It don’t matter who’s popping for the moment; P is forever…

[Video]
[5.75]

Nortey Dowuona: I gotta be real here: Gunna actually sounds a delight in real life and a decent guy. He cannot rap though. The beat is also too dusty and dull. Future sounds unengaged and too low in his range to really bring the song above acceptable. Thug stays in his lower range but lightens up and drops some fantastic bars. Oh well. Gunna better put out a pushing Qs next and get Mick Jenkins on it. Maybe drop an NFT of them in a pic.
[4]

Oliver Maier: I’m not going to judge anyone for not liking Gunna. He’s a little ridiculous. He raps about fucking genies and has album covers that look like this. There is the sense — not one I subscribe to, but it exists — that he has stumbled into hip-hop stardom somewhat by accident, an avatar for the kind of rap a lot of people hate without either the critical celebration now enjoyed by the likes of Playboi Carti and costar Young Thug or the relief of irrelevance now enjoyed( ?) by Lil Pump. I feel for him, not just because that’s a tough gig, but because I think he has good musical instincts including, yes, restraint. His muted style makes it hard to point out a particular song or verse as a showcase, but I will stand behind the position that it takes talent to do so much with so little the way he does on songs like “Speed It Up” and here on “Pushin P”. He, Thugger and Future rap so similarly that it sounds like one voice modulating between three pitches. Together they form a kind of half-conscious monologue, slurring through alliterative half-thoughts and phasing across either side of Wheezy’s beat, one second lucid, the next sluggish and hypnotised. Poetically pointless, pratically perfect.
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Potent punchlines, punctuated perfectly. 
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: I didn’t expect these guys to come through with a backpacker exercise in 2022 but, please, who doesn’t find pleasure in plosives? This has me feeling much the way I do whenever I hear Blackalicious’s “Alphabet Aerobics“: it’s very clever, but what is it for?
[5]

Al Varela: I’m always really bothered when a trap song has a solid idea for a hook but delivers it so poorly that it loses whatever magic it could’ve had. The melody in Gunna’s reflections on “pushin’ p” is catchy on its own, but he delivers it in such a sleepy, dull delivery that I can’t imagine even vibing to it at the club. Usually, that means the song is coasting on “vibes” rather than any sense of propulsion, but Wheezy’s beat on this song straight sucks. Colorless mush that will inevitably drown in the lifeless thud of the bass. It’s not like Future or Young Thug do anything to save it, though it did amuse me hearing Thug come into the song with a full-on incoherent babble. The only time the song made me smile, or emote, really. Bad.
[3]

Ian Mathers: The other two already sound comfortable in these environs, but somehow when Young Thug starts up the whole thing snaps into what passes for focus. A sly, slight shrug of a track, as if they’ve noticed (we’ve all noticed) how little apparent effort the rich have to put into things and so emulating that and getting away with it is its own status symbol. It kind of works, even.
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: You know Atlanta is truly dead and buried when they had to steal slang from the Bay Area you haven’t seen in forever, to make a lazy rewrite of a song from more than a decade ago that Future already released and had as a street single. Which, somehow, is the biggest hit out of the entire QC/YSL/Future axis in close to a year? Perhaps even more. It’s bad enough that I miss the Atlanta of yesteryear where two of these men were actually setting trends and not desperately clinging on to their clones for life and vitality. And I say this as a former New Yorker who remembers the music coming out of that city in the late ’00s. This is a true nadir.
[2]

Alfred Soto: Picture the flow of Gunna and Future, harmonists as pleasing to the ear as the Everly Brothers, as a river current of moderate force, too caught up in itself to eddy; the obscured burble confident of sound and suspicious of words; giddy on stripping those slurs we can make out of signification. “Pushin P” was already doomed to join the red solo cup among catchphrases made momentary in the pop culture mind — several students have quoted it snice last week — but as a murmured boast it’s tops.
[9]

Bad news for Sean Paul of YoungBloodZ…

[Video][Website]
[4.50]

Ian Mathers: Even knowing the sample source (and I do appreciate how it’s been stripped with ruthless efficiency for dancefloor purposes) some part of my brain keeps assuming this is about to bust out into a remix of Ciara’s “Oh”. Not a complaint!
[6]

