When Googling for a subhead idea I came across this very chaotic California story, which I will now pass on to you…

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[5.00]

Juana Giaimo: Ever since Lana Del Rey said that she doesn’t build a persona, I’ve felt disenchanted with her music. Artists inevitably create personae even if they don’t want to, but now I know that hers wasn’t intentional, lines like “run your hands over me like a Land Rover” seem a lot less interesting. She compares the way fame has treated to her with disposable luxury objects, but only victimizes herself, rather than without having the distance to see that she is herself part of that. The last line, “You’ll need a miracle, America,” pretends to have moral superiority, as if she wasn’t an American herself. I guess that, as a representation of “Americans” — white people, from the USA and not the continent — the narcissism and and heroic narrative here shouldn’t surprise me. It’s actually quite similar to what we see in every Hollywood movie, making propaganda about how USA saved the world. Oh, and it’s also a really boring piano ballad. 
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Lana Del Rey’s music is so sludgy-soporific that Lana on a formulaic piano ballad sounds comparatively peppy. Ignore the words (always the caveat with her), and “Arcadia” sounds more like a melodic ABBA ballad than ABBA’s actual 2021 ballads.
[6]

Andrew Karpan: Not good, but successfully sad. A quiet record that hovers and meanders like dust, “Arcadia” details the landscape of her current era: a terrain of pained singer-songwriter-ese, where her discovery of “arteries that get the blood flowing, straight to the heart of me” cringes, just slightly. When I heard Lorde’s new album surveying similar themes of new-age emptiness alongside a sun-dried coast, I wondered, somewhat loosely, what Lana would think of her newest neighbor. But the answer is written right in the sand: “I’m not native, but my curves, San Gabriel all day.” She sees herself buried in the earth, a forlornness that’s almost morbid.
[4]

Leah Isobel: Lana’s campiness both distracts from and elevates her songwritingg. The off-key second verse nearly sells this whole “Old Money”-sung-by-a-Real Housewife conceit. I will always dig her mix of artificiality and emotion, but as lovely as “Arcadia” sounds, it doesn’t really add much to her body of work.
[6]

Alfred Soto: No artist goes from the figurative to the literal in 2021 as quickly as Lana Del Rey, accomplished through the lounge music arrangements she’s so fond of.  “My body is a map of L.A./ And my heart is like paper/I hate ya” makes its point. Is she addressing fans? These ambiguities keep her interesting.
[6]

Andy Hutchins: My headcanon is that Lana pitched the title as “GMC Acadia,” but that the person at the other end of the table fell asleep listening to approximately the 300th dreary LDR song about having sex in California (and that it wasn’t the version posted to YouTube with the minute’s outro of something like trap mariachi), so she left it. Prove me wrong.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: I mean, the poetry’s nice. But there’s never been an artist that makes me feel so much like the Safaree eating gif. 
[5]

Ian Mathers: Doesn’t it kinda feel at this point like the disc horse around Del Ray’s gotten so thick that we’ve all forgotten, her included, that she still needs to write songs? The lyrics continue to shakily try and cross a tightrope stretched over the chasms of self-parody (“lay your hands on me like you’re a Land Rover”) but sonically this is just totally inert. And I like piano ballads. If she’d taken the trumpet-and-fried-beat bit from the end of the video and run it under the rest of “Arcadia,” that at least would have been something. Something a few steps away from full-blown “you guys were mean to me, and that’s why I’m a fascist,” but — you know what, enough disc horse.
[2]

Mark Sinker: Now and then I’ve spent a day as I work with LDR in the background, to catch up on the hype or else the beef, and — I can fairly and honestly say — nothing ever snagged my attention. Running into her full-face for the first time for TSJ has been disorienting, because it’s been such a succession of opposites: things I liked and wanted more of, things that irritated me, sometimes opposing reactions in succession and sometimes both at once, sometimes for or against visual aspects. This merely puts me in line with all of her listeners ever: those who hate her, those who love her, those who stay indifferent and undrawn. The surprise, I think, was realising just how good she may be at distilling these opposites, as if this above all is what she aims for — not ideas, not feelings, not the resonant portrayal of a time or a landscape or even her own physical self, but this uneasy and irresolvable failure ever to agree, even with yourself, You could call that a portrayal too, I suppose, but it’s more of a concentrated affect.
[8]

It’s what we want too!

