Just disappointing we couldn’t go with “Simmer of [6.90]”…

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[6.00]

Tobi Tella: Ominous and guttural, the quietness and control in the production and performance compared to the pure fury of the lyrics makes it even more potent.
[8]

Alex Clifton: There’s so much to be angry about these days: structural inequality, climate change, the rise of fascism, the continued existence of billionaires without limits while too many people have to scrape by… the list could go on, but I’m sure you feel just as weary as I do. I’m still learning how to deal with anger in general, particularly because I tend to bottle every emotion in my body until it explodes out, usually with horrifying intensity. There’s a trick to learning how to be angry but using the anger in a productive manner, letting it fuel your movement forward through definitive action. Otherwise, you get lost and swept away in the anger until there’s nothing left but pure incandescent rage. Women in particular are taught to “simmer down” and mask their anger, although over the past four years we’ve thankfully seen a definite increase in the number of vocal and angry women on the world’s stage. I’m glad we have more women speaking up now, but at the same time I do think there’s a balancing act involved that few have perfected, in part because we’ve rarely had the opportunity to do so publicly. “Simmer” explores this push and pull, the desire to “give in” while ensuring that the anger doesn’t take hold of you so there’s nothing left. The production on this is great, making Williams’ vocals sound as if they’re delivered through gritted teeth (con–trol–) and the atmospheric breathing signals trying to calm the fuck down. The more I listen to “Simmer,” the more it keeps opening itself up, much like the depths of anger. However, this is far more smartly channelled than a pure rant on how things suck — it’s a meditation on all aspects of the feeling. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.
[8]

Alfred Soto: With Taylor York producing, “Simmer” could’ve emerged under the Paramore moniker: a Bold New Direction, etc. And like the frequent best by the band, it’s modest and catchy but also retrograde: here, like Radiohead and Burial circa 2007. Against this spare electronic backdrop Hayley Williams’ boldness turns into stridency on the first two listens, perhaps with the effort to make lines like “how to draw the line between wrath and mercy” sing. It will do. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Give in, she sings. But she doesn’t: not to the sensual abstraction of middle-aged Radiohead, not to the wrath that’s actually quite a thick line away from mercy, if you think about it. “Simmer” does what it says on the tin: no lids are blown.
[5]

Katie Gill: There is some QUALITY text painting going on in the chorus which I, as a sucker for text painting, appreciate. I’m a little less certain about the conceit of the song itself. It sounds remarkably un-Paramore, which is good for helping Williams establish an identity as a solo artist. But it also sounds like it’s trying to hop on a trend that’s been going on for the past few months. I suspect I won’t be the only person to mention Billie Eilish in my review but dang, we really do live in a post-Eilish world now.
[6]

Will Rivitz: Anything that sounds like a cross between How To Destroy Angels and Lane 8 will manipulate my serotonin receptors better than any SSRI I could imagine. The poise of the verses’ bass groove, the choruses’ guitar stabs, and the pauses Williams takes which rip tablecloth upon tablecloth off while maintaining the perfect order of the cutlery atop them make me feel even better. This song makes me float.
[9]

Micha Cavaseno: Pros: Williams’ ever-increasing infatuation with excessively active percussion got away from ho-hum ’80s pastiche and is now at least in late-’00s/early-’10s glitchy art rock. Cons: Somehow that means we get to hear the midway point of Feist and Thom Yorke which, big surprise, just ends up being a tedious version of Phantogram.
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: I’m not sure when this happened — normally other artists sound strikingly like Hayley Williams, not the other way around — but Williams’ vocal inflections, her stretching of vowels like taffy and plucking words out of the air carefully, as if with micro-tongs, sound near-identical to Tori Amos. Compare “Smokey Joe” — a spiritual precursor to “Simmer,” in its measured, tiptoeing vocals for lines like “if I kill him, there are complications” — or especially “Curtain Call,” where you could practically paste Tori’s vocal on “protection” into this and vice versa. The arrangement, too, has a certain mutedness in its pitter-patter drums and bass and ghost-wisp vocals that reminds me of Fumbling-era Sarah McLachlan. (So much music does lately, first to mind Ex:Re, and the similarities go so little acknowledged; someday someone will remember for more than one thinkpiece’s time to remember this stuff as an actual vector of influence on a generation of musicians.) The problem you can guess from the title: the song simmers, and nothing past.
[6]

Great score…

[Video][Website]
[7.67]

Nortey Dowuona: Thank you, Ms Meyers, for having such a beautiful son.
[10]

Kylo Nocom: It’s quite long. His singing is something I’d laugh at anywhere else. The mood is too chirpy. But I’ve had this on repeat, and really can’t knock any aspect of it. I can try to reassess Mac Miller’s legacy and post-passing reappraisal with consideration to how other late rappers have been treated, but I’m a bit too beaten down and I’m sure others will take care of that. I just wish he were here to release this himself and be happy.
[7]

Ian Mathers: Not really being familiar with Miller’s work before he died, and yeah, having read the lovely and enlightening Jon Brion piece about working with him on these songs, I was if anything bracing myself to avoid overcompensating when I first played “Good News”. But it’s such a low-key joy, almost casually Beatlesque and with a tremendously charming lead performance that as far as I can tell I’d be swept up by even if the artist was still here today. Of course, the most moving part of the video version is the end, with footage of Miller goofing/grooving in the studio to a kicky little piano part that’s probably in there somewhere. Even those of us who were unfamiliar can feel the loss.
[8]