Micha Cavaseno: The cool thing about this song is it reminded me that somewhere in my apartment I have both Cherish albums on CD and that I should make a point of checking them out again (or maybe even for the first time? I only think about Cherish once every four or five years sadly). I’m also happy that the US gets to have lazy UK Garage style jams à la Basement Jaxx become memes, and maybe this will be a pattern. Beyond that I couldn’t tell you anything about the song really, but I feel OK in spite of that.
[5]

Leah Isobel: As a standalone single, this is pretty whatever. As adhesive material for a fun club mashup, it’s great. But I’m grading it as a standalone single, so…
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: I’ve heard this during work all the time and it is only a great song until the drop happens and the Cherish hook drops, then the drums drop… and then it stops needing to exist. 
[4]

Oliver Maier: I have to assume that this did well because it sounds kind of like the song from Squid Game and I can’t tell whether that makes me feel better or worse about it. At any rate Acraze has sucked all the blood out of an impeccable song until only a gasping husk remains, and surely that’s worth something? Hello?
[1]

Scott Mildenhall: It’s hard not to respect the unabashedly perfunctory nature of this remix — not just for its commitment to the template, but also how the inverted drop lays bare an essential connection to its heritage. That sudden discarding of all expendable accoutrements in favour of a badly mixed vocal and tinny bass is almost Pavlovian in the extent to which it could be playing from crap phone speakers on a bus to 2007. Is this the point? Is it supposed to sound formally bad? Perhaps not, but the result is quite nice.
[7]

No longer can we ignore one of the biggest bands in Australian history…

[Video][Website]
[6.62]

Edward Okulicz: Like A Version is a long-running thing on Triple J where bands cover other songs and then invariably they become popular and discussed and eventually become radio hits on the station in their own right. At its worst, it sometimes provides an outlet for people to like things they shouldn’t with ironic distance when a “cool” act covers an “uncool” act. At its best, you get the diametric opposite — an “uncool” act covers a “cool” act. Honestly, the results are delightful — The Wiggles strip the veneer of psychedelia from “Elephant” and reveal that it’s actually kind of goofy and that the rhythm lends itself to being jaunty fun. A whole lot of love and effort has gone into this and the first time I watched the video I had a huge smile on my face. But I can’t imagine listening to it over and over, so this topping the Hottest 100 is down to a lot of people liking it a little rather than people thinking it’s true greatness. 
[7]

Jessica Doyle: Neither I nor my children were ever Wiggles connoisseurs (if I want a nostalgia hit from an indie-rock-and-kid-friendly-entertainment crossover I’ll go to Feist, or maybe sloshy). So I have to take this on its own terms, and regretfully report that the “Fruit Salad” interlude sounds shoe-horned in enough that the cover doesn’t impress me. It’s cute, though!
[5]

Alex Clifton: This sounds like a number on a children’s Halloween special about the wonders of fruit and the dangers of arrogance — which is to say: this absolutely slaps. Tame Impala could never.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I am not trying to be snarky or clever when I say that this is genuinely the most I have ever enjoyed a Tame Impala song. The “Fruit Salad” interpolation is fun and the vocals, guitar solo, and drumming are honestly upgrades.
[7]

Alfred Soto: As ubiquitous for the generation younger than thirty as much as Aerosmith or Kanye in another, Tame Impala specialize in vaguely demonstrative arena gestures whose innate reluctances honor what remains of indie values. This cover, I suppose, disinters “Elephant”‘s recessive core; we hear how Imagine Dragons in 2002 might’ve arranged it, as if that’s the point.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: We lived through the late-2000s musical phase of aging Gen X hipsters trying to reconcile their indie-rock past with their suburban-dad present. We absolutely do not need to live through another.
[3]

Al Varela: This was an inspired cover choice for The Wiggles. “Elephant” was already a pretty goofy song, at least in its structure, so a band like The Wiggles who thrive on that goofiness can easily turn it into something fun, yet genuinely catchy! I’m kind of amazed by just how good this cover sounds. Near indistinguishable from the original! But of course, hearing them interpolate their own hit, “Fruit Salad”, into the song was an absolute delight. Truly deserving of being the new Australian national anthem.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: this is a fantastic cover and the Wiggles are truly one of the greatest musical collectives to ever exist. wiggle on, y’all.
[10]