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[7.88]

Tim de Reuse: I’ll never totally love Lil Nas X’s musical body of work, because he sticks to production tropes that aren’t my taste — this tune, in particular features an acoustic guitar manicured into a flat, noisy mess, and the chorus is small and plasticky when my gut tells me it should’ve been big. But I’ll set my pet peeves aside for someone who is willing to write so directly about both the particular desperate intensities of being a man trying to find another man, fighting against statistical realities and a lost youth. Few artists, even among the independent gay artists I adore, write affirmations as raw as “That’s what I fucking want!” That is a line I have to tell myself constantly, when family second-guesses me or when I’ve had a particularly unlucky month; for all the ways in which I might personally wish this song were different, it’s just damn nice to hear someone else shouting it too.
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Effervescent and earnest machinations of a new queer canon, one which feeds the soul with the immediacy of an IV bag of gay vitamins hooked up to your veins. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Unlike the more morose “Sun Goes Down”, the music here doesn’t really reflect the tone, the deceptively sunny strum and handclaps underpinning something between despair and frustration. (It still goes, of course — you know who we’re listening to.) He’s right (and he should say it), especially considering the really monstrous wall of shit Lil Nas X deals with on a regular basis, but he’s also pretty far ahead of the game; this is a pretty good articulation of a healthy and reasonable expectation for an actual partner, and dude is like 22. It’s good that this is what he wants (and what many of us would want for him too), but the slight friction between the genuinely unfair barriers he’s got to deal with that many don’t and the fact that only the luckiest don’t have to wait a little longer than this for something truly good spins away at the heart of the song, only torquing it up further.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: There’s something adorable about a massive pop star starting his prospective hit song with a 4 count. There’s something adorable about singing “you gon be ok and everything is all right.” There’s something adorable about the fact that the song pauses for him to sing a 2 bar bridge in a world where bridges are long gone. This whole thing is adorable and beautiful.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: Lil Nas X isn’t honestly much of a vocalist, but he is an absolute master of hooks and more than competent at the filling. This is a fully realised mantra in a couple of minutes, easily enjoyed in full but also perfect for sound bites or captions on obnoxious GIFs. Honestly it’s a huge shame that one day he’s not going to be so young and brazen. If they ever work out the secret to eternal youth, they better give it to Nas here. 
[8]

Will Adams: Lil Nas X’s vocal limitations are both a hindrance and an asset to “That’s What I Want.” The propulsive, hooky pop-rock arrangement deserves a vocalist to match its energy, but he falls short. On the other hand, the central “That’s! What I! Fuckin’! Want!” works far better as gulped, strained high notes rather than a proper belt, like he’s yelling his frustrations to an empty night sky. Perhaps the first time I’ve felt genuine catharsis from him.
[6]

Alfred Soto: With “Hey Ya” in its rhythm and “Homosapien” in its interior, “That’s What I Want” is Lil Nas X’s best song because it’s so horndog-happy to worry about silly shit like originality or plagiarism. Except no male artist snuck “need a boy who can cuddle with me all night” over hard strumming before, and no male artist yelled ‘THAT’S WHAT I FUCKIN’ WANT’ hoping he doesn’t masturbate himself to death every night.
[9]

Andy Hutchins: The magic is in that takeoff between “I want” and “Someone to loooove me!” That’s where “That’s What I Want” best transcends the nuts and bolts of excellent pop music and aspires to be truly special instead of settling for anthemic. But the synth line that rises like a dolphin from the ocean in that moment has had diminishing returns for me — it could be twice as loud and/or bright — and so this is settling into merely being another gripping performance from the person whose ability to surf the wave of American pop culture without bailing is as impressive as his chops with melody, rather than the favorite to be my favorite song of the year.
[8]

Follow up to sleeper hit that has us reaching for the snooze button…

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[3.29]

Andrew Karpan: Indie boyz without style or substance, this noble effort to reproduce the band’s incredibly random, billion-streaming hit last year collapses on the weight of its own vacuousness, a thudding bass riff wasted on the kind of empty emotional noodling that creatively bankrupted fellow travelers Alt-J sometime in the last decade. It’s pop music for people who’ve never had a good time in their lives.
[2]

Tim de Reuse: The grooveless clap-on-every-beat chorus is already making it difficult to feel the music in my bones, but the vocal delivery seals the deal. The enunciation of “dance” into “DAY-unss” is a monumentally irritating flourish, and when the crooning in the quiet parts starts to edge towards Adam Levine (the platonic ideal of Voices That Make You Want to Punch Your Headphones) I can’t even pretend to identify with the main character anymore. Whoever she is, man, she’s way better off.
[3]

Leah Isobel: If they keep stomping on the downbeat, it’s going to crack under the weight.
[4]

Juana Giaimo: Glass Animals have entered the group of indie rock bands with a catchy, anonymous, mainstream hit and a few dozen songs nobody else knows. It seems they now sound like Tame Impala (synth solo! vocoder vocals! psychedelia!), but way messier.
[3]

Alfred Soto: The hell does a “hurricane” taste like — as wild and tempestuous as the college-era cocktail? The na-na-na sound effect recalls the worst bits of early 2010s electronically coated rock, as if Foster the People were New Order. 
[2]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: I’m having the same problem I had with the last Glass Animals track I blurbed: the idea all feel half goodness and reliant on cliches, and yet I still find myself enjoying it in spite of that. The fuzzy bass really drives it forward, and though the vocals are weak at some points, the falsetto redeems them. It feels like something made for me if I were six years younger, and not as easily disappointed by the abruptness of some endings, literally and metaphorically. 
[5]

Edward Okulicz: An actual curate’s egg: great bassline, awkward falsetto, vocal effects that scream “well, let’s use all the presets.” The song also ends one chorus too early, although at the same time the chorus isn’t so good that I really needed to hear it again.
[4]

British boy bands: back in style?