Brad Shoup: Like his Arthur Lee cover from this same album, “Good News” has that gentle, sitting-room rock ‘n’ roll goofiness, like John Sebastian or Randy Newman. I kept waiting for a tuba. For someone who’s considering making the dread of death a full-time hobby, it’s excruciating to hear him genially putter around a house fire, shrugging over some exquisite pizzicato timbre. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: Folk-rap is the only descriptor to make sense of Jon Brion’s mild sonic enhancements and the late Mac Miller’s delivery — is he singing through a mouthful of Quaker Oats? And do folk and hip-hop tracks bop to a leisurely 5:42?
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A song made to be looped over and over — not because of its attention to detail, the flourishes that Jon Brion attaches fluidly, but because of something more elemental. It’s a capybara of a song, calming even when it’s not doing much. It’s lo-fi in a way that feels much less studied than the study mixes that have proliferated on campuses and bedrooms, a fuzz that emerges naturally rather than consciously. Miller’s at the center of it all, and he’s never sounded better — aware of his own loneliness but not really wallowing in it. It’s hard to write about “Good News” without thinking about death, but the song works more as a work of contemplation than memorialization. It is the sound of inward motion somehow emanating out, of swimming in circles and finally getting somewhere.
[10]

A “Bop” is a bop…

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[7.00]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I love it when song titles tell me everything I need to know about what the song sounds like. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Nichelle Morgan, in a comment on the “Bop” video said, “DaBaby is like that one kid in class that everyone is cool with.” And she is absolutely right; he has the brash, devil-may-care goofiness the Yout Dem love in their artists, yet raps in a sharp, needlepoint barrage of flows that the older folks and “born in the wrong generation” kids can happily embrace, while both the baddy, fluting beat and DaBaby’s deep, warm smile spread several rays of excitement and exuberance.
[8]

Kylo Nocom: DaBaby continues to be lovably audacious in a song that increases its score tenfold with either the video or the live SNL performance, particularly when interrupted with Jabbawockeez (!!!) shout outs.
[6]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: This piece lives and dies on the strength of JetsonMade’s flute sample flip, but DaBaby rides it with enough confidence to make “Bop” a fitting title. And he’s earning his victory lap. 
[7]

Alfred Soto: He loves his woozy flute samples, and I bet I know why: it allows him to get all Barry White, slavering that vowel-rich baritone in places I don’t expect. He boasts again (and again), revels in erotic cruelty (what else is new), thinks he’s cute doing so (sigh), and knows he’ll get away with it (see Parenthetical #2). 
[7]

Brad Shoup: The mellotron melody is fine — it sounds like runout Beatles to me, maybe it’s Final Fantasy to someone else — but the important thing is he’s funny: cautious when you’d expect him to go nuts, loaded with deadpan ad-libs. He chops and crushes phrases with abandon. (Why isn’t everyone saying legitly?) If you like it I love it, no biggie.
[8]

Tobi Tella: The flute gives it novelty, DaBaby’s charisma keeps it engaging. It’s not great, but damn if it isn’t fun.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A different approach to trap flute than most — instead of using the melody as a jumping-off point for his own, or as a vaguely exotic flourish, DaBaby sees it as a distraction to be pushed through. It is possible to note that this is what DaBaby sees all things as. It works, because his tracks always work on some fundamental level, but you begin to worry about diminishing returns.
[6]

Julian Axelrod: When it first debuted as part of the brick that is KIRK at the tail end of last year, “Bop” didn’t seem like it would become the defining DaBaby song. It was never underwhelming, but at first glance it seemed like more of the same from Charlotte’s prodigal son. But here we are in January 2020, and it follows DaBaby everywhere: late night appearances, FaceTime concerts, and probably more than a few frat parties. The impressively elaborate video is a big part of it, but “Bop” is the perfect encapsulation of DaBaby because it sounds as chaotic and enthralling as the video looks. His voice fills every inch of available space, with his ad-libs meshing into a bastardized barbershop quartet. He’s the rap game Bugs Bunny, a beguiling rascal who both exists within the scene and stands outside of it. (On that note, “I’m unorthodox than a motherfucker/Ay, when you gon’ switch the flow? I thought you’d never ask” is the best self-reflexive rap line since “Feelin’ Myself.”) It’s the perfect calling card for a rapper who already has at least ten. The only reason I’m not rating it higher? This isn’t even the best he can do.
[7]

Did not Usher in a top score; did yield a lot of writing…

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[7.73]

Ian Mathers: There’s a mandolin part (or something) peeking through the mix here in places that, combined with the dreamy listlessness of Sophie Allison’s lyrics and delivery, is giving me significant pangs of that ol’ devil nostalgia for both my past and the music of my past. Sometimes though, you just gotta go with it.
[9]

Vikram Joseph: Nostalgia is a hallucinogen; it blurs the distinction between times you miss and times you simply happen to remember more vividly than others, and, more disconcertingly, between places you have been and places that have only ever existed in your internal world. There’s something about “Circle The Drain” – with its soft golden hour hues, its fuzzy edges – that drives deep into whichever ganglion or cortex is responsible for nostalgia, and sends uncoordinated sparks and signals across its synapses, triggering a slideshow of fragmented memories that may or may not be memories at all. It reminds me of so many tangible things – the late 90s / early 00s guitar-pop of Natalie Imbruglia and Avril Lavigne, the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today”, and (strangest of all) second-tier Brit indie band Feeder’s tender teenage stoner anthem “High” – but also of so much that is unreachable and unnameable – walks home from nowhere, composite daydreams from a hundred train windows, summers disintegrating into the building blocks of memory. As if getting older isn’t frightening enough, if I have this much capacity for nostalgia at just past 30 won’t I be slowly crushed under its weight by 70? But for now, while I can still think of myself as young, I’m grateful for this song – a gorgeous, dreamy downer – and for the synthesis of new memories from the glowing rubble of ones that came before.
[9]

Leah Isobel: On my first day of work in the new decade, a customer yelled at me. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, and he wasn’t actually mad at me; he was hurt by something my boss had done, and I was just in the crosshairs. But what he said – the justified core of his anger – has stuck with me, like an ink I can’t wash off my hands. It’s followed me all month, keeping me from being present with my friends or honest with my parents or productive at my job. I haven’t been able to write about it, either; the helplessness, the horror, the rot I feel in my body. It feels a lot like the sick-sweet guitar decay in this song.
[9]

