• Thomas Inskeep wrote about his memories of Daft Punk for Rock & Roll Globe.
• Rachel Saywitz reviewed TiKA’s debut album Anywhere But Here for The Line of Best Fit.
• Madi Ballista and Dorian Sinclair, on Ballista’s blog, reviewed BanG Dream!’s debut single on its fifth anniversary.

Fresh from having his #1 album cancelled by Gervais-beseechers Mogwai…

[Video][Website]
[4.56]

Oliver Maier: Boring. I don’t think anyone was trying to cancel Skepta in the first place, but neither he nor slowthai bring anything worth getting excited — let alone offended — about to the cookie cutter beat. A clickbait title for two dud verses.
[3]

Juana Giaimo: It’s funny how men only now are critiquing cancel culture (they even gave it a name!) but seemed to have no problem when Janet Jackson or M.I.A. were cancelled, to name just two examples, for things that actually didn’t hurt anyone at all. It makes me think the criticism isn’t about morality itself, but at whom morality is being pointed. Indeed, the lyrics of “Cancelled” don’t offer arguments, but just say: “How are you going to cancel me?” Oh, what a very male thing to say, right?
[3]

Andrew Karpan: A weak slowthai track and an even weaker Skepta one, “Cancelled” is a rumination on status which concedes that the contradictions of capital make institutional rebellion an empty gesture. Skepta’s “How you gonna cancel me? / Twenty awards on the mantelpiece / Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury” is pretty on the money, though it’s depressing to see the culturally valuable work of critique reduced to a blunt and, therefore, impotent tool. Someone’s blogging has to matter, though I suppose I’m biased. Still, when slowthai put on something of an old-Kanye bit at an awards show last February — the NME Awards, named after a magazine that that’s barely a blog now and where the highest prize is a ceremonial middle finger — it didn’t mean anything, and when he profusely apologized a day later, it still didn’t. Fine! I can barely remember most of last February either.
[5]

Samson Savill de Jong: You wouldn’t know it from the video, but the song only just manages to crack two minutes. Both men get one set of 16 each, repeat the hook a couple of times and that’s your lot. The beat work is pretty nice, the rapping is pretty inoffensive — ironic given the title of the song — but I wasn’t blown away by any of it. Disappointing given the calibre of MCs these two purport to be.
[5]

John Seroff: slowthai’s name is on the label and the by-turns sinuous and menacing hook evokes Timbaland and DJ Paul. But the real star of this two-minute bonbon is Skepta, who pops off a rat-a-tat 16 bars that name-checks Jodorowsky and The Fugees and blasts out the muscular dare of a chorus that holds this brief, rewarding exercise together.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: I can listen to Skepta rap all day long, and slowthai — who nearly seems like a guest on his own single, ceding the spotlight to his grime forefather — is stronger than usual here. Once the bass kicks in, it’s over for me.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: A lilting flute beckons the crunching drums as vamp Skepta gently explains his continuous rule, while a shaking synth gong beckons vamp thai. He stumbles in with the lurching bass drums and skidding snares in his boxers, before Skep snatches the bass and hangs it, using it to devastate the zombies behind you. Then thai bites into your neck.
[6]

Alfred Soto: If you’ve spent years climbing ever closer to the center of power, you have little incentive to question, much less dismantle the ladder. You accept the assumptions because without those assumptions your ascension wouldn’t have happened. To listen to Skepta lend his talent and prestige to this depressing reading of the male market registers as soul death. You sell records, dudes — if you worry about “cancel culture,” then keep your most repugnant thoughts about women to yourself as much as your hands. It’s that simple. 
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: Is there a sympathetic view to take on this flimsy manifestation of misplaced entitlement? Maybe. This is not the same as when an obscenely well-paid national newspaper columnist with a spouse at the heart of government does much the same thing (though it is grist to their mill). There remains A Conversation To Be Had on the difference between the two, but this song does nothing to start it. Insofar as it even had to exist, that’s a shame; the bigger one is that the word is not “Ignored”.
[3]