We really love this song! Wait…

[Video][Website]
[4.57]

Al Varela: Pretty easy to compare this to the last time a teenager went viral over a breakup song, but I’ll be fair to Lauren and judge the song on its own merits. In which case… It’s fine? I think I like what the song is trying to do more than the song itself. It’s an angry lashing out against a guy who gave her plenty of good memories but also buried her in baggage she wasn’t remotely prepared to tackle. The anger in Lauren’s voice is certainly justified, and pinpointing his daddy issues is certainly a telling line that brings in some good subtext, but the song doesn’t go far enough. It stays too long in the good memories without properly examining how those memories were tainted by hindsight, so the catharsis isn’t really there in the same way it is in Olivia Rodrigo’s material. Plus, the cheap production really lets this song down. It never reaches a proper climax, instead content to wallow in the same dynamic and never getting as intense as Lauren’s otherwise good performance. There’s absolutely potential within this song, but I think it needed more time to be fleshed out instead of rushed to streaming so it could get that sweet sweet virality while the iron’s hot. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Influence hits harder and faster in the social media age. Barely a year after “Driver’s License” Olivia Rodrigo smiles benignly on Lauren Spencer-Smith’s sweetly electronic “Fingers Crossed,” a pained valentine to a boy with daddy issues. In Rodrigo’s songs I hear the attempts to avoid overstatement: the bigger the emotions, the tighter the songs. By contrast “Fingers Crossed” sounds a few thousand bucks away from an awards show ballad. 
[5]

Andy Hutchins: Cross “the unholy spawn of Miley Cyrus and Lewis Capaldi” off the list of things the music industry will try and fail to splice Olivia Rodrigo and/or Billie Eilish with. Would that we could ash the list entirely.
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: When I first heard this, I thought it would be a fantastic break up/put down kill shot by Lauren…. and the ticking guitar and plush synths and lumbering thin drums and the fingers crossed punch line proved me right. The problem though, is that once the punchline is laid across the unlucky bastards eyes, he’s been blinded, and all the high pitched wails laid over Lauren’s static, plasticky voice don’t make it cut through the skull any further. So it’s actually a relief it ends anti-climatically and doesn’t even bother with a bridge and final chorus; it should have been an interlude at best.
[5]

Oliver Maier: A dead ringer for Rodrigo lyrically, most notably in the “fix you/issues/miss you” combo and the way that “when you said you loved me, well you must have had your fingers crossed” is structurally doing the same thing as “you said forever, now I drive alone past your street.” Still, there’s just enough extra depth in the arrangement for “Fingers Crossed” to feel 3-dimensional.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: It’s almost impossible to hear this without imagining a focus group behind it recommending this inflection or that snatch of melody or that turn of phrase because it tested well in the market. Spencer-Smith makes her moves well enough that perhaps it doesn’t matter that none of them are her own. I like how she bites down on words like “daddy issues,” but there’s a curious lack of actual personality to most of her delivery.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: There’s a slight ABBA lilt to the second half of the chorus, but that doesn’t make up for the Colbie Caillat-Katy Perry chimera of everything else.
[2]

Followed by, more befitting of this guy, the Weeknd Night…

[Video][Website]
[6.14]

Rodrigo Pasta: Max Martin working with Swedish House Mafia – not the first time this has happened, and not the first time it yields good results! “Sacrifice” is one of the few songs on dawn FM where Martin is fully behind the boards, and not just serving as an instrumentalist at the command of OPN. The result should be quite plain and predictable. It’s not! The drums have an airy sound that’s refreshing coming from both acts, and the scratchy lead guitar sounds excellent because of the notes that aren’t being played — the riff carries itself mostly by texture. And when SHM show up with their usual house keys, this time with a focus on vintage pianos and gleaming strings in the background, it’s only natural for this song to be excellent! So it’s interesting what they have the Weeknd do: restrict his voice, not in the mix but in his performance, guiding him to deep tones that carry the feeling of wanting to be remembered by the audience. Unfortunately, that backfires: the Weeknd’s vocal tone is what ends up being memorable, not the actual melodies. His ominous tone that leads to his usual nasal singing in the chorus feels enticing, but the main melody just follows the accentuation and chord progression of the instrumental, so the hook doesn’t land; it feels too tied up. To that extent, the main theme of the song (“I sacrifice your love for the night; I love my time”) doesn’t invite a deeper reading of what that entails, only different ways of saying the same thing. The Weeknd loves to suggest, but when it comes to telling a story contained in 3 minutes, he falls flat. He’s too chained to his overarching narrative.
[7]