Julian Axelrod: Calling a song “passive” is rarely a complement, but everything about “Circle the Drain” feels detached in the best way. The sample-of-a-sample guitars fade in and out of focus, Sophie Allison’s numb sigh is couched in a week’s worth of reverb, and her verses frame summer love and self-immolation as equidistant unattainable ideals. It’s a song about depression, but it doubles as an interrogation of the “slacker rock” tag bands like Soccer Mommy so often fall under: Is this person stuck on the couch because they’re unambitious, or has the mold in their brain turned them to a bedridden husk of their usual chipper self? Everything around Allison is pristinely produced, which makes its passivity all the more pointed. As a great artist once said, “Do you think a depressed person could make this?“
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: A nice, twee song about being sad. That’s it. that’s the tweet.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: I cannot pinpoint, and it’s bugging me, what specific maybe-obvious riff this is biting. (My ears hear something like Kay Hanley’s Cherry Marmalade, and the duh answer is probably like Nirvana, but I think part of it is, of all things, Incubus’s “Drive”?) But I’ve listened to enough ’90s college-rock filler to recognize a clear improvement on it.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Nailing the early nineties college rock churn ‘n’ jangle as surely as “Lucy” did last year, “Circle the Drain” flirts more closely — more ominously — with the churn ‘n’ jangle that crossed over several years later: think Shawn Colvin, not Belly. Listeners may dig this direction. I say Soccer Mommy gets blanded out. 
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Is that a banjo? Well, that’s unexpected. The guitar-plugged-into-a-sole-amp and ramshackle ’90s-Beck-ish drums, those are expected. But you can definitely hear the increased production budget on this, and I’m not 100% it’s for the better. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: The dream of Adult Alternative is alive and well and uncanny. The idea of daubing one’s emotional grayness into the short shadows of a deceptively summery pop rocker… I wasn’t sure that was a move anymore. 
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: This doesn’t sound like a 90s radio hit, this sounds like 90s album filler. Okay, that’s a bit much. It sounds like it was there, but then someone at Loma Vista said ‘it’s 2020, music has been functional background noise for like four years now, take out everything interesting except for the delay spin in the second verse and the nifty tape flutter effect around four minutes in, don’t distract anyone’. There’s a synth pad at 1:15 that disappears by 1:20. The actual song is pretty great – I especially love the imagery of walking on a cable, depression being so debilitating that doing anything has the stakes of conducting the electric city. The top comment on eight-minute advance single “Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes” currently reads “If she went far enough, I think she would meet Chris Martin at the beach.” For “Circle The Drain,” I wish she did.
[6]

Michael Hong: Bubbly and burbly, “Circle the Drain” sounds exactly like that, a spinning whirlpool. Where Clean was blurred by the surrounding ennui of being a teenager with a crush, “Circle the Drain” marks a clear progression in Soccer Mommy’s sound, sounding more expansive and vibrant. You feel it in the twang of the looping guitar melody and in the shuffle of the backing beat. The background noise of Clean is washed away, reduced to a low fuzzy din and Soccer Mommy’s voice comes with reassuring elegance that suggests while you can fall apart in the spiral, there’s comfort to come when it does eventually end.
[9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I hate the game my mind plays with regards to my depression being “legitimate” enough. If things are OK and I don’t feel depressed: Great, but was I just dumb and emotional this whole time and my depression not actually real? When things are OK and I feel depressed: Not great, but at least I know my depression is… real? I don’t know. That I have such thoughts is an upsetting thing in and of itself, and the plainness with which Soccer Mommy talks about not wanting to remain strong for family and friends is a reminder of how debilitating life can be. That others feel that way makes me feel less alone. “Circle the Drain” is a song about being stuck, of being “chained” to your bed (please help me if I’m “napping” all the time). There’s a quiet appeal–a slacker glamour–that this song exudes, that captures the allure and sickness and banality of depression in the everyday.
[8]

Will Adams: The chorus is curious; the bridge sets up a clear launch, but at the cathartic moment the production falls away, to the point it feels like we’re getting a second verse. It’s not until the titular thinking appears (“round and around”) that the arrangement comes back into focus. It’s a neat trick. One that wears thin by the third time, but who am I to argue with a song that wraps me in the nostalgic comfort of Orange County radio and Daria commercial bumpers like this.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Soccer Mommy’s best songs capture the clarity of feeling like shit like no other artist’s do. It’s a hard feeling, the way that being lost and beaten-down create not any kind of moral righteousness but a shocking awareness. It’s everywhere on “Circle the Drain,” from the crunch of the intro guitars and the tinniness of the drum machine on the bridge to Allison’s vocal performance, which sounds at once both immediate and far away. But it’s there most in her songwriting, which Gabe Wax’s production only intensifies. The way that the second verse breaks from the figurative language of the first into stark, morbidly funny descriptions of mental illness and decay is arresting, and the way the song pushes through it, almost making the final choruses sound triumphant, is even more so.
[8]

Alex Clifton: “Circle the Drain” is a story of depression set to the warmest guitars I’ve heard this side of the nineties. It’s a beautifully neat trick to pull and Soccer Mommy here does so with aplomb–both aspects kept reeling me back in for second and third listens. Although the lyrics are sad, the feeling is ultimately uplifting. It’s okay if you are falling to pieces. A song like this will catch you.
[8]

We’ve come to talk about Em again…

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[2.20]

Alfred Soto: Good lord — an Eminem single called “Darkness,” surprised yet? The Simon and Garfunkel interpolation and sound effects come off as cheap contexualizing for the sake of a bait-and-switch in which Em unmasks himself as Stephen Paddock. With critics paying renewed attention to the complexity of his flow, it’s also worth stressing that ability tethered to self-pity deserves scorn.
[4]