That’s Gill’s thumb in the air, India haven’t taken another wicket just yet…

[Video]
[6.00]

John Seroff: I know embarrassingly little about the UK Asian and Punjabi charts, enough so that AP Dhillon, a trap artist with a 62-million-view single, is completely off my radar. “Brown Munde”s video and lyrics preach pro-capitalism color-line and class solidarity, interspersing the song’s leads fixing trucks and pulling shifts as contractors and line cooks amid a host of the usual clichéd money-phone and Lamborghini signifiers. I’ll need someone with a better understanding of the culture than me to explain the finer political implications of the posse of armed Sikh uncles flipping off the camera, but I daresay I got the gist. The harp hook is plenty catchy and the beats and the rapping get the job done.
[6]

Andy Hutchins: “C’mon, man. Gang shit, man,” AP Dhillon appears to say to someone on FaceTime in the first seconds of the “Brown Munde” video. Apart from that, non-Punjabi speakers won’t understand much of it save its signifiers and jargon borrowed from English — Lambo truck, clown, trap, lean, four-door to G-Class, game lag, contract breach — without looking up a translation. It doesn’t matter, because all involved understand the more universal language of hits and bangers, most importantly producer Gminxr, who assembles a sturdy chassis of trap fundamentals under hypnotic guitar.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: All trap songs should come with a guitar motif this nice. Raise that ceiling up a tad.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: I like Gminxr’s production on this track, layering a classical-sounding guitar loop over a trap beat, but none of the rappers on “Brown Munde” do much to make themselves stand out.
[5]

Alfred Soto: A classic case of getting wowed by lyrics that neither the beats can toughen nor the singer inhabit.
[4]

Andrew Karpan: While sounding nothing like them, the energy of this reminded me of those great Atlanta trap records that Gunna or 21 Savage put out every year, where the depictions of fame and wealth roll off the tongue with such a heavy sigh that the high life ultimately seems as tedious any on earth. I love these songs: they suggest that a better world is not truly possible in this material one, rejecting the unearned aspirational qualities of the pop song and, consequently, the beats do not reach for the stars but do only what they must. The beat on “Brown Munde” feels like a similar kind of slog — in a good way — letting the voices it contains speak frankly and freely.
[7]

One person is!

[Video]
[3.50]

Katherine St Asaph: Sugary Backstreet-ballad crooning, the chorus of “Timber” except trying to be serious, a line about some unspecified “bad decisions you didn’t judge” that pings my details-intentionally-left-vague radar — I do, indeed, roll my eyes at this.
[3]

John Seroff: Though somewhat better realized and less musically moribund than this week’s other “That’ll Do Pig” country ballad, Dan and Shay’s attempt to lower the bar is less moving than it is, well, simply extant.  Instead of this amiable walking treadmill, there’s probably a more interesting song with this title to be written about the experience of discovering that your vlog crush is more than an avatar and really just human after all.  
[4]

Vikram Joseph: “Glad you exist” is one of those early internet-era phrases that’s meant to sound cute and profound but which just sounds empty and trite; you can picture the sort of man that replies to a funny tweet with “You, sir, have won the internet today” whispering it in bed to his wife, who is pretending to be asleep. It’s a laziness that’s more than matched by the song’s vanilla, sub-Ed Sheeran strum and paint-by-numbers depiction of a happy relationship; the gulf between how self-satisfied this sounds and the amount of effort exerted is cavernous. “There’s a couple billion people in the world,” Dan and Shay assert, with wildly misplaced confidence — that was the world’s population in 1926, a year in which this still wouldn’t have sounded interesting.
[2]

Al Varela: At this point, I have no reason to expect more out of Dan + Shay. They found their audience in making the most middle-of-the-road cheesy love songs on the radio that women who watch The Bachelor fall head over heels for. But who said that has to be a bad thing? They struck out last time with the confusing mess, “I Should Probably Go To Bed”, but the breezy acoustic flutter of “Glad You Exist” makes me smile. 
[7]