Joshua Lu: A lot of Dawn FM falls into the same pitfall as this single: It’s well-crafted, has a clear aesthetic, and is delivered with hypnotizing charm, but it doesn’t reach the heights of his biggest hits. “Sacrifice” churns along strongly, but all of its parts sound too familiar, and its pace is too monotonous to truly inspire. Excellent radio fodder and not much more.
[6]

Al Varela: I feel like I say this every other single, but “Sacrifice” is the most Michael Jackson-esque song The Weeknd has ever made. I can trace exactly which Michael Jackson album and song it’s replicating; Thriller and more specifically “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”. This is a good thing! Abel has proven that he can capture the larger-than-life charisma that made Michael’s music so engaging, and “Sacrifice” is one of his tightest pop songs to date. Great wiry groove, big powerful synths, an infectious hook, little adlibs where The Weeknd improvises a little and gives the song its own little charm — it’s great!
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: The Weeknd, like every weird, metallic DeWalt sequence singer of the early 2010s, wound up making decent repeats of our parent’s dance music by the time the 2020s came rolling around. But unlike FKA twigs or Solange or Kelela or even Nao, he got to that point at the middle of the decade and made it the farthest. Unfortunately, he looks the worst for wear among them. He still sounds like a decent Michael Jackson impersonator and not the STARBOY. There are times (“Call Out My Name,” “Moonchild,” “I Feel It Coming,” “Tell Your Friends,” “Blinding Lights’) where his frail voice is imbued with a power that is either blinding, glimmering, piercing or shining bright. But most of the time he just sounds smaller and weaker compared to the swallow-voiced pederast who remade pop music as it still exists today in his very likeness. “Sacrifice” (which I keep wanting to become “I Want To Thank You,” and when it doesn’t I get mad) is well penned and sleekly fits into the Weeknd’s boxes. But it doesn’t blow those boxes up with the power or brightness of his voice, but instead lingers below the squelching guitar and slightly off-beat drums that never buoy the song into the stratosphere it’s trying to reach. Once the song ends, you’re left with a great deal of boredom and disappointment, wondering when the next Paris J*ckson album drops.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The huge distorted riff mitigates my irritation at Abel Tesfaye’s accent, more noxious than the one in “Gasoline,” which at least observes a tradition of non-Englishmen longing to be Phil Oakey. He and Swedish House Mafia have assembled an emo-loose-in-the-city ambience closer to Tobey Maguire in Spider Man 3 instead of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, i.e. who’s the goofball thinking he’ll get laid?
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: The Weeknd once likened his late-night lothario act to The Hills Have Eyes. With Dawn FM he’s on to The Fog, recasting himself as the narcotic voice of the last radio you hear. Once more the moment has been met precisely, in its Liminal Spaces Bot and songs-heard-in-empty-malls fascination. But what exactly has met it? Max Martin and Swedish House Mafia drop some juddering synths and piano chords that hype you up for something that never arrives. Abel intones hollowly like a choirboy who’s staking his whole reputation on staying on pitch, emotes like he’s suiting up for battle, and conjures up a grandstanding “life is worth living” narrative around the same old shit of being free to bang other people. This is past there being no there there; this is the Weeknd suggesting it’s unreasonable to expect any there at all. Yep, that’s the moment all right.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: Last year I worked through a majority of the summer at a liquor store while attending various appointments with psychiatrists and therapists. Living in the general area just outside of Philadelphia, I was greeted every day with a consistent marathon of 105.3 WDAS bombarding me. “Bombarding” not because it was painful to think you might get to hear Aaliyah or Stevie Wonder or Ralph Tresvant or whomever while you work; quite the contrary, that could often make the day much better. What made it worse was the tiring reality of how oppressive radio feels when you don’t have control over your life, your workplace or your listening. And believe me, it was certainly oppressive when the local hero turned notorious serial rapist called into the radio after being freed to sound like a exiled king. Alicia Myers’ “I Want To Thank You” was one of the better jams I’d love to hear and feel like my life was granted respite and reward during the more painful times of struggling to pry my life apart in a serene and conscientious way. Hearing that bit of it submerged in the sterile hellish sound of Weeknd’s “Sacrifice”, complete with Dawn FM’s conceptual nightmare provocations is… well, I get it, Abel. I really do somehow. On a brighter side though, I left that job, so I’m also glad that I don’t have to live in a life like that song for a little while yet.
[4]