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[6.71]

Scott Mildenhall: A fitting title: at their height, JLS defied the zeitgeist as a boy band striking a chord with timeless sentimentality. They were an anachronism then and an anachronism-in-aspic now, preserving a comforting candour that becomes all the keener at a decade’s distance. Hiring Steve Mac for a warmed-over “Everybody in Love” feels just right — it’s not as impressive as “Patience”, but the kind of skilful nostalgia-bait will touch even the non-believers. In at number 71 with a bullet? Well, there’s always the tour.
[7]

Ian Mathers: In which a boy band I have not thought about in roughly a decade come back with a song that makes me nostalgic for the boy bands of at least another decade before that. Please note: I’m not complaining. Not everything has to build a better mousetrap; they sound like they’re having fun and I’m charmed by enough of the grace notes that I am too.
[7]

Juana Giaimo: Is my rating a product of nostalgia or am I actually enjoying the song? Sure, I wish the the vocals had a wider range when they sing together instead of resembling a block of sound, but lately I’ve been thinking that love has become too cynical in pop and sometimes I miss a cheesy silly love song about eternal love, whatever that means. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: What a hook — the only eternal love I recognize is the three-minute pop song kind. Ed Sheeran agrees. 
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: I don’t know how Ed Sheeran bought his soul back from the devil to make great music again, but he should have never sold it.
[10]

Oliver Maier: You know that thing where some cartoons with teenage characters have an episode with a funny made-up boy band like Boys Who Cry or Sev’ral Timez or Boyz4Now with a signature song? You know how half of the time it’s really good and catchy and the other half of the time it’s clearly the product of someone chuckling to themselves about how insipid and circuitous boy band songs are? “Eternal Love” sounds like the second one.
[3]

Mark Sinker: The right number of boys for you is four… FOREVER! (we’re back!) 
[7]

Hang on, this isn’t an ode to their favourite Sugababe?

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[7.75]

Lauren Gilbert: It is frankly a hate crime for MUNA to release this while I’m still in (indefinite, infinite) quarantine. This song makes me want to kiss a girl I’ve just met in the California sunshine, and pull her closer as I’m high on endorphins, thinking that this one might be the one. I want to move my body, to have a bright, beautiful queer life. Bridgers’ guest verse brings almost Swiftian specificity to a song designed for spinning like a girl in a brand new dress; in an instant, I am returned to hazy half-memories of standing in a Target and realizing I wanted to kiss the girl I was there with. I didn’t then, but I still can — I still can go dancing, I can roll down the windows and turn up the volume; I can experience the purest of queer joy.
[10]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: MUNA and Phoebe Bridgers singing about the texture of the women they sleep with feeling like silk chiffon on their skin — while also talking about their anxiety — unlocks a whole level of queerness I didn’t even know existed. This can be read as a masterpiece of camp and a sincere ode at the same time. 
[8]

Jeffrey Brister: After relating to MUNA through tender, icy songs of heartbreak or resilience in the face of adversity, it’s nice to hear something that radiates with pure joy. It lacks the emotional heft of “Winterbreak” or the absolute euphoria of “I Know A Place“, but sometimes a song doesn’t need to swing for the fences to be enjoyable. Unrestrained happiness is its own reward.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I know summer is, at least around here, staying longer and longer every year, but it still feels a little unfair to put out a song in September that I want to be listening to in a car driving around with the windows down.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: The shivering synths underneath the glittering guitar are so pretty, and Katie’s voice is so vibrant and silvery, that it’s almost a pity when the drums hammer down and the bass slinks in. But when Phoebe drifts in from her painting, she feels indistinct, and the beauty of the arrangement slides back in as the mix contracts. Now MUNA and Phoebe can circle each other and float across the walls, taking flight around the castle with the bass trailing after them into the night.
[7]

Will Adams: For a band that initially marketed themselves as “dark-pop”, MUNA fare surprisingly well with giddy love songs. “Silk Chiffon” is essentially “In My Way” — a pop-rock gift wrapped in a bow — with an extra five coats of sheen and an overtly queer lyric. Katie Gavin’s writerly tendencies distract occasionally (a CVS meet-cute feels too on the nose), but it’s all about the chorus: the cry of “SILK!” that echoes over the surging guitars, the punctuation of “chiffon” that follows, and the elation of “that’s how it feels when she’s on me.” The line repeats, as if Gavin is at a loss for additional words, but that’s what happens when you fall head over heels.
[7]