Juana Giaimo: I opened the video on a separate tab and when the song started I thought it was an ad until I opened the tab and realized that it was the song. That’s not a good thing. 
[5]

Oliver Maier: Every Dan + Shay song sounds like it was written and produced in one afternoon maximum. I was ready to dub this “fine” until I became aware of that offbeat guitar chord ticking away rigidly in the left channel, and now it’s all I can hear when I play this song. The tropical house theatrics on the post-chorus aren’t as grating, just dumb and unnecessary.
[2]

Alfred Soto: When they bray about “secrets,” I believe not a word, even with their acoustic guitars, especially because of their acoustic guitars.
[2]

Andy Hutchins: Is this a distress signal sent in the hopes that Ed Sheeran will return to recording this wan approximation of joy and their careers? Can we pretend that it is?
[3]

We check in with Polish pop again, and are not sorry at all…

[Video]
[7.14]

Katherine St Asaph: Perhaps like Polish pop’s answer to Grimes, and exactly like if Gwen Stefani’s reintroduction to herself had PC Music involved. Except “Sorry from the Mountain” is more lacerating in its lyric (“This depression will probably go away on Friday, when I drink coffee grounds and boiling water”) and far more polymorphic, exciting, and non-obvious in its production. Really, it just makes me happy that I can write the words “clear happy hardcore influence” in the advanced year of 2021 and only be 80% full of shit.
[8]

Vikram Joseph: This is chaotic and neon-pink, decorated in ravey synths and with a burbling, roiling undercurrent. There are clear PC Music signifiers, especially on the playful verses, although Mery Spolsky has a hard time carving out her own niche in this crowded field, and even with the assistance of Google Translate the lyrics remain fairly inscrutable. “Sorry From The Mountain” is fun though, in much the same way as someone covered in glitter and high on pills that you spend ten minutes talking to at a festival is fun — you don’t remember their name or what they looked like, but they just, you know, had a really good energy.
[6]

John Seroff: Mery Spolsky’s theatrical hyperpop girl-power bop “Sorry from the Mountain” is accompanied by a pastel-colored video attempting to show just how you’re meant to dance to it. Spolsky’s suggestion is apparently “very slowly,” a fittingly contradictory answer for a lean, over-caffeinated song that relentlessly pitches speedy, unpredictable and interesting decisions. Marketing a pop hit with Polish lyrics in America is probably a non-starter, but is it unreasonable to hope for a footwork remix?
[7]

Alfred Soto: It can’t still, nor can Mery Spolsky. Beats double against each other, arranged more thickly than on prime Grimes. The rap-singing is compelling enough to imbue that already mysterious title with more mystery.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: A beat that feels (but doesn’t sound) like a jackhammer grounds a smart rapped/sung vocal from a singer who sounds like she’s getting one over, and someone should send this to the mood board for Dua Lipa’s next album. 
[7]

Jessica Doyle: My one complaint about this otherwise fun ride is that Spolsky’s delivery is a little too relaxed on the chorus; if she’s relying on the instrumental to provide the energy I wish she’d put in more space with it front and center, as she does around 2:30 to provide the transition to the downslope. So, yes, for once I am saying I’d like it to be longer.
[7]