It’s the Weeknd Day! (Hm, feels like there’s a shorter way to say that…)

[Video][Website]
[5.75]

Nortey Dowuona: Now that collaborating with Rema and Central See and Headie One is normal and pretty Solange-esque, a formally strange artist collaborating with a more intentional and direct one lends credibility to one and grit to the other. With her new record, CAPRiSONGS, Twigs makes a direct stride toward the mainstream, enlisting playlist fave the Weeknd, who made this same trajectory much sooner. As the bass line is battered by heavy drums and Twigs slides between the piano chords, her voice is liquified into arsenic and sodium and shaken until the melodies solidify. The Weeknd’s stainless-steel voice traps the song before it launches back into the chorus, and Twigs’ startlingly clear-eyed lyrics return at the bridge but are smushed into incomprehensibility, the emotions disappearing with them. Then the song shatters, too slight to carry the feelings within them and yet too heavy to bounce them above it. In Twigs’ earliest work, her fragile, icy voice carried a human tone amid the dangerously sharp edges of her bladed-titanium musical collections. “Tears in the Club,” in its more recognizable format, is instead a cold, impersonal blender of musical styles: one with a name brand, made to chop mangoes and puree ginger, which costs too much for a regular restaurant. It doesn’t feel like any tears were shed, nor like any tear would be if it was played.
[6]

Oliver Maier: Not a novel concept, but more within Twigs’ wheelhouse than most people’s. The Weeknd with his anodyne croon make for an effective foil, Twigs’ hyper-poised emotionalism clanging against his robotic suaveness. This was probably never going to be brilliant and could easily have been tediously competent. I’ll happily settle for very good.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: “Tears in the Club” seems poised to bring Twigs’ music out of the cloud nothings into the corporeal world: Arca bringing the maximalism, the Weeknd bringing sleaze, Cirkut and Ali Tamposi bringing CVs full of Justin Bieber and Ava Max songs. There’s some Y2K R&B to it, as if Tahliah’s flipping two Ashanti tracks at once. But the resulting sound is even more remote, even less there. Maybe the contrast with the pop song Twigs could have made is why this sounds haunting rather than dull, dissociated rather than detached, a gracefully choreographed downward spiral. Even Abel’s verse, while indeed sleazy, doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a real dude but a projection of Twigs’ mind: a phantom duet partner who won’t leave a single thought unaccompanied.
[9]

Rodrigo Pasta: If FKA Twigs wants to go pop, we should let her. She’s got the compositional instinct, and she’s got the contacts to make it work. “Tears in the Club” could be a fine pop tune with some alt-leanings, and everyone on board is quite talented — or a genius, in Arca’s case. The foundation is mostly fine. But since it’s FKA twigs, an Artist who shows us the obscure and the sinister within ourselves (or something like that, I forget how the pitch goes), this can’t “simply” be a pop song. Every element has to sound distorted, glitched up, weird, to reveal to us something deeper… but no, this is just a sad pop song about being sad at a club. We don’t need the squeaky glitches in the drums, the terrible baby-cooing post-chorus, the weird compression in the Weeknd’s otherwise fine verse, the warbly vocal samples all over this for no reason. Once all the mismatched, purposely dissonant voices collide at the end of Twigs’ final verse and the drums fade (“I think of us together!”), does it evoke anything other than gross undertones? Stop playing around pretending to be serious, and have fun for once! Arca gave you a fantastic piano line, and you’re just going to bury it? Smash songwriter Ali Tamposi helped come up with a good melody, and you disservice it by turning the chorus’s final line into warbling nonsense — what, are words too direct? Oh, and it’s mixed like shit, because Serban Ghenea can only mix pop music, and this is not a pop song.
[3]