Leah Isobel: I like that “Silk Chiffon” builds on Saves the World‘s 90s-alt influences; it’s basically “Good News” recast as a gay love song, with some of the scene-setting from “Taken” thrown in for good measure. It feels a little less specific than those songs, though. I can’t tell if that’s because it gallops through the verses to get to the pre-chorus hook, or because the chorus and bridge are more melody than lyric (a bit of a downer for a band that writes lyrics as well as they do), or because Phoebe’s quavery star power pulls focus from Katie’s best vocal to date. But also, who cares? The world could use more gay love songs.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I’ve never been in a place to escape into MUNA’s world, and I’ve grown more than tired of Phoebe Bridgers’ winking chaos. Indeed, Bridgers’ verse about being Stoned At The CVS Pharmacy prevents full immersion; she just can’t help herself. But that group shout of “SILK!”, that 1/4 triplet phased delay echoing into the ether, sucks me right in. It’s permission to indulge in escapism: Life’s so fun! Life’s so fun! I definitely know how to rollerblade! I can definitely pull off a mini-skirt! I’ll stop hiding in fantasy later. I’ll feel ashamed of my own desire later. For three minutes and twenty six seconds, I am a soft goddess with skin like silk chiffon.
[8]

The next YouTroubadour should fare better — get ready to meet Biden Harris…

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[4.12]

Tobi Tella: More wholesome than Megara, this is pure schmaltz, but the transparent play for emotion doesn’t offend. Maybe it’s the actually sort-of-sweet lyrics, or lowered expectations from my fears he would explode into Lewis Capaldi Voice at any second, but this is a perfect anthem for streaming during the honeymoon phase of your relationship and forgetting it exists moments later.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Stock signifiers plus steady stateliness equals The Most Romantic Song You Have Heard In Your Life (again). Overwrought vocal aside, Clinton Kane knows not to complicate things, but in being the latest to try and boil this concept down to its supernatural essence — Calum Scott came close — he’s overshot the process, ending up with a load of hot air. On the plus side, it could very easily be James Arthur.
[3]

Juana Giaimo: An Ed Sheeran ballad with a piano instead of an acoustic guitar. I think his voice even cracks exactly the same way. 
[4]

Jeffrey Brister: Is there something preventing singers’ voices from resonating in the face, instead resorting to that back-of-the-throat vocal affect? And the wobbly vibrato makes every sustained note feel like an awkward run. It is a perfectly serviceable melody attached to a perfectly serviceable song, but the performance just sounds so BAD, making the fatal mistake of unnecessary effort masquerading as genuine feeling.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: The plaintive voice of Clinton Kane and the plunking piano chords both thud along; his voice ragged and paper-thin, the earnest pianos smashing down as the yearning strings sizzle and yank. Slowly his voice unravels and unspools, finally collapsing before it can take flight.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: While the dulcet piano and barely strained earnestness of the vocals signify another win for the first dance industrial complex, I find myself alone in the wilderness begging for even a hint of a drum. 
[5]

Alfred Soto: He comes to his tremulousness sincerely, but if the beloved has haunted him since childhood one presumes she boxed his ears on occasion. OK, often. 
[3]

Mark Sinker: “Worth the wait of all the years of my heartbreak” — but child yr like 21 and this is NOT. IT. “Sweetheart since preschool” is of course a thing but no-one ever needs to make solemn songs about it as a thing, bcz it’s very not relatable. Meanwhile the burr in yr voice is a thing, so whatever u do don’t lose that.
[4]

We temporarily interrupt reviews to give you a geography lesson.

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[7.80]

Aaron Bergstrom: Magdalena Bay (band) are based in Los Angeles, and there is in fact a Magdalena Bay (body of water) in California (well, Baja California), so fair play to them on that. However, there is also a Magdalena Bay (body of water) in Norway, and wouldn’t it make more sense if icy, shimmering pop like “Chaeri” was being made in Scandinavia and not SoCal? It’s like how you can’t call it champagne unless it actually comes from that particular region in France. Still, while “geographically misdescriptive” is a reason why your trademark application might get denied, it’s not really a fair criticism of a propulsive, crystalline gem like this one that could play anywhere.
[8]

Ian Mathers: For this kind of breathy vocals over throbbing electronic background, It can be hard to balance those elements in such a way that neither element gets swallowed or overshadowed. Magdalena Bay have chosen one of my favourite approaches to the problem, where it feels like the production is insistently seeping in around Mica Tenenbaum’s vocals. And then, just when they’ve built a sturdy enough vibe I honestly expected “Chaeri” to just stick with it for the duration, they start blowing it up a little in a wonderful way, with the kind of eruptions that make me wonder wistfully what could have been if more synthpop bands had gotten in on the shoegaze ground floor. 
[8]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: The loop feels like it could go on for hours without me getting bored. The bass starts out surprising but its constancy becomes comforting as “Chaeri” rises and falls. 
[7]