Brad Shoup: I swear to Christ I saw the title and knew he was gonna interpolate Simon and Garfunkel. But I also knew he and Royce were making their own “Six Feet Deep,” and I was way off. Turns out it’s a creative-writing assignment designed to keep the grader’s pen dangling forever. What do you do with something detailed so painstakingly and painfully? The parallels Em draws are clever enough linguistically. (Has any song ever flattered Genius annotators more?) But the only ones that feel legit involve substance abuse. This is a megalomaniacal idea presented bashfully — I should be grateful he isn’t trying to do voice acting — and framed thoughtlessly. The gunshots and screams are ghoulish enough without considering how the rest of his catalog uses them as cartoon gags. A fantastically bad idea that I will be thinking about for at least as long as the song’s excruciating runtime.
[5]

Kylo Nocom: Em forces the audience to endure his balladry, only to reveal that they were, like, empathizing with the Las Vegas shooter the entire time! The set-up is… intriguing (to call it “well-executed” feels like making another lame pun he’d squeeze in) yet it still sucks in many ways that don’t even require public moral outcry: the sound effects spoil the twist way too early, his singing burps out remnants of emo rap, the beat samples fucking Simon & Garfunkel, and I still hate the sound of this guy’s voice doing anything. To write any more on this feels like losing a game that Eminem will win — a point he makes annoyingly often and remains true. But it’s a shame that something meant to be poignant from the guy comes out as weak shock humor.
[3]

Julian Axelrod: In theory, I’m not mad that Eminem is still trying to pivot to Social Commentary Anthems. I guess I’d rather hear him use his platform to wrestle with knotty issues than peddle stale punchlines about killing Honey Boo Boo or whatever. But what’s really frustrating is Eminem’s refusal to drop his gimmicks when it matters. You can’t make a song about real life survivors and reference Saturday Night Fever. You can’t condemn gun violence at festivals and condemn festival-goers concerned about gun violence. And regardless of the subject matter, you cannot punctuate a belabored alcohol-as-gun metaphor by muttering “Double entendre” like a sadistic, self-satisfied SparkNotes. That’s the worst part: No one outside of Eminem’s stanbase will be swayed by this, and very few within it will either. When will his reign of terror end? When no one cares.
[0]

Isabel Cole: Oh, fuck you: for being tacky enough to open a limp-pulsing track called “Darkness” with a phrase that’s been memed into meaninglessness and then marrying it to our particular American plague so that I feel irrationally bad about dismissing it with a flippant joke. But, fine, Eminem has put on his (boring, ill-fitting) big boy clothes, so let’s do this. Being a grown-up, like being an artist, means being accountable for your choices, beginning with not just the choice to rap from the perspective of a mass shooter (although it’s hard to imagine a level of artistic merit or political efficacy that would justify that decision), but specifically the choice of this shooter, this tragedy. It’s easy to imagine why this particular incident would call to Eminem, from the infamy of the body count to the anxiety he must feel about the possibility of a similar event striking one of his own audiences. In choosing a mass murderer who remains so enigmatic, Eminem gets to dwell in the alleged mystery of violence, emphasizing its senselessness even to those who commit it. But it’s more than the scale that makes that massacre unusual (although the scale also bears on the irresponsibility of his selection: come on, dude, how can you profess concern and not see yourself laying the groundwork for some other asshole to think “if I kill enough people someone famous will write a song about me?”); the perpetrator had no known history of domestic violence, but the majority of such men do. You can’t talk about American violence without talking about American misogyny, and selecting a narrative that enables you to avoid the connection between the two marks you as someone with nothing to contribute to the conversation; implicitly generalizing this genderless narrative by layering news audio clips of shooting after shooting brings it from stupid to evil, emphasizing the pervasive danger of American culture now that men are dying too. This is of course particularly galling coming from goddamn Eminem, who has profited so handsomely from the commodification of violence against women. Galling partly because it retroactively dims whatever insights on the topic he may have laid claim to: rather than the inscrutable, almost mystical lost soul portrayed here, most of these men are something more like the narrator of “Love the Way You Lie” plus a couple years on the wrong parts of Reddit. He could have chosen to bridge that gap for his long-time listeners, to make the connection between hating the bitch who ruined your life and being self-centered enough to want to watch the world burn, but he didn’t. Making me wonder what exactly he thought he was rapping about all those years, if he finds this form of violence so novel.
[0]

Will Rivitz: I see Lin-Manuel’s done away with his orchestra’s string section.
[2]

Andy Hutchins: The distance between “Hi, kids! Do you like violence? / Wanna see me stick nine-inch nails through each one of my eyelids?” and a three-verse double entendre that doesn’t exactly strain itself to not sympathize with one of history’s most nefarious mass murderers is not as far as one should probably walk in 20 years of life. A less clever rapper would not have found as many ways firearms buttress our vernacular; a cleverer one might have made this song about that instead of a five-minute trigger warning. A wiser one wouldn’t have attempted this at all: Noble though the aim may be, there is no target audience here.
[3]