Micha Cavaseno: Twigs has released so little over so long a period that it’s easy to forget the girl who once seethed at the implication she could be more Janet Jackson than Kate Bush now wears every form of magickal costume like it’s her inherent right. Similarly, many must’ve forgotten that what worked on MAGDALENE weren’t the crossover attempts at mainstream gloom with the likes of Future, but her dressing her melodramas with the voice of one who could finally clutch at having to live. Inexplicably, though, “Tears” works wonders in how she twists her hurt and resentment into angelic purity, while Abel Tesfaye YET AGAIN finds his perfect role as foil of Dangerous Dark Prince against the pure-hearted she-Paladin. (See: “Love Me Harder” yet again, just somehow swap Max Martin for people who are two or three steps removed from Kode9.)
[6]

Leah Isobel: I know that “let it out like therapy” is a great line because it makes my skin crawl. And I don’t even like The Weeknd much, but his persona is so honed, his presence so weighted with meaning, that with one line he can overwhelm Twigs even on a song about how she’s trying not to think about him. He pushes “Tears in the Club” away from catharsis and deeper into the pleasure of heartbreak and longing. But the undercurrents of violence, always present in both her and his music, make that approach a little uneasy in a way that feels all too familiar. I love the graceful arc of the melody and the way the hook peaks on “fucked up”; I don’t love the skin-crawling feeling.
[7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The Weeknd has done better than this half-assed cameo. He and FKA Twigs aim for futuristic dance floor melodrama, but the vibes veer closer to Taylor Swift and Zayn on the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack. 
[5]

Alfred Soto: The experience of clubbing may induce tears later, but no one cries in a club. Stop indulging Abel Tesfaye’s soggy fantasies.
[2]

Mostly [6]s and [7]s… why don’t we just meet you in the middle?

[Video][Website]
[6.50]

Alfred Soto: Responsible for several sharp singles without establishing a persona, Maren Morris returns with an acoustic chugger reliant on how convincing listeners will find the title pun. The town bores her, but she won’t burn it to the ground, not yet. Fear of hellfire may have something to do with it. Or the possibility that she’ll need a fiction of stability.
[6]

Leah Isobel: “Circles Around This Town” reframes ennui as a sign of of grounded relatability. It’s an interesting move. Country music demands authenticity, but all the external signifiers have been co-opted, so Morris builds her myth on an ineffable restlessness. She’s a cowboy in spirit, if not in practice. I like this.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: “Circles Around This Town” is the kind of perfectly fine recreation of elder guitar driven country with enough day-glo gloss of today’s production styles to make it acceptable, but as a song in itself? Rather plain and dull, especially in writing. It’s meant to be an inspirational peppery potion, but it just feels a little too confident, especially since Maren is still in the beginning stage. And the low slung guitar dimmed in the bridge only reminds you that all of this is being played down, drums thundering below her voice keeping the guitar loop and occasional dips of slide guitar and violin in the chorus aloft. The power of Maren’s voice really helps the chorus soar, making the song float and puff up — then the verses slim down and thin out to prepare for the chorus, but instead it saps all the power of the chorus, which could actually prepare you to take on the world. A shame, every time the circle is completed the thin lines break it apart.
[7]

Alex Clifton: The lines “a couple hundred songs and the ones that finally worked / was the one about a car and the one about a church / that I wrote” hit different after the Swift-Albarn songwriting beef this week. It’s a testament to how hard but rewarding it is to make it with your own material in the music industry, especially as a female songwriter. The rest is a cute but rote story about finding success and keeping the grind up, but Morris does a nice job with it.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: This remembrance of Morris’s early days in Nashville trying to make it is a delightful return to the straight-ahead country of her (major label) debut Hero; I love Morris, but wasn’t much of a fan of the more pop-soaked Girl. Imagine my surprise upon realizing that Greg Kurstin was behind the boards on this. Credit to him, a pro if ever there were, but also to the song’s writers, including both Morris and her husband Ryan Hurd, who know their way around a country song. What she’s saying and how she says it are equally important here, and the song’s arrangement is *chef’s kiss*.
[9]