Dorian Sinclair: “Chaeri” starts small — a whispered melody, moving in tiny steps over a simple drumbeat and dark, repetitious synthline. The slow build from there, as melodic intervals get larger and more instruments are layered in, is extremely well-paced right up until the instrumental break at 3:00, which doesn’t quite land for me. Having a moment of catharsis there is the right choice, but something about how it’s executed falls flat. Unfortunately, from there the song never quite recaptures the simmering tension of the first half, though I do like the static wash that rolls over the ending like the tide.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: A lot of details that I like individually: the indistinct echoes that start filling the background halfway through, that little downturn in the bass, the way the word “bad” is delivered just loud enough to distort. What’s the payoff? Pure bombast: a cloud of feathery pads and arpeggi. It’s impressive for the first few seconds after it hits you, and more ambitious than most synthpop acts would dare to put out there as a big single, but it suffocates everything interesting about the song under its weight.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The lopsided bass is slipping over the side of the pulsing kicks while Mica Tenenbaum sprinkles on her powdery voice along with the blipping analog synths, before letting loose the flat footed snares and a swarm of churning synths. A pile of synth sludge crashes down on a spiralling drum break, which smash through the floor as the bass, now set firmly on the middle, carries them across to the next building as the synths swallows and smash their old room to bits.
[7]

William John: No one’s quarantine home workouts appear to been as fruitful as Magdalena Bay’s; having developed a fanbase through commitment to a DIY, living-room, post-post-chillwave (or wherever we’re up to with that) aesthetic, they emerge suddenly with “Chaeri,” confident, muscular, and ready to soar. “Chaeri” is not only the finest Magdalena Bay song yet, it’s also the longest (if you overlook remixes like the popular slow’n’reverbed version of “Killshot“), and though brevity has been a definitive characteristic of much of their previous material, a maximalist approach sure does look cute on them. Singer Mica Tenenbaum’s directions to “lose control,” “let it come alive” and “let it grow” in the song’s glorious coda are as much instruction as they are affirmation, and the more the synths spiral behind her, the more declarative her vows to revel in the wildness of new thrills become.
[10]

Alfred Soto: It could’ve unfolded so anonymously, so ignominiously: breathy electro-throb hasn’t had the best of track records the last decade. How “Chaeri” recreates the experience of how an awakening person remembers a night of dancing and passion when the 1 a.m. beats are dim echoes is its astonishment.
[8]

Leah Isobel: On paper, this empathetic, anthemic chorus (“It’s only that bad — it’s only that bad — if you tell yourself you’ll never get out of bed!”) could read like an openhearted Robyn banger, the kind of song that provides comfort and warmth. But Magdalena Bay undercut it with an unstable melody and a bass synth that sounds like a jet engine careening in and out of key. They introduce menace, and slip the feeling from solicitous to domineering and demanding. If Robyn’s work is poptimism materialized, the platonic ideal of pop as connective tissue, “Chaeri” is pop pessimism — suspicious of the comfort pop can provide, exaggerating and satirizing it until it comes off more like mind control. It’s a cool thought experiment, but what makes it work is that it absolutely slaps.
[9]

Will Adams: Magdalena Bay tend to only flirt with explosiveness — see the brief climaxes toward the end of “Airplane” or “Oh Hell” — opting instead for cruising, blissful electro-pop. On “Chaeri,” they blow the doors open. The explosion is foreshadowed, via an uncertain chord progression and the giant snare that enters in verse two, but every time it hits, it dazzles. The growing tension reflects Mica Tenenbaum’s situation: equal parts contrition for her part in a failed friendship and frustration with the other party’s unwillingness to reconcile. The coda following the explosion is where it clicks. “Let it come alive, let it grow,” she sings as the music follows suit, “better cut and dried than unknown.” “Chaeri” tracks a riveting journey, not just of musical progression but of personal growth to accept past wrongs and look, laser-focused, to the future, nothing held back.
[9]

Return of the prodigal cousin…

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[6.57]

