As usual, Skepta’s beat is the star (how could I not trust someone who thinks to sample Sophie Ellis-Bextor), a collage of undulating synths that makes room for his raps. It’s Nafe Smallz who sinks it, however, with a weak verse bookended by his weaker hook.
[5]

Ian Mathers: The production is beautiful, but it goes so much better with Skepta’s asthmatic weed smoking, palm wine and pepper soup than it does with Nafe Smallz’ post-Rae Sremmurd sex brags that the song feels distinctly uneven.
[6]

Iris Xie: As someone from California, “Greaze Mode” is kind of amusing because Skepta and Nafe Smallz sound like totally horny weed tourists documenting their vacation — I can hear them going “wooooow all that weed and those girls” between their lines. Even the reference of “definitely, I grind” is an extremely corny, if well-utilized, piece of wordplay. But I really like the humming glass flute sound that mixes with the kickdrum and sprinkly synth, because it’s nice to hear flutes that don’t sound tired and overused, like those snake charmer melodies. The combination of rhythms encases the flow in a chill chamber that makes the song prettier, as greasy as it is.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: The sludgy production and Future vocals are decent, if ever so slightly dated, but lines like “how can she tell me that I’m cute?” and “addicted to the sex” redirect any gravitas to junior high school.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Nafe Smallz’ British Travis Scott take and Skepta’s cool, electronic production are smooth and relatively anonymous, leaving Skepta’s verses the simple job of not sounding awkward. Unfortunately, he can’t seem to clear that low bar here — his raps are so disjointed that it sounds like they’ve stitched his verses together from the remnants of other, better Skepta tracks.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Are the Travis Scott warbles only here to convince me this is the significantly worse “Mode”?
[3]

As it turns out, they DO believe in evolution.

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[6.00]

Alex Clifton: In undergrad, I talked with a heartily Baptist girl who asked me point blank if I believed in God. I grew up with Catholic guilt, buddhas scattered around the house, and lots of books by atheists and transcendentalists, so I mashed that all together into a theory that there are many roads to the truth of Being a Good Person. For some, that’s God; for me, it was always music. I tried to explain this to the girl but she didn’t really get how I could see this kind of truth in anything that was not an institutional religion, and she never spoke to me again. But I think that same feeling permeates “Church.” It’s laden with religious imagery, sinning and redemption and all that, but the church in question seems to be any sort of escape where you can get lost in something and learn to forgive yourself. Maybe it’s an actual house of worship, or maybe it’s a night drive where you have time to think about the world, or maybe it’s a walk around a neighbourhood to look at pretty houses. Whatever it is, it’s yours to keep: the way Aly & AJ sing the line “I need a little church” makes it feel like you’re swapping a secret with them. They’ll let you into their church and they won’t tell a soul where you find your truth. It’s a lovely song that is immensely private and cathartic, and it reminds me why I chose music as my church.
[8]

Alfred Soto: “I can’t even stop to take care of my own self/Let alone somebody else” — boom. I’ve waited years for another “It’s a Sin”: Catholic guilt with the desperation of dance hall days. Only the vocodered, echo-laden production lets it down.
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: There’s a lot of potential for a song about Christian guilt and how it seeps into one’s ability to love others and oneself, but “Church” doesn’t divulge enough details to make this lyrical conceit convincing. There’s a semblance of regret and desire for change when they admit selfishness, but the tone of the song never hits the level of devastation or wistfulness that it needs. And while there’s a lot associated with saying “I need a little church,” it still feels like an easy copout in a song that’s noticeably underdeveloped.
[4]

David Moore: Aly & AJ have written two of the best songs I’ve ever heard that process emotions that I personally associate with my early, brief exposure to Christianity: “Not This Year” is my favorite Christmas song of all time, about reconciling seasonal blues with the affected cheeriness of the holiday. “Blush” is a song about sexual desire with a limited means of expressing it, and as such it circles around desire — the physicality of it, the taboo of it — with a level of sophistication and attention missing from songs about a sex whose casualness is taken for granted. So I’m bringing way too high a bar to “Church”  — as far as their (re?-)budding electropop career goes, this is meatier qua song than most of their previous comeback singles, but the sentiment is comparatively flat, the ache for absolution from unspecified sins sounding more like pretext than subject. (It makes me want to go back to Krystal Meyers’s “Beautiful Tonight,” which leans hard into the remorse rather than the redemption.)
[6]