Juana Giaimo: Recently Poland passed a nearly-total abortion ban. Only a month before that, Argentina legalized abortion (becoming available in free public hospitals and therefore giving the change to have a safe abortion not only afford expensive illegal procedures). To finally achieve that, the whole country spoke about abortion for more than two years: friends distanced from each other, families fought, celebrities spoke against or in favor and many female-empowerment songs were released. The music video of “Sorry from the Mountain” features women in front of futuristic churches dressed in disguises similar to The Handmaid’s Tale outfits and showing a red lightning bolt, all of which have been featured in Polish protests against the abortion ban. The lyrics (I had to rely on Google Translate) talk about how girls need to believe in themselves and about falling in love with the confident side of yourself, but it also has some witty lines with a sense of humor that shows there is hope. The hyperactive music is full of energy — it tells these are girls that ready to fight. But when you realized that it was released in October and how things turned out later, it becomes a devastating song. I know that because abortion was going to be legalized in Argentina in 2018, but the senators chamber didn’t pass the law. I remember the emptiness when I woke up the next day and that all these kind of songs stopped making any sense. And still, I know how important it’s to keep singing them.
[8]

Permanently moving onto the sidebar…

[Video]
[7.17]

Will Adams: In Shygirl’s hands, a simple formula of house chords, classic drum breaks and lust-in-this-club lyrics becomes otherworldly. Gone in under 2:30, it’s as effortless as UK garage can get.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The 2010s were a good year for UK pop house, as Katy B and MNEK can testify. The shimmering keyboard textures and Shygirl’s wind-blasted vocals on “Tasty” rank among those thrills.
[8]

John Seroff: Shygirl’s particular flavor of “JOCK JAMZ: now with ***f333lz***” hasn’t quite resonated with me (or with an American audience) yet, but once the right beat comes along, I am prepared to believe it’s just a matter of time. Not yet, though. 
[4]

Oliver Maier: The elastic stretch and snap of the breakbeats and Shygirl’s performance are the twin jolts of kinetic energy that keep “Tasty” in motion. As ever, her horniness is relayed with an air of remove; whether that’s intentional I’m not certain, but it’s emphasised by the vocal filtering and the circuitous feel of the rhyme scheme in the chorus. I don’t mind it! Shygirl’s clinical approach to getting freaky somehow feels more honest than a song that trips over itself to exude sensuality.
[8]

Leah Isobel: “Tasty” is much warmer than the rest of Shygirl’s work, and that exposes some of her limitations; her cool distance works when she’s doing steely trance or skewed hip-hop, but here her verses sound more like placeholders. But then she smirks her way through the line “would that be so bad?” and yep, I still like this.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: After seemingly thousands of tracks over the past decade designed to  evoke various house or UK garage classics, it’s nice to hear one  designed — in a world with any sense of quality — to become one.
[9]

If they’d added “You Are” to the title they could’ve averaged at least two points higher…

[Video]
[3.17]

John Seroff: Even before Morgan Wallen put his whole damn foot down his gullet, Nashville was already husting to make 2021 the year of a more integrated pop country landscape. A more savvy insider than me can split the percentage of impetus to be attributed to moral righteousness and to financial motivation, but my inner cynic believes no one in the post Lil Nas X-era will ever again be told that they can’t be country if they want to… especially if helps expand the demographic. One of the most outsize early examples of country’s sudden willingness for parity-with-benefits was Blanco Brown’s briefly inescapable “The Git Up.” Matching Brown with the deeply mediocre Parmalee for a twangy, extra-straight take on “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup” turned out to be a surefire route for a feel-good gold record and a panderingly multi culti video that is, in the words of one of its top YouTube commenters, “awesome content.” It’s the sort of song the Nashville machine will point out as a sign that the times they are a’changing. It’s also bland, patronizing and taking up space that should (and hopefully soon will) be reserved for better music.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: Would it kill songwriters to come up with a song for someone special that sounds like something special? Parmalee and Blanco Brown have a goofy rapport that boosts this a bit, but nothing, whether details or sound, is any different than the last thousand country love songs. Point off for the parade-of-non-models video, glurge designed to conceal the fact that the industry doesn’t put these people in their other videos.
[5]

Al Varela: Okay, first some positives! I like how the video showcases a lot of variety as the targets of affection, including one person with vitiligo and even someone who I believe might be a trans woman? That’s awesome! I love seeing this kind of thing normalized! Shame that the song itself is fucking garbage in the most generic, flat, basic possible way, but hey, at least you tried! Just on the video though. You didn’t try at all on the song.
[3]