Nortey Dowuona: I originally wrote something short, pithy and wrong, so I’m gonna drag my feet getting to the point with this one. Let me start with this: 1: Keem is good here. For one, his whining flow is so tightly locked in, it doesn’t make you notice the fact that his writing’s clumsy at best, and occasionally there is a startling vocal tic (the way he repeats “beat him up” is both exciting and threatening) that makes the riding of the beat switch so thrilling. But he’s only half, exactly half. Now the lukewarm take: 2: Kendrick is bad here. For God’s sake, he drops off the flow to throw, “IM SCARY, IVE GOT A GUN IN THIS BITCH.” You put this in the voice of Chance the Giftwrapper/Political Actor/Comic Influencer or Russ (the Eminem who Songs Good) or Travis Webster, it wouldn’t be classic or good or even funny. Plus the verse begins with Kendrick practicing his first 4 bars, on a professional song when he has been a pro rapper since 2009 instead of just delivering them with intensity THE FIRST TIME HE SAYS THEM. Also, how do we go from “I know if I’m generous at heart, I don’t need recognition/the way I’m rewarded, well, that’s God’s decision” to “I’m a prophet, I answer to Metatron and Gabriel” as well as “I’ve been ducking the overnight activists, yeah!” (Has Kendrick actually ever been in touch with any activists, especially in Compton?) The flow switches are so trite and half assed, especially when he starts telling us he comes from the 70, so when he does provide a dope line about getting to the right when the ambulance comes, he ruins it with a filler line and then hits us with the Yelawolf accent. And when he drops off the beat with the burn the hard drive line, it’s so goddamn awkward it makes you mad. Like, didn’t this guy use to be able to outrap Jay Z? What happened to calling out all your peers to get them ready to do duel with your raps? Tyler could outrap you now. So could J. Cole, KRIT, Wale AND Big Sean. Drake is a lost cause at this point, he’s getting washed by Lil Baby. Rocky is somewhere… doing something. Pusha T is two-timing his wife, being a father and is 44. Mac Miller sang better than you. And now we see rappers like Kenny Mason, noname, JID, Tierra Whack, SAbA, Junii, Little Simz, Dave, RAP Ferreira and especially Earl Sweatshirt, Angel Haze and Megan the Stallion, rap better than you. So calm down, go back to the pad, and write a better verse than Dave’s third on “Verdansk” and maybe people might be interested in a new record from you. But: 3: I still like this song. Baby Keem put in too much work for this to be a failure, and Cardo, Roselilah, Outtatown, Deats, Frankie Bash & Jasper Harris have created a titanic, 3 headed hydra for your earbuds. Plus, I used to like Yelawolf. However, I’d really prefer Kendrick be at least trying to justify all this smoking my top 5 from a man who’s a teetotaler.
[6]

Andy Hutchins: There is a lot here, and more of it’s bad than good: Keem’s delivery borrows from his cousin’s more, uh, experimental periods, and that plus his plodding flow would be grating even if he weren’t rapping — on his first song that virtually anyone has heard — like the artist people were actually coming to see on those world tours that saw him tag along. It’s a waste of those triumphal horns possibly left over from Jay Rock’s “WIN” or an attempt to remake it. But what is good is great. Keem’s cousin is one of the greatest rappers alive, of course, and the beat switch provides him with what sounds like a miniboss theme from some lost Super Nintendo RPG. The sneering, snarling, sarcastic performance befits a tiger growling its announcement of a return to the hunt, knowing damn well nothing in the jungle is a threat.
[5]

Mark Sinker: He’s huge now but he’s also in his head — who isn’t this last year and more? — and so the thoughts become just thumps and cracks circling more and more tightly, overlapping, hysterical, a frantic frightening controlled inner mythopoeia just beyond the edges of sense, where words become abstract percussion and emotions become a lethal blurring drone and gestures flare like petit mal…
[10]

Juana Giaimo: My favorite transition is the first one. The brass sample stops, we are left a few seconds with Baby Keem’s rap alone and suddenly a very dreamy synth appears, giving a completely different vibe to the song. The following transitions are abrupt cuts; they almost seem to have copy pasted each section, making it hard to listen to it as a whole. It doesn’t help that both Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar opted to fire words one after the other in a rather tiring high tone and with little flow at all. 
[5]

Alfred Soto: With horns flattened as if if it were 2006 and Timbaland-Timberlake ruled, “Family Ties” depends on the transition from Baby Keem’s syllable-at-a-time rapping to Kendrick Lamar’s impatience, force, and trademarked long lines. No discrete sections, blessedly: Keem returns in the second half, a genuine duet.
[6]

Al Varela: Kendrick so easily steals the show on “Family Ties” that it’s easy to forget that Baby Keem holds his own on the first half of the song. The flow starts out a bit basic against the horn beat, but his loose, fun energy eases you into the song as he slowly brings on faster flows and more intensity, pulling through when the beat switches and his nasal voice goes from funny to intimidating. I think that’s why Baby Keem stands out over a lot of other newcomers. His rapping is short and simple, but it’s the meshing of several beats and styles that make each song feel like a journey. In which case, Kendrick is the sleeping dragon at the end of the tunnel. And yes, obviously his verse is tremendous. It’s insane to hear him switch between different voices and flows at a rapid-fire pace. Not to mention there’s a bit of goofiness to his lyrics, so even if this verse is meant to reclaim his spot on the throne, he does it with a loose sense of fun that we haven’t seen as much of from him before. The whole song builds to its best moment, where Baby Keem comes back and throws bars with Kendrick back and forth. A victory lap within a song that was already victorious. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Flexing as an end in itself (aesthetically as much as anything else); the Keem half is good, but the Kendrick half is better (bars and production both). Were I a rapper “Family Ties” would very much make me want to never attract either of their attention, which definitely feels like the goal.
[6]