Ian Mathers: I genuinely can’t decide if the fact that “Church” seems muddled about whether or not our narrators really are defiantly unashamed of these sort of vague “bad things” for which they need to go to church is a weakness or a strength. And either way I’m not exactly sure how “I need a little church” cashes out (although this is possibly because, a few weddings and a Christmas service or two when my grandma was still alive aside, I’ve never been to church). But I do keep humming it regardless, so clearly at least part of me thinks it’s a bop.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: “I need redemption for sins I can’t mention” — try that one on a priest, confession without actually confessing anything. Can you really not mention them? Is it just pat songwriting? Or is it that mentioning actual sins would be too messy and ugly, and potentially alive and pulsing and thrilling, for this bit of featherweight ethereal breathy purification via self-loathing? Everything is abstractions and euphemisms, the lyrics’ bad-girl connotations only half-bowdlerized away; it’s like you put “Criminal” in a teen devotional. The vocals are pretty, the vocoding is decent, the track is sweeping, and yet I feel demeaned.
[5]

Vikram Joseph: There are a lot of moments here that push all of my buttons — the skittering beat and hauntingly euphoric synths in the chorus, the autotuned acapella sections that remind me of “Hide And Seek” — but there are lyrics here that make Aly & AJ sound like a teen movie’s snarky parody of a Christian electro-pop act. “I need redemption for sins I can’t mention,” is notably comical, and once you start to think about it in that context even the chorus starts to sound like an outtake from The Book Of Mormon (“I need a little… church!”). Nonetheless, it sounds lovely enough that I’m willing to embrace the awkwardness.
[6]

Finding it hard to believe…

[Video][Website]
[3.43]

Alex Clifton: The thing I always liked about Avicii’s production is that it shimmered — I can’t think of any other artist who managed to make music sound so starry-eyed. Avicii was also responsible for turning Chris Martin’s voice into something that you could hear at a club (I guess you could theoretically have a DJ play “The Scientist” but it would get weird). I’m not sure if this was Avicii’s best work but it’s still got the lightness and brightness that I always associated with his music, which always stood out in contrast with some of the bass-heavy EDM. I’m really sad he’s gone and we won’t get more songs like this, but I’m thankful for all he gave us while he was here.
[6]

Will Adams: EDM isn’t known for subtlety, but even then there’s a particular “oof” to hearing Chris Martin (sounding a lot worse than usual) repeat “I think I just died” three times each chorus. It’s especially strange given the previous Tim single was already saddled with the context — I suppose this is meant to sound uplifting? It actually does in parts, namely when Martin isn’t singing; the second drop midway through the song recaptures Bergling at his most euphoric. That is, or should be, his legacy: dance music that you can’t help but raise your arms to, unafraid of leaning into cheesiness. “Heaven” only makes it partway there.
[5]

Iain Mew: This sounds half-finished, presumably because it is. Much of it is scaffold, the setting for more detailed uplift to be placed, and it can’t stand up to the weight of a song, never mind the weight of all the extra context tugging on the repeated “I think I just died.” Nothing does well from its present state, but Chris Martin’s thin and cut-up vocal suffers worst. Given neither sufficient support nor space for any emotions to breathe, he is, like the song, left in uncomfortable limbo.
[2]

Alfred Soto: To dismiss this prayer is churlish, and Chris Martin sounds at home on tracks that play like remixes of themselves, but the keyboard arpeggios and Martin’s mushmouthed attempt at dignity are so pro forma that they underscore the averageness of the late Avicii’s legacy. Festival-aimed electro pop uplift should sound like transcendence.
[3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Well, at least it’s better than “A Sky Full of Stars,” the previous Avicii and Chris Martin collaboration. Martin’s nasally voice still sounds unfittingly sloppy though, its monotonous tone imbuing the song with a terrible drabness. The instrumental passage reveals how anthemic this isn’t, and the stock EDM synths and house piano chords can’t make this feel the least bit chipper; they feel like a coat of bright paint on a landfill.
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: On “A Sky Full of Stars”, Avicii and Chris Martin made for perfect partners. With its focus on piano and guitar, it sounds as much a Coldplay song as an Avicii one, the key-banging and Martin’s banging-on completely congruent. But faced with more fiddly synths, he’s less at home. Still a more refined, distinctive and recognisable legman than his brothers John and Sam, he nevertheless lacks the space to thrive, somewhat weighing down an otherwise ascendant production.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Biographical criticism is, as ever, risky. A posthumous album is not a suicide note, nor usually an intentional statement like Blackstar; and even if Tim was the latter, “Heaven” dates back to 2015. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t stop cold when I heard “Levels,” with its deployment of that particular Etta James sample (full of “sometimes,” “never felt before,” sounding forlorn amid the cheer) in that particular isolation from that particular person. And it definitely doesn’t mean I can hear the chorus “I think I just died and went to heaven” without thinking the obvious next thought. “Heaven” was not intended as a tribute, but if it didn’t become one upon release, it became one once it was chosen as the single. Which makes the astonishingly awful Chris Martin vocal the equivalent of drunkenly rambling through a funeral speech, the thin arrangement the equivalent of holding that funeral on Playmobil furniture, and the lyric so saccharine it becomes bleak. Presumably Tim Bergling was fine with “Heaven” in 2015 — the Spin profile says “completed,” not “recorded” — but it’s harder to imagine him being fine with it years later, harder still to imagine him able to stomach hearing it. And however small that chance is, or however projection-based, it’s still enough to make me unable. This should not have been released.
[0]