Samson Savill de Jong: At least this doesn’t fall in to the Meghan Trainor / Sir Mix-a-lot “positivity” trap by just replacing one arbitrary beauty standard with a different arbitrary beauty standard, avoiding comparisons with other women altogether. It’s still a cringey song (“never looked so hot” does not fit in to this song at all), and I don’t care for the sound of it at all (generic bro country shlock which would have had to do a lot to ever appeal to me) but it could’ve been a lot worse, which is the exact kind of ringing endorsement every artist craves.
[3]

Alfred Soto: With the video a model of twenty-first-century integration, “Just the Way” remains a memorandum of understanding instead of a song: every note as tightly proofread and fought over as a legal document. Parties representing Parmalee and Blanco Brown are pleased, sources say.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: I want to love this — the presence of Blanco Brown in the Country Airplay top 5 with this record, his first such visit, matters — but good lord, this is such a generic slice of “I love you just the way God made you”-core (which is the actual chorus). It could be Florida Georgia Line, or Rascal Flatts, or even fucking Dan + Shay. Brown’s vocal at least sweetens the pot just a little, but only a little. This song, unfortunately, is trash.
[3]

We enjoy a bridge over troubled paradise…

[Video]
[5.86]

Will Adams: Most of Slayyyter’s output has been a love letter to bubblegum, whether channeling Britney (on many an occasion), fluffy Euro-pop or Carly Rae’s nostalgic take on the genre. On “Troubled Paradise,” there’s a clear effort to present herself, both with the upgraded video budget and more contemporary production from John Hill and Jordan Palmer. As is the case with first introductions, there are some missteps. The verses drag, mainly due to the sustained notes that highlight Slayyyter’s thin voice, and Hill and Palmer confuse grandness with aggressive reverb. But what works is enough: the “Into You” bass-throb, Catherine Slater’s ad-libs, and a driving, extended bridge that’s more than welcome in an era where most songs don’t even have one.
[6]

John Seroff: Slater’s XCX-lite audio and FHM video visuals may make for a more mainstream radio-friendly unit shifting package than her hyperpop contemporaries, but it’s hard to sincerely stan for something this essentially and perhaps intentionally disposable. Given her prior single was the unlistenable deep throat anthem “Throatzillaaa,” let’s call this a step in the right direction.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: The past year has destroyed my attention span, but it’s still amazing how every second of listening to this, I forget what happened in the song one second ago.
[3]

Alfred Soto: I hear no trouble and see no paradise: besides that hotstepping sequencer line, this is innocuous, anonymous electro-pop, and in that not charmless.
[6]

Austin Nguyen: Not as troubled as I’d like, but sleek, efficient synthpop nonetheless with its strutting pulse on familiar lyrical pressure points.
[7]

Aaron Bergstrom: Probably less than the sum of its parts, but those parts are “Flesh Without Blood,” “Somebody Loves You,” “Heart to Break,” and maybe “Northern Lights,” so it’s still pretty good.
[6]

Vikram Joseph: This plays like a highlights reel of 2010s electro-pop: the vocals and the gothy melodrama of the lyrics call back to True Romance-era Charli XCX, the heady synth propulsion is peak Carly Rae Jepsen (making me think of “Making The Most Of The Night” in particular), and it exerts a Scandi-pop gravity strong enough that you can almost see the aurora borealis. It briefly threatens to feel faintly ersatz, but its forward motion is relentless, and by the time it reaches the terminal velocity of the middle-eight it’s absolutely a superb song in its own right. If we can call this year the real start of the decade, then “Troubled Paradise” is the perfect bridge from the last.
[8]

A dull flame of desire…

[Video]
[3.00]