A Singles Jukebox and a Pressure Machine walk into a bar (in a small town, no doubt)…

[Video]
[5.73]

Claire Biddles: The first 45 seconds left me absolutely breathless with excitement: the small-town setting, that spoken intro, those swirling synths, like a combination of the drama of Hot Fuss, the Americana myth-making of Wonderful Wonderful, and the sonic palette of Brandon Flowers’ (still hugely underrated) solo album The Desired Effect. Surely the absolute platonic ideal Killers song, for me anyway. But the half-hearted, mid-tempo story of doomed kids and opioids that follows, while well-intentioned, isn’t nearly as engaging as it should be. The Killers have earned their place as successors to Springsteen’s soaring American rock’n’roll, but this pastiche demeans their position.
[5]

Will Adams: I doubt that the number of people who’re interested to hear what Brandon Flowers has to say about the opioid crisis is anywhere above “zero,” but “Quiet Town” carries charms typical of most Killers songs: guitars that gleam like late afternoon sun, Flowers’ quaver and lyrics that sketch his vision of the heartland.
[6]

Alfred Soto: A bright hook, Brandon Flowers sings in that patented alert-child yelp, but the lyrics read like an abstract to a paper for which he’s about to ask an extension from his professor. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: This is why lyrics are important; musically it’s a weirdly little pleasant melange, but there are near-toxic levels of bullshit wafting off of it, and it mostly just makes me want to go listen to a much better song about the way drugs and the drug war ruins lives.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Unsure of which Springsteen song they wanted to caricature, the Killers take on about six of them at once. I’m not entirely sure that the big ’80s pop drums, the harmonica, Brandon Flowers’ bright delivery and the ostensibly slightly dark subject matter even work by themselves, let alone when put together like this. Peak Bruce’s songs were far catchier too.
[4]

Jeffrey Brister: It’s good, but it’s not good enough. The E Street Band sound is competently executed; the arrangement is lush and full and packed with detail. But while the lyrics have the basic idea down, they lack truly vivid detail. Springsteen wrote about big, universal emotions, yes, but his best work was always grounded with specificity. There’s not much of that here. And Brandon Flowers’ blasé, monochromatic performance drags the whole thing down, turning something that could have been stark black and white into a smear of indistinct grey tones.
[5]

Juana Giaimo: “Quiet Town” is too quiet for a Killers song. We’re used to Brandon Flowers’ trembling vocals joined by a tight beat that leads to an emotional explosion, but here they have completely changed the formula to a new one that lacks strength. His vocals seem completely lost — there is even some phrasing that sounds strange, like when he quickly rushes into “Parents wept through daddy’s girl eulogies” and then changes to a higher melody in the next line. Musically, the ’80s synth-pop doesn’t blend so well with the folk instrumentation — especially the harmonica. Brandon Flowers has created lots of characters throughout his career, but the ones here are empty archetypes. As a big fan of every single song on Imploding the Mirage, this was a little disappointing, and maybe it’s exactly because I miss the implosion.
[5]

Andy Hutchins: 20 years on, when it comes time to sing of America, it’s still a Springsteen impression that the Killers do (and Brandon Flowers very specifically does) more often than not. But it’s always been a good Springsteen impression, at least, and they could obviously be ripping off far worse source material. They’ve also gotten better at blending what goes beyond Bruce with what could have come from his pen — I would have won so much money betting on “pouring rain” being the rhyme in that first verse — and his lips. “Quiet Town” sounds a little wistful and a little prideful, but it’s also from an album that I think aspires to be a distillation of thought for this band akin to what Nebraska was to Bruce, and thus it’s still just a touch cynical (“Somebody’s been keepin’ secrets”) and dance-y in a way that has always been the Killers’ own, part and parcel of an era when confronting the sincerity of the day is scary as hell. It’s both better for it and better than the album’s actual Springsteen feature as a result.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: The glam rock drums that thud against the floor and threaten Brandon Flowers’ voice, a errant harmonica and loping synths are so strong the hopelessness in the strung up guitars and humming bass and in Flowers’ voice doesn’t crush it. They roll on by through Brandon’s home, spreading joy and love to each grieving family, enlivening a dying home…
[9]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Flowers is somewhere between Springsteen anld Mellencamp on this attempt to contend with the opioid crisis and its impact on small-town America. While it’s a solid effort that conveys pain and hope, which seems to be the intent, touches like the mandolin and harmonica veer it closer to cosplay. 
[6]

Austin Nguyen: The indomitable idealism of Our Town‘s final monologue, but rendered by John Green: a knot of mystery (“Somebody’s been keeping secrets”), vague undercurrents of adventure (tambourine jangles and electric guitar riffs restless for the open road), YA-quirked phrasing that makes some words feel like they’re being plucked from crinkled saran wrap. I’ll continue taking Rayanne over Raymond.
[5]