Will Adams: Eminem stepping into the mind of a mass shooter is not surprising. Punctuating said narrative with in media res sound effects (shower curtains! pill bottles! loading clips! screams!), turning “The Sound of Silence” into a Talkboy sample, and making this shit five and a half minutes long? That takes extra chutzpah.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: I suspect the efforts to prevent copycat shootings were doomed ages ago, if not after Columbine then definitely after Rodger. Even if every mass shooter permanently closed off his chosen inspiration to all future comers, there are still enough sprees strewn throughout history — hell, just through this millennium — to produce years of trauma; and even if every media outlet declined to report shooters’ names or manifestos, all of that would still circulate on chans and Discords (where they probably originated anyway) that any given proto-shooter is far more likely to read than the Associated Press, and infinitely more likely to trust. It’s a failure of imagination: far easier to high-mindedly decline to acknowledge shootings than to reckon with them, to dissect and understand what makes them happen and more importantly what doesn’t, and thus learn how to stop them. As a certain folk duo sang, silence like a cancer grows — which brings us to Eminem’s “Sound of Silence”-sampling, presumably cautionary foray into the Vegas shooter’s mind. If your average caustic millennial isn’t reading the mainstream news, he’s definitely not listening to Eminem in 2020, and yet “Darkness” crumples under the burden of needing to not inspire anyone. The rapping is low-energy, the rhymes distractingly stiff or goofy — trigger/convictions, booze/snooze — the flow lumbering and often just bad. Where Disturbed heightened “The Sound of Silence” to Game of Thrones grandeur, Em and Royce — perhaps building on a popular mashup — desiccates it. The arrangement is the midpoint of Alex da Kid and “Teardrop”: a smothering quicksand, meant to drag listeners into inertia and keep them there. (For all the gunshots-and-cussing masculinity of this, the piano loop reminds me most of Sarah Brightman’s cover of “Scarborough Fair“: delicately hypnotic.) Eminem conveys neither Slim Shady’s glee nor “Love the Way You Lie”‘s visceral anger, nor much but a morose slog, but give him this: It is mostly impossible to imagine someone hearing “Darkness” and buying a gun. Mostly. Why, if you’re aiming not to inspire, would you musically accompany the killing-spree verse by finally moving past line two of “The Sound of Silence,” to where the melody gratifyingly blooms upward? The vodka bottles in the video — the lyrics’ metaphorical gun, shown in appealing product-placement close-up — are thankfully fake prop brands — but then why do the close-ups at all? Most tellingly, Eminem chooses one of the few shooters with no manifesto to disseminate and few known motivations. Whether that’s out of a desire to avoid spreading the truly hateful shit (which would be a recent development), to avoid the issue in general, or just to play the guy with the biggest body count, it means he gets away with lines like “you’ll never find a motive, truth is I have no idea” instead of engaging with the specific kind of nihilism shooters are all too happy to tell you about — a nihilism that is, in some part, his creation. When will this end? When enough people care what “this” is. Begrudging point for the part where, after Eminem says “magazines,” the video cuts to actual magazines, like the glossy paper kind: the best trolling he’s done in years, specifically of the sort of gunfuckers who were already halfway through a comment about him saying “clips.” I suppose it’s not the bleakest way he’s made people laugh.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: At one point Eminem had the capacity to make jokes. He’s way funnier here, his faux-double entendres and sampha-soundalike Simon and Garfunkel interpolation adding up to something so maudlin and obvious that it’s almost impossible to listen to as serious political rap. It’s not even disgusting.
[0]

…as a treat

[Video]
[6.00]

Julian Axelrod: One of my favorite things about Moore’s last single is its fluidity, the way its ambling verses coiled and exploded into the blood rush catharsis of its hook. “Save a Little for Yourself” pulls the same trick with none of the nuance, abruptly skidding into a flat chorus that feels copy and pasted from another artist’s demo. Switching from wholesome guitar strums to rousing Americana doesn’t subvert either side, it just creates a Frankensnooze.
[5]

Alfred Soto: This has the confident gait of 1997-era Sheryl Crow, the market in which Mandy Moore is most at home these days (when did you think this would happen?). A solid performance and tune, no more.
[6]

Leah Isobel: The lyrics’ faux-inspirational Instagram quotability almost doesn’t work, but the key shift into the chorus and Moore’s lovely vocal – specifically the way she offsets the natural prettiness of her tone with clipped, brash phrasing – implies enough actual stress to sell the serenity. It’s a coffeeshop bop.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: A dusty, washed out guitar and drum heavy mix floats out of the desert, Mandy Moore gently lifting the sandbags with her smooth, sea glass voice pulling the wind into the balloon and raising the whole song into the air and curling underneath the basket.
[6]

Juana Giaimo: I just like warm acoustic songs like this. It doesn’t have the uniqueness of a Kacey Musgraves’ song and the lyrics certainly could be less generic, but Mandy Moore’s sweet voice can cover up those flaws. 
[7]

Brad Shoup: A series of kind gestures, well rehearsed: I like the descending piano figure in the chorus, and a little mellotron is always nice. But I appreciate this kindness for its intent, not its effect.
[5]

Alex Clifton: Breezy and full of sunshine and basically a Dawes song with Mandy Moore on lead vocals. That’s not meant as a derogatory review, although I do wish this felt a bit more organically from Moore. Still, I’m delighted to hear Moore return to music knowing that she’s making the music she’s wanted to make for so long, and I’m glad that if any indie guy is going to work with Moore on her music, it’s Taylor Goldsmith and not Ryan Adams.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Oh Amanda, you’ve come home. Sure, this codes a bit more credible, a bit more singer-songwriterly, but the delivery is recognisably the same one that Moore used to elevate her strongest teen-pop ballads (say, “Only Hope” or “I Wanna Be With You”). Only now she’s doing adult contemporary rock ballads, and has aged perfectly in line with her fans me. I recognise her again and that feels very comforting. 
[7]

But perhaps our scores are also swayed by high tempo…

[Video]
[5.86]