Assessed: less than success…

[Video]
[4.67]

Andy Hutchins: Shenseea is commanding and compelling, verging on overpowering the riddim and the “ra-ta-ta-ta” in the background with force of personality: “Way too blessed, blessed, blessed…” sounds like a megawatt smile delivered via megaphone. So why is Tyga — who isn’t a labelmate — here, even if he’s doing his best to overachieve and break his years-long streak of mediocre-or-worse verses by following a failed attempt to rhyme “chest” with “bed” with an ABAB rhyme scheme? A second verse from Shenseea or a swap of Tyga for Lizzo or Megan Thee Stallion or a Sremmurd del Rae (actual label mates!) could have elevated this.
[5]

David Moore: Shenseea sings the hook like an alarm clock went off unexpectedly in the middle of the night, creating an anxious undercurrent to the whole thing — it’s a little hashtag stressed.
[5]

Alfred Soto: That loopy string melody with its hints of the Mediterranean should’ve up and left Tyga and Shenseea yelling and mumbling to each other.
[2]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The repetitive best/blessed hook works because Shenseea’s voice commands attention throughout her verses. Tyga’s boasts sound comparatively laughable, but his low-key feature functions as a needed repose.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: Tyga’s presence is a disappointment, in that he interrupts Shenseea’s hypnotic ascent into phonetic absurdity. This is exactly the sort of thing to which your dad, a mid-ranking TV comedian and Twitter personality, is going to say “she keeps saying the same thing!”. Pop cultural industry at large depends on this kind of song, and to whatever extent it establishes Shenseea it seems likely she’ll return with more of the same conviction in future and a little less repetition.
[6]

Ian Mathers: If ever a song not only deserved but practically cried out for a DJ Khaled cameo, it’s this one.
[4]

SoundCloud-adjacent rap, meanwhile, remains a thing…

[Video]
[5.67]

Julian Axelrod: This is the Soundcloud wave’s inevitable endpoint: a 16-year-old rapper with glasses and braces surrounded by faceless strippers and million-dollar industry connections. Tecca’s flow is basically 2019 rap fridge magnet poetry, but his chipper yelp helps it go down easy. Unfortunately I’m a sucker for the Lil’s and Young’s and Baby’s of the world, so I’ll be bumping this until September 21 and not a day longer. I have no idea what the future holds for Lil Tecca, SoundCloud rap, or society at large.
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Essentially a hook stretched out to two minutes, “Ransom” is more impressive than its simplicity lets itself on to be. Lil Tecca knows how to contort words to make sure they always rhyme: “want” rhymes with “phantom,” but also “gone” and “dancer” and “Vuitton” and “stunt.” His flow sounds nonchalant in its delivery but it’s unexpectedly slick, and its innate groove finds a counterpoint in the dotted synth notes. His lyrics are right: he ain’t dumb.
[6]

David Moore: Here’s a textbook example of what I’ve started calling modal rap, the phenomenon that’s gotten so popular that at this point about half of (e.g.) Rap Caviar has some version of it. Rather than sing a melody, rappers sing notes on a minor pentatonic scale (5 notes — root, minor third, fourth, fifth, flat seventh) — especially hopping up to the seventh and back down to the fifth a lot. There’s a melody, but it’s improvisatory, roaming freely around the scale of the mode. There’s a pleasant droning quality to it, and it’s a little different from either the single-note rapping or the repetition of a pop hook that previous rap-singers did. Figures will repeat, but they’ll switch to a new pattern in the next verse. And it gives the impression that the song could go on forever, like humming pieces of a song to yourself until you have a memory blank or just move on to something else. 
[6]