[Video]
[3.71]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Unpleasant, unclever, droning, joyless, gimmicky — and most criminally — utterly and completely sexless. 
[1]

Ian Mathers: Yeah, this sounds like the kind of thing a dude who makes his album art a bunch of zhuzhed-up emojis would do. It’s almost shocking how lazy it seems Drake has gotten, totally outpaced on his own track by two other artists working well below their own potential.
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: Great if you’re invested in Drake enough to find the proposition amusing, but otherwise nothing special — the Fairbrasses were too sexy for a syrup too, after all. In a way, the reproduction — the reduction of a joke to a meme — is evolution, but it is quite a bland one. And if he were a real Fredhead, he’d be sampling “Deeply Dippy” or “You’re My Mate.” Rise to their challenge, everybody. (Just not their politics.)
[5]

Al Varela: The sheer stupidity of this song astounds me. I heard about this song being in the works and I hoped and prayed that it would sample Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy”, and I felt so liberated when it did. And just like “I’m Too Sexy,” “Way 2 Sexy” is the ridiculous sex flex that I wanted it to be. Future singing “I’m too sexy for the trap” is hilarious, and followed by Drake trying to be this girl-rotating playboy, is dumb enough that I can’t fully believe either of them when they claim to be sexy bad-asses. But I think that’s the magic of the song. It indulges in the fantasy so much that, even if it’s not convincing, it’s still fun to hear them flex and make goofy voices over this ridiculous sample. The video certainly doesn’t help make the song look less like a joke. But I love that!
[8]

Andrew Karpan: The first thing Right Said Fred singer Richard Fairbrass proclaims he is too sexy for is love, a sentiment it is not hard to imagine Drake shares, even if it doesn’t make it on tp the sample that propels the latter’s latest hit to the same peak Fairbrass had worked so hard to climb. But Drake is loveless, animated by the kind of offhand cruelty that comes to a man with nothing to say who must therapeutically extinguish his existential malaise to an audience of millions who don’t want to hear it. The contempt he feels toward his fans, the animating energy behind his latest work, has become the most understandable thing about him. At long last, it can be said that Drake has come to match the vampiric despair so elegantly cultivated by longtime collaborator Future, and their sad song haunts a grim city of public housing blocks.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Until Future delivers a rap as weird and dense as he might’ve during his 2015 heyday, the rest of “Way 2 Sexy” sounds like a recovery meeting.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: Back in 2010 I first watched “Over,” a new single from the new artist Drake. There were the silly faces, the clumsy punchlines, the world killing hook, the dumb fashion choices. I was enthralled. I found the song four years later during my waning high school years of fumbling through my IGCSEs and A-levels, but at that point, I no longer liked Drake on it. I listened to that beat alone, amazed at how it could carry even my own myopic and thinly sketched raps. At this point, that was how I felt about Drake’s raps — myopic and thinly sketched, buoyed by a Dead Prez namecheck, Ebert and Roeper joke and one actually good line: I’m way too young to be feeling this old. And now drake is 34 and is too old to be feeling this young. Everything he has done has allowed some of the most cynical (Donald Glover), hollow (Travis Scott), lazy (Cardi B) and delusionally arrogant (J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, and ASAP rocky) rappers to sour and wither, their own art wilting in the harsh light of commerce. And here Drake tries again to suck away the spinning energy of the two rappers who we once thought could never be caught or equalled. Future is so desperately vile it seems more and more like a defensive pose to hide his own pathetic and self-immolating life, Jeffrey seems more and more bored with being asked to make this irritating pedant interesting to folks who don’t know much of Nickelus F and K-Os, and the beat begins with a sliver of a sizzling synth line that is immediately smothered by a dull set of 808 drums and cloying synth horns. It should be gloriously pathetic and maddeningly hilarious, but it’s so limp and weak and hollow you can’t even laugh at it or dance to it. Why are we still letting drake pretend to be from Atlanta, Durban, London, or Kingston? Why are we writing about his most vacant and numb music that exposes his cowardice and emotional abuse to a woman he so publicly lusted over and pretended to adore? Why are we still pretending the jokes about him being soft and weak were anything but trying to corral him with the sting of a masculine excommunication that he quickly capitulated to? Why am I listening to this man name and list all his enablers, trying to keep the money rolling in and the hits lining their walls and the co-signs written on their songs? Why did we hear from two random famous young girls about him slithering up to them and see one very non-famous young girl be kissed, then joked on in such a gross way? Why did I not see that the boy was not ever going to be a man? Why did Boi-1da and Ali Khaaliq hand this man a world-conquering hit that just demonstrated he would not be able to conquer the world without it? Why did we not get him and 40 to stay songwriters? Why is “Over” still so good?
[1]