Aaron Bergstrom: Basically Machine Gun Kelly’s Picture of Dorian Gray, “Flames” gets more and more unlistenable as it goes, meanwhile “Forget Me Too” is still out there in the world, inexplicably perfect. Turns out the formula doesn’t work every time.
[2]

Vikram Joseph: What in the Yungblud is going on here, and under what duress was Avril roped into this mess? There’s actually no way to review this song without sounding like your dad: so much shouting, so little to say, other than a barrage of fire-related metaphors (none of which are good, but the narcissist/arsonist line is especially heinous). Kill it with… oh, I won’t lower myself.
[3]

Alfred Soto: With vocals that function like buckets of water hurled on a just-lit firepit, “Flames” struggles to generate heat To listen to Avril Lavigne reduced to her singular skatergirl timbre while Mod Sun howls his bellybutton off is to welcome the flood.
[1]

John Seroff: I honestly never cared for Avril the first few times around, so I can’t pretend to be excited to encounter her on the hook of this would-be revival of pop screamo. Mod Sun’s moody sorta-kinda-rap howling and “Flames” surprisingly low energy don’t add much to the experience.
[3]

Will Adams: A curiously passionless duet from a pair who fit well into the genre given, respectively, a rapper who’s primed for the current emo revival and a beloved pop-rocker with a sk8er girl pedigree. The lyric approaches “Girl On Fire” levels of mixed metaphors, but hey, at least they didn’t rhyme it with “desire”…?
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Point deducted because I can’t think of a good “flames on the side of my face” joke.
[1]

Julian Axelrod: Somehow the worst judge from Cooking on High got current fling/aesthetic aspiration Avril Lavigne on a faux-Matrix pop punk excavation that goes harder than anything Avril’s released since “Boyfriend.” If she’s happy, I’m happy!
[7]

Can they kick it?

[Video]
[5.83]

Samson Savill de Jong: Look any track that contains the bars “I locked up the food for the kids like Boris/And then I let it go like Rashford” has to end in the positive column. This is good though, both men have a tight and well-controlled flow and some solid rhymes, and I like the way they pass the mic back and forth; it feels like a real collaboration. There’s nothing that’s going to keep most people coming back, but it’s enjoyable while it’s on (especially if you like football puns, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed).
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Currently in the Premier League you’ve got players with names including Maupay, Lookman and Chilwell, so surely Digga D can do better than that Peter Crouch line. To use an idiom he and Tracey might like, this is a bit of a Leeds United performance: a lot of running to variable effect. When it works it can be mesmerising, but by the end it can have led nowhere. That’s how “Bringing It Back” feels — not failing; Luke Ayling.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: A head-nodder of a beat, just so-so verses from Digga and AJ. Split the score down the middle, then.
[5]

Jeffrey Brister: It’s a great showcase of the performers’ technical skill, but the lack of switch-ups in their flows, combined with a limp chorus and too-long runtime (which, at only three minutes, might be a consequence of the chorus), makes it drag a bit too much in the back half.
[6]

John Seroff: Solid enough drill that bears all the standard wobbling bass signifiers, stuttering beats and two adroit (if monotone) flows jittering with internal rhymes. The lack of a clearly defined hook or any diversity in the tempo keeps this from really taking off but, once UK bars open again, I could see “Bringing It Back” being a springtime shout-along chorus of choice.
[6]

Andy Hutchins: Good drill beats either accentuate the performers or get out of their way or both; “Bringing It Back” is the sort of unremarkable soundscape that provides runway for both AJ and Digga to lean into flow-first deliveries of low-impact bars without much to festoon the proceedings. AJ’s cleverer — his dexterous Rashford and Bale references are highlights, though “Bale” as an ad-lib is not — and gets further tucked into his crouch (no Peter), so even his chicken shop order sounds fine. Digga, the rising rookie to AJ’s established vet, pales in comparison, his trademark energy lost in an attempt to trade bars with a better. Worse, the conceit of the track is nostalgia for flows that aren’t really even revived, and both men were better on their named antecedents.
[5]