Ryo Miyauchi: Formerly named Battle Street, Geiin Wa Jibun Ni Aru later got a full-on image change: a boy-band take on the kitchen-sink rock music made by bands fronted by Vocaloid producers such as Yorushika, Kobasolo or ZUTOMAYO. They got that tumbling jazz-rock sound down, but what’s more impressive is their sharing their influences’ playful, deconstructed approach to lyrics. The actual meaning of words take a backseat to exploring the thrills of rhyme.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: If a J-Pop boy band made itchy, slightly manic new wavish indie rock, I guess it’d be this? Turn down the BPMs and it’s great; as is, it’s good. The vocals take me out of it a bit.
[6]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: Turbo-funk that feels possessed by the spirits of both ’70s jazz fusion and ’90s math-rock is incredibly hard to play, but it’s harder to make a catchy pop single out of it, which makes this song all the more impressive. It even has a chorus that is even more technically chaotic. I wanted the bridge to be longer, but that’s just me being a nerd. 
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: This is the energy and vim I expect from my disco-synth-funk-nu-fusion-stuff — even the panning on the vocals is intricately done. The track would be better if the arrangement kept to two extreme, stark, contrasting modes — frenetic and staccato — rather than meandering off toward the middle sometimes. But good luck remembering any quibble a second later.
[7]

Brad Shoup: I used to take comfort in math rock that leaned on a disco backbeat. But now I’m… yearning for it to be difficult? Not that this breakneck tempo isn’t its own special stressor. It’s like watching someone solve a Rubik’s Cube with a countdown timer.
[5]

Iain Mew: They loop and twist and knot SO MUCH into a small space, and it’s a really impressive technical feat. It just leaves so little room to breathe or appreciate the details that I can’t find a way in to actually enjoying it on any other level. 
[4]

Jessica Doyle: This is a dance of a song with every blur of a footstep landing. It feels like nitpicking to complain that the piano and the group sing-shouting cancel each other out in the first part of the chorus. But the multiple parts find balance, without compromising on speed or intensity, for the second half; rarely has a “wo-o-oah” been so clearly earned. It is all great fun, and I would continue gushing with praise for another paragraph or two, had I not searched for information on the group and learned that when Genjibu debuted last August, one member was 13, one 15, and two 16 and a month. Intellectually I know not to accuse the entire Japanese idol industry of Johnny Kitagawa’s crimes, but emotionally, nope, nope nope nope, that is too young for to me to assume a healthy environment for all and continue with the unabashed enjoyment. Let me know when a bunch of 20-year-olds have adopted this style, and I can break out the [8]s.
[4]

Considering this and “Heartless,” the Jukebox concludes that a heart is worth 2.6 decimal points…

[Video]
[6.50]

Andy Hutchins: A guy whose career has been spent toggling between scuzzy, drug-driven explorations of the dark and Michael Jackson impressions of variable accuracy finally finds the midline between those bumpers while doing 120 in a Testarossa and surrenders to ’80s-era cheese — that flimsy synth line that echoes the hook melody and bridges the chorus and verse is both ridiculous and perfect. It’s okay to be corny!
[9]

Juana Giaimo: I recently met someone who told me he was a big fan of The Weeknd, and it made me wonder whether all music writers sometimes just start hating someone without many reasons. But personally, I’m enjoying this — maybe because it doesn’t sound like The Weeknd? The fast beat and the ’80s keyboards are more dynamic than anything he’s released in the last couple of years. He’s playing the “I can’t love, there is too much lust in me” character again, but considering the first line of “Heartless” is “never need a bitch, I’m what a bitch need,” “Blinding Lights” suddenly sounds super deep. 
[7]

Tobi Tella: The Weeknd’s pop pastiches have been better than his woozy R&B attempts lately, highlighted by how much better this is than “Heartless.” This has more energy than most of his other forays into this ’80s sound, and that sense of propulsion works wonders.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Everything The Weeknd does works better at high tempos than at slow. The creep of his voice, the way his lines linger and descend, fits better when it’s not just another part of a languid whole. On “Blinding Lights,” The Weeknd is an irritant, buzzing around the electro-pop of the beat like a moth navigating to a blocked-off flame. It’s a pop song that makes the desperation of trying for a pop hit into something slightly rabid, and more compelling than an album full of downer-driven torch songs. It passes the “is this a banger in real life?” test, too — at every party I’ve been to this year, “Blinding Lights” was the only unifying dancefloor hit.
[8]

Scott Mildenhall: As if seeing a lost Italo classic through new eyes, The Weeknd and his sugar-sweet synths sell this set piece with verve. He forgoes the worst of his cliché for a more urgent than tense approach: showing rather than telling the drama. It’s a full, almost maximalist sound delivered through minimalist means: The verse slides into the chorus, and every part has its counterpart, almost, but never quite interlocking as they brush past.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: Time-travel back to 1984 and this would have been a Laura Branigan single. In 1985 this would’ve been on the Breakfast Club soundtrack, because it’s totally got the right tempo for the “Molly dance.” (Seriously, listen to this while playing that video on mute and tell me I’m wrong.) The Weeknd adds nothing, but that’s to the track’s benefit because a) his personality (cf. cocaine and sexual assault) is gross, and b) anon-ish mid-’80s uptempo synthpop is kinda my jam anyway.
[7]

Isabel Cole: Pretty enough, I guess, although the synths have started feeling a little video game fight scene for me. But I have listened to “Blinding Lights” at least half a dozen times in a row actively trying to attend to its particulars enough to form an opinion, and my brain simply refuses. Which is kind of its own information, you know?
[4]

Brad Shoup: A few years ago, he might have forced a snow-blindness joke. But now there’s just a withdrawal reference and that’s it. He’s making the safe moves, and so is Max Martin: even I know Drive-core isn’t in fashion.
[6]

Kylo Nocom: “Oh, this is Max Martin?” I asked myself while looking up the track credits, impressed by the more entertaining murk of his synthwave biting that had mixed results before. “Oh, this is Max Martin,” I realized once I kept listening and found out he had no other ideas.
[5]