Iris Xie: The beat is pretty and crystalline and contrasts with Lil Tecca’s easy flow. It’s full of time-tested rhythms, to an almost comfort food level. Really undemanding, but moves gently.
[6]

Alfred Soto: This 16-year-old doesn’t sound like himself so much as an amalgam of Isaiah Rashad and early Kendrick, but I expect mimicry at this age. What I didn’t expect: the no-stress way in which he declares his principles: “They hate the place I’m from/But them n****s don’t know me/they just know the place I’m from.”
[5]

Andy Hutchins: Located at the intersection of the unmooring of geography-based styles — you could not possibly guess Lil Tecca is from Queens based on “Ransom,” though you could maybe suss out the Chief Keef fandom — and the explosive growth of homegrown rappers making it off one spare song, “Ransom” smartly keeps the sing-song hook-to-forgettable verse ratio at 3:1 and does not overstay its welcome. This is a trifle, but trifles go down easy in the summer.
[5]

An only kinda happy one…

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[4.17]

Mo Kim: If anybody in the K-pop has earned the right to a little bravado, it’s Somi, who after several cycles through a revolving door of reality shows and project groups has finally landed in a permanently viable position. (At least if we overlook YG’s past track record with female artists.) The charisma and personality she possesses as a performer, however, is but a layer of icing camouflaging a tragically undercooked composition: try as she might (and she gets close!) nobody could sell the wafer-thin melodies, the sub-Trainor rap verses, or the hook’s rancid brattitude. “Oops, you’re not invited,” Somi sneers, at a party that went sour before the first candle was lit; here’s hoping she graduates from Kidz Bop sass soon and onto a single that’ll invite her to better showcase her talents.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: There are moments when one can hear the Blackpink comparisons in Somi’s voice (that snide “Uhh,” for one), but a stronger command of the English language and a more teen-friendly aesthetic make for a “girl crush” song that bears far more resemblance to Cher Lloyd than 2NE1. While this decade has countless examples of YG songs with middling drops-as-choruses, “Birthday” is one of a handful that executes it flawlessly. The secret is in the drop’s function as a building block and not a terminal passage or hollow expression of bratty confidence; the snark of the lyrics is instead fully realized in a chromatic vocal run during its first half. The TNGHT horns fill out the sound as the synths move up an octave, allowing for a smooth transition into a bridge that finds Somi singing in a higher register. And just like the final section of “Whistle,” “Birthday” culminates in a final passage that combines those elements so naturally that any inclinations that this genre blending was untenable is blown to bits. When those horns first hit before the final chorus, it feels like an actual celebration; it’s the exact moment when Somi stops telling you about how great she is, and makes you feel it.
[7]

Alfred Soto: I believe it’s her birthday — this Miley/Avril hybrid snaps and crackles without popping, as if she had an expectation she might cry if she wants to. 
[7]

Alex Clifton: A bit like being stuck inside a piece of Funfetti cake. I thought this would annoy me by getting brighter and sweeter, but what did me in is the breakdown after the chorus–it sounds empty and serves no purpose. Somi delivers the line “oops, you’re not invited” with the bravado of a My Super Sweet Sixteen kiddo, but overall I feel like I missed a party, and a pretty mediocre one at that too.
[4]

Iris Xie: Those “ah ah”s in the beginning are the sound of fingernails scratching against a chalkboard. Too bad they’re bested by that awful Jennie-lite rap and verses that are a Frankenstein of four different TWICE songs. You, our dear reader, if you have not had “Birthday” inflicted on you yet, are much better off fleeing when this song comes up in your Spotify and Youtube suggestions. But I can understand why this dumpster fire of a song was released. 
[0]

Jessica Doyle: Somi should be easy to root for: she’s very charming, and if we’re going to get to a future where idols have some kind of employee rights before struggling through a seven-year contract and winning the public-approval lottery, then we need more moves like her JYP-to-YG’s-Black-Label jump. The problem is, her debut song is charmless. It’s easy to pick on Teddy and his worn-out drops (we even pick on Teddy and his worn-out drops when the worn-out drop wasn’t Teddy’s!) but that “Oops, you’re not invited” smug nonsense makes a bad situation worse. It doesn’t ring true for a debuting singer who’s already seen some of her I.O.I. bandmates done dirty; it doesn’t ring true in the context of an actual birthday party, where the more is often the merrier; it doesn’t ring true to the best part of the song (“Well, alright alright alright alright / nan hu hago bulkke, can you blow my mind?”). It does make sense in the context of YG showing off a victory over a business rival. I hope Somi’s getting the respect there she wants (and deserves), but if she’s not it wouldn’t be the first time her parent company reduced women to bartering chips.
[3]