Alfred Soto: For fuck’s sake, enough. How many Swanson Frozen Fish ‘n’ Chip versions of 1985 Holiday Inn acts will we endure before our gall bladders rupture from nostalgia overdose? Tender-voiced narcissism needs one-finger keyboard riffs for support like Prince needs Grammy tributes.
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The beat is propulsive and the melody is tinged in gorgeous melancholy, but Abel’s the star here. He gives his best vocal performance in ages, emoting with the calm mania of someone coming down from a high.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: That whoo! before the wind tunnel synth rush chorus is the most emotional I’ve heard Abel Tesfaye sound since he begged to fuck Julia Fox in the bathroom in Uncut Gems. It’s also the most I’ve liked Abel Tesfaye since he begged to fuck Julia Fox in the bathroom in Uncut Gems.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: “Lost in the Fire” was like chromed-out La Brean spittle getting hacked into your mouth with vengeance and spite, a weirdly underappreciated chance for Tesfaye to find his weapons again by remembering his urges for cruelty. Here he’s returned to something else that’s familiar from his early work: detachment and disconnect. The Vangelisian synths swooshing around his falsetto also occupied so much of Kiss Land, but there he was trying to convey a stir of emotions. “Blinding Lights” isn’t just numb; there’s a deliberate disaffect. You end up learning what it’s like if the whole point of “Take On Me” was to feel resigned to the helplessness of things moving beyond you at a rate where focus and absorption is not only impossible, but detrimental. Is that perhaps a reductive retro-futurism? Sure, if you think you can control your future. This song doesn’t sound like it expects to.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Ten(!) years(!!!) into the Weeknd’s career, “Blinding Lights” finds him doing full-on outrun, after several singles of just mostly outrun. I wonder whether Max Martin ever finds it weird that the going sound of pop — dictated as much by him as all the Redditors leaving comments on Chromatics videos — now sounds exactly like the stuff that was popular around the time he was doing hair metal. Imagined Shitty A&R Guy brief for this: “Can you get me a song that sounds like Giorgio Moroder, or ‘Take On Me,’ or honestly just that Vine with the girl grinning to ‘Take On Me’”? (Writing that, one gets the creeping realization that those references are all very specifically 2015, which perhaps says something about Martin’s adaptation to the times. But so many people have been so wrong, like David-Frum-predicting-Trump’s-trouncing wrong, by predicting Martin’s decline, so who knows?) It’s a backward trajectory for Abel Tesfaye, in more ways than one. We think of artists beginning their careers with this kind of fakedeep, false-heroic faux-lovelorn bullshit, a valentine cut from polyester and trimmed in coke, and then maybe it’s revealed through tabloids or journalism or scandals or basic judging of character that they don’t so much have skeletons in their closet as ascended to a fame on a staircase of skeletons, many freshly torn. But with House of Balloons and its subsequent trilogy the Weeknd built his on-record brand as an admitted, unapologetic scumbag, whose songs were filled with often-drugged women, used to varying extent. When the public loved the scumbaggery enough to boost him from hipster-famous to famous-famous, he paired each more charming pop track with a repudiation: “Heartless”‘s “lowlife for life,” “The Hills”‘ “when I’m fucked up, that’s the real me.” (His mentor Drake has also tried to do this, with less focus and less convincingly.) But it increasingly seems like The Weeknd’s long-term goal is for his music to culminate in sensitive facade: a Miami Vice Byron who soothes with familiarity of form, with singles so expensively vulnerable they gleam like a neuralyzer and erases memories equally well. I suspect, for much of my cohort, that’s the generational dream.
[6]

A pretty good week for the hyperspecific subgenre of “critically acclaimed works involving long Southern road trips…”

[Video]
[6.23]

Alfred Soto: With the synths chiming and the drum machines thudding, “Feel the Way I Want” positions itself as a retro move in which insouciance is its own reward. I don’t get a sense of who Caroline Rose is.
[5]

Camille Nibungco: Caroline Rose has the aesthetic sensibilities of a fourth Haim sister but with catchier pop hooks, like those of an underproduced Saint Motel song. However, the simple thematic message of “just be yourself,” underscored by the melodic electro-pop keyboard instrumental breaks, puts me in such a nostalgic groove for simpler times.
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: Did not expect a pivot to monogeneric synth-pop after the under-appreciated chaos of Loner. This will probably find a bigger audience, but it’s basically Haim covering “Gone,” except half as good as that sounds. I’m about as bored with lines like “I’m so in love with myself/It’s so romantic” as I am with “Pretending not to be popular/even though I’m a pop star.” She pulls it off, but it’s enough to make me want to learn Tracery and write a script about this kind of thing. 
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Landfill indiepop, definitely, but seems more like landfill indiepop of the Hype Machine era, not landfill indiepop of the Spotify era. I’m not quite sure what the distinction is, except that there is one — mild guitars? Attempts at funk?
[3]

Josh Langhoff: For indie synth-funk whose ground zero is “Electric Feel,” this is pretty authoritative. Each keyboard line sounds more stoned than whatever it jostles out of its way, and Rose provides a bunch of dork-friendly singalong hooks. Now, if someone could just please ID the bassline — I’ve ruled out “Stiletto,” “Lovely Day,” and “Backwater,” and I’m not getting anything else done, help.
[8]

Brad Shoup: It sounds like recycled Unknown Mortal Orchestra. There’s a c. 1980 boogie classic in here somewhere.
[6]

Vikram Joseph: The sort of frisky disco-pop that could convince you that January might, at some point, no longer be an ongoing concern. The synths bubble and squelch like a video game, Caroline Rose goofs her way from coast to coast in the video, and it’s such a wholesome experience that the slightly milquetoast declarations of self-love sound almost radical.
[7]

Juana Giaimo: I’m not the biggest fan of high-self-esteem anthems, but the slightly danceable beat, the sharp keyboards and Caroline Rose’s breathy vocals are very suitable for these summer days in the Southern Hemisphere. What I most enjoy is that, against the relaxed tone of the song, the lyrics seem kind of ironic: “Everybody’s so quick to sit you down and say ‘try to be cool about it’. Baby, watch me freak out.” 
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: She says that she wants us to watch her “freak out,” but there’s not really anything freaky here — not even the barely concealed tension of Rose’s earlier work. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Instead, an overwhelming sense of calm breathes through the whole song, with a strong drum groove and psychedelic synth accents allowing the track to flow. It’s freedom in a track, tensionless in the best way.
[7]

Kylo Nocom: When compared to Natalie Prass’s equally sunny “Short Court Style,” “Feel the Way I Want” comes off as uncomfortably postured, as if suffocating in the feigned flightiness of its arrangements. The song’s best moment is at the 2:04 mark, when the arrangement is stripped to a pointed bassline and a more confident, falsetto-free delivery by Caroline. But not soon after, the song becomes even more grating self-love corn with the song’s sleekness being its downfall. Reviews praised her sarcastic wit in the past; I wonder if the giddy platitudes are all just one huge joke I don’t get.
[4]

Ryo Miyauchi: Caroline Rose’s proclamations of taking back control sound more like a wishful mantra than actual self-realization. The scrappy feel of the DIY new wave gives the music some twee character, but is a fault when it comes to actually supporting the message.
[5]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Don’t bother listening to the song by itself until you’ve seen the video; the experience won’t be complete. Hilarious, heartwarming, and instantly iconic, Caroline Rose shimmies her way through the American South from Hollywood to Florida, with dance moves that I can’t do justice to in writing. The best I can describe it is that she looks like she’s having so, so much fun, she doesn’t even realize she’s singing a song. She’s like a kid just reveling in the wonder of her own body, unaware of and indifferent to anything else. None of this would matter if the song wasn’t there though — a catchy, if unassuming, self affirmation anthem coasting on the power of Caroline Rose’s charisma.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: There’s a specific synth sound I associate with Caroline Rose: chintzy and propulsive, detached yet richly emotive, like a Vegas lounge singer breaking down in tears mid-song. The synth doubles as the perfect complement to her lyrics’ dead-eyed stare. Rose’s turns of phrase have so many layers of irony that the emotional gut punch comes as a surprise. Here, “gonna feel the way I want to feel” is an empowerment platitude fashioned into a threat. The commodification of self-care has made monsters of us all, turning indulgence into a lifestyle. But Rose mixes self-love with a lot of self-loathing, embodying an influencer who will destroy anyone who threatens the happiness that destroys her. It’s camp, it’s commentary, it’s Caroline fucking Rose.
[8]

Perhaps pick the food out of your teeth before performing on live television?

[Video]
[6.17]

Alfred Soto: In which les fréres Jonas diddley some Bo while unleashing some of the scariest high notes in recent memory. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: “Edge of Seventeen” guitar and a Bo Diddley backbeat by way of Andy Grammer: level-breaking Wife Guy moves. They’re so excited they tend to sound like mush, but I guess that’s kind of a Jonas thing.
[6]

Jackie Powell: Initially, I didn’t think nostalgia was something that the Jonas Brothers could convincingly pull off. Unless of course, it’s reflexive. The Jo Bros can only recreate Camp Rock orYear 3000, right? I say this because of their embarrassing tribute to Earth, Wind, and Fire where they barely knew the words to “Boogie Wonderland.” But then the Jonases decided to hop in the time machine with Ryan Tedder and out popped something a bit more their speed. As a teen and musical theater nerd, I was in Grease twice. I sure know how to snap into the hand-jive when I hear it. Before I saw Joe Jonas as John Travolta’s Danny along-side his wife as both Sandy and Cha-Cha in the music video, I knew the chorus on “What a Man Gotta Do” is just a sped-up 2020 “Born to Hand-Jive” redux. The keys and the rhythm guitar bring Johnny Casino back into the 21st Century. The middle Jonas should be more than familiar as he and his band DNCE played Johnny and his band in 2016’s Grease Live! The youngest Jonas’ verses, as Will Adams pointed out to me, are Nick’s best imitation of Michael Jackson on “Black or White.” If he wants to pay homage to MJ properly, he’s got to drop his jaw, as those vowels can’t be sung for themselves. The Jonas Brothers proved they can steal like artists successfully, and I’ll give them credit for that. But I’d like for them to write an actual bridge in the future instead of some “ooos” that are a part of a scale. Also, the lyrical content of their singles continues to be milquetoast and not very relatable, save for “Sucker.” Why don’t they pass the pen to Kevin next time? Maybe he can be a bit more introspective. He was the only third of the group who stayed out of the limelight for six years.
[6]

Isabel Cole: Wait, are the Jonas Brothers good now? And no one told me? Or have they been good the whole time, and I’m just an asshole? This totally slaps! Fun and breezy with just enough faux-retro cutesiness (I DO think that all pop music should remind me of Grease, the best movie of all time) and a solid understanding of how if you pick just the right syllables it simply does not matter if your song has “words.” Do I need to listen to their album now?
[8]

Ryo Miyauchi: “What a man gotta do to be totally locked down by you” sounds too good to be true to take at face value. It’s also damning a love song this sincere is sung by a group of dudes who’d be more than eager to put more sleaze into this innocent funk had this been a piece of their own solo material. But the Jonas Brothers are earnest as they can be, thrilled even, about their feelings here. They wisely refrain from wittiness or macho flexing to instead straightly deliver their sentiment about willingly wanting to be tied down.
[6]

Alex Clifton: It’s taken me three full listens to realize that Nick sings “you’ve got no flaws” in the first verse rather than “you’ve got no floss.” I couldn’t tell if he meant the dental stuff or the dance, but flaws makes more sense. Anyway, it’s not as good as “Sucker” but it’s a nice dumb slice of fun, and I definitely enjoy how every JoBros song these days is about how much they love their wives. Makes me remember there’s still some good in the world.
[6]