We may prefer you go ‘head and be gone with it…

[Video]
[5.67]

Alfred Soto: “‘Sexy Black Timberlake’” is me being objectified as a sex object for my skin color,” he said in an interview, and, well, sure. But with a beat this Compton-indebted (complete with tea kettle synth), a delivery this sinuous, and a lyric so merciless in its vilifying of a nameless bitch, it’s less of a problem to figure out who’s really the victim, and it’s not the guy who promises implicitly to bring sexy back (again?).
[6]

Alex Clifton: Do you know how rare it is to get an actually sexy dance beat with a voice to match it? Justin Timberlake used his falsetto to seduce a generation of teens on FutureSex/LoveSounds, but Channel Tres makes me want to dance. “Charming” feels like the wrong word here because I think that implies more cuteness than sexiness, but there’s a level of dopiness in here that I find endearing. Seductive and a little silly — exactly my type.
[6]

William John: Glossy, head-nodding house spoiled by an obnoxious libretto. “Sexy Black Timberlake” is intended to be a response to the author “being objectified as a sex object,” but Channel Tres’ attitude toward his loathsome subjects seems to be equally dehumanising. 
[4]

Julian Axelrod: Now that every new artist is aping a style from decades past, we’re forced to confront the ethics of reinvention. Can you have an emo revival that doesn’t hate women? What are the racial implications of an indie band digging up Graceland thirty-plus years after we realized that album feels kinda icky? If you think rap’s relentless forward motion makes it immune to this conundrum, enter Channel Tres. Or rather, enter the pitch-perfect G-funk synth whine that comes in behind Channel Tres. And before you start rhapsodizing about the glory days of Tupac and crip walks, enter Channel Tres’s hook: “Bitches act crazy/Tryna have my baby/Tryna get in my house.” Now, obviously misogyny in rap is not a ’90s-specific issue, and to his credit there’s a lot more going on here: For one, he describes the song as a rebuttal to the objectification of black men. And sonically, this isn’t lazy Dre cosplay. Nick Sylvester supplies a house bounce MO to Tres’s bounce house flow, and CT rides it perfectly. He’s a bottomless well of effortless cool, a product of that distinctly modern rap wave where none of the lines mean anything but they each sound incredible in the moment. (“Not a fool, a damn fool!”) But that’s what’s so fascinating about that hook: It’s a cherry-picked signifier of the past cooked into a song that sounds like the future, glaring in its incongruity and inspirational in its insignificance. Time is just a construct; the groove stops for no one.
[7]

Ian Mathers: This feels like it shares some of the energy of that time where Luke Cage shows up at Doctor Doom’s castle and demands the money Doom owes him (but, you know, in its actual context).
[6]

Iris Xie: Too bad the song doesn’t live up the hype of that title — I maybe something like a wiry exposé and commentary of Timberlake’s copping of Black music and being able to do it much better, and turning up the rating on the PG-rated nature of “Sexyback.” The latter happens, but the song doesn’t match the initial intrigue. I see what Channel Tres is trying to do with that high-pitched synth noise and some claps trying to do a funk beat, and it’s a somewhat interesting turn of talking about being hypersexually objectified as Black man. However, it’s laidback to the point of being boring, because it’s simply not catchy enough. Ironic songs with commentary thrive when a beat can carry the whole meaning, to the point where you go “hm, nice” when you finally look up the lyrics after the 5th time. No such reception here. 
[5]

Feels like I’m going to lose my mind…

[Video]
[4.71]

Alfred Soto: It takes guts to cut electro pop this tepid and call it “Borderline.” Maybe they haven’t heard (of) Madonna — I wouldn’t put it past them.
[3]

Julian Axelrod: Right now Tame Impala’s closest analogue is Arcade Fire circa 2013: Beloved indie stalwarts and Real Rock Saviors make the jump to festival headliner status, try on an uneasy new dance sound to fill their big new stage. Just as time has revealed Reflektor‘s bloat, “Borderline” feels like dance music made by people who wouldn’t even groove at a wedding. I don’t hate any of it; every detail is carefully calibrated, every sonic shape-shift perfectly planned. But it’s so busy thinking about the next step that it misses the beat. When I saw Tame Impala last summer, I was surrounded by rapturous teens who sang along to every song — not just the lyrics, but the synth runs and bass lines. Tame Impala’s been making dance music. The only difference now is their intent.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: It’s nice how consistently it centers that adventurous bassline, and I’m a sucker for tinny rave pianos clanking about in the back of any mix — good on them for straying ever so slightly from their roots, I guess. But this stays on such an even keel the whole way through that I can’t help but feel like I’m listening to something specifically designed to start off one of those human-curated Spotify playlists intended for people to half-listen to on board game nights.
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The kick drum has a real pulse to it, and it establishes a sense of movement before the rest of the instrumentation fleshes out the song’s danceable groove. While Kevin Parker’s bassline is as crucial as ever, it’s the tasteful use of bongos and pan flutes that makes this feel simultaneously dense and light: brimming with ideas and color, yet undeniably dreamy. It helps that it’s so immaculately produced — little else in the indie world right now feels so expertly engineered.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: When I was 22 the world felt sleek and noir and charged, sepia haze and foggy lights and crushingly tall buildings. Time has passed, the world has been drained of it, and so I find myself clutching at anything that comes remotely close, even if it’s a mediocre Tame Impala song when I stop really paying attention.
[5]

Alex Clifton: This blurb was going to be a comparison of all the 2010s indie band influences I heard in here (chiefly Broken Bells, MGMT, and some of LCD Soundsystem’s dance groove) but honestly I got really bored and couldn’t finish the song because it already felt like a sad extended dance remix at a very bad graduate student house party. 
[3]

Ian Mathers: Every generation needs their Supertramp, I guess.
[4]

Returning for album number two…

[Video]
[5.83]

Iris Xie: Bad Bunny is a foghorn at full blast to match those seagulls in the track. Yeah, that’s the only thing to note here.
[2]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Something poignant about hearing wheezy synths and moments of relative solitude punctuated by Bad Bunny’s obnoxious yelping. A song for sad, drunk bros.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: I don’t think I recognized until this moment just how much Bad Bunny is an updated Drake for a more tropical climate: the sensitive-mook affect, the nasal croon, the lyrical focus on women and their emotional life all map across genre and region. If I like Benito more than Aubrey, it’s maybe because I more instinctively grasp his alignment with the proletariat: reggaetón is the great leveler. “Callaíta” is a step further down the path that X100PRE traced, an impressionist portrait of a young woman caught up in a reckless pleasure-seeking whirlwind that hints at depression and possible abuse: the lyrics frame her as heroic, but his delivery is melancholic, and his repeated reference to her as quiet but sexually daring is both a celebration that introverts can rally behind and a paternalistic (even Drakean) interrogation of who hurt her. Tainy, the reggaetón producer’s reggaetón producer, responds with a late-night drink-nursing riddim, all spacey reflection and stale breezes.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Bad Bunny is in ballad mode here, and even while he moans like he’s urging a party into life, it’s quite a restrained ballad mode; the ocean-blue synths spill around him while a gently pulsing bass laps around the edges. It gives an impression of insularity, of intimacy, of his abrasive wobble of a croon turning itself inward. He’s been more impressive when less modest, but that doesn’t make “Callaíta” any less satisfying.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Tainy gets to do a few fun things with this beat, all beautiful and glassy and swiftly brushed away by the overwhelming Bad Bunny-ness of it all. He’s as loud and single-minded as always, enveloping the track without adding much to it. 
[5]

Julian Axelrod: How much longer can I stan Bad Bunny while only understanding 20 per cent of what he says? I tried parsing the Genius translation for “Callaíta” (the sole comment: “Not even close to the original lyrics”) but it didn’t tell me anything I couldn’t already glean: misbegotten lust, lost youth, beach drinking, etc. That’s not a testament to my rudimentary Spanish, it’s a testament to the expressiveness of Bad Bunny’s incredible voice. Tainy’s shimmering mirage of a beat guarantees a summer smash, even without the chirping seagulls up top. But no one but Bad Bunny could imbue it with such nuance, yearning and passion. He sounds like the loneliest guy at the pool party, every shiver in his voice suggesting the good times aren’t meant to last. But there’s genuine warmth and empathy in the way he sings about this lost girl, something that distances him from a certain Canadian collaborator. Even when he’s reeling off a string of “yeah yeah yeah”s, he’s always speaking from the heart.
[8]