Joshua Lu: Julia Michaels is credited as a songwriter, and it unfortunately shows a little too much; the lyrics are too neat and too squarely set at reaching the titular hook. Even the vocals are holding back, as if the song were designed for Julia — Maren’s voice, so effortlessly powerful, is made for something much more grandiose, and she should’ve been able to make “Circles Around This Town” into a sweeping cry like Maren’s best songs. Instead, though, we’re left with vocals that are weirdly filtered and distance, and the song suffers as a result.
[4]

Remember Katy? She’s back, in dancepop form.

[Video]
[4.40]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A B-Side to “Never Really Over,” both in perspective and in quality. 
[5]

Katie Gill: “You know, I think it’s time to give everybody they want,” Katy Perry says at the start of this music video. Apparently she thinks everybody wants a generic-ass EDM song with her vocals processed to shit and back. It’s a song that desperately tries to be Dua Lipa at certain points when in reality, it’s nothing by Daya. Out of Katy Perry’s three or four big comeback attempts in the past five years, this is easily the most embarrassing.
[3]

Oliver Maier: She has to realise that this sounds more like a bitter reproof to a public that doesn’t really care about her anymore than a kiss-off anthem to an ex? Surely? Both musically and lyrically this feels like an attempt at a “Don’t Start Now” that doesn’t really get it. Few of Katy and Dua’s talents, such as they are, can be said to be mutual.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: Everyone’s gonna say this is dated to Future Nostalgia, but the cut-up vocals and campfire-singalong chorus are dated to a few years before that — so 100 years ago, in 2020s Standard Time. That said, they do sound better now that they aren’t so ubiquitous. And I guess one way to handle Katy Perry’s unique vocal stylings is to cushion every melodic turn with an amount of autotune approaching the Cher Event Horizon.
[6]

Will Adams: A dancepop kiss-off by Katy Perry? Call it “Part II of Me”. While utterly anonymous — you could tell me the billed producer was Tiësto, Joel Corry, 3LAU, R3HAB, anyone, and I’d be like, “mm-hm, sounds right” — it suits Perry, given how it picks and chooses from the various ’10s pop eras she’s lived through. The hook is a vestige of that odd EDM-country trend, the post-chorus leans into Teenage Dream-style syncopation, and Alesso’s beat evokes Calvin Harris’ sleek house period. Extra point for the video being anodyne future-choreo as opposed to ham-fisted empowerment-via-enlistment.
[6]

Alfred Soto: To listen as Katy Goddamn Perry turns into anonymous Eurohouse belter impressed me: better anonymity than the superstar bellowing of aspirational/inspirational maxims. But anonymity has its own demands. Alesso’s rhythm track is colorless, not anonymous. 
[6]

Alex Clifton: I didn’t know I wanted Katy Perry over Eurodance pianos before, and I’m surprised that it’s not happened prior to this. I just wish she had been given a little more material to work with. Dance music isn’t about lyrics, it’s about the sound, so it feels dumb to complain about it, but when you repeat the chorus this many times without much else added in, it comes off as boring. At least it gave Perry a chance to step out of her comfort zone; I’d love to see more of this in the future.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Fitting for Perry, the least talented pop superstar of the past 20 years, to finally succumb to her fate as an anonymous dance-pop singer – and on a track as limp as this one. This is the definition of “just desserts.” Also the definition of terrible.
[0]

Nortey Dowuona: The problem with a singer like Katy Perry is that she’s identifiable yet not memorable. You know when you hear her voice that it’s her, but you’re not particularly interested in what she has to say. Hence why her post Teenage Dream career has been made entirely of other producers and songwriters sliding her some solid B+ material but not anything that has to do with her own point of view or musical style or vocal timbre. This leaves “When I’m Gone” on shaky ground that’s been broken by the flat drums that consist of a dull kick and squashed snare that barely poke their heads above the watery grey goose synths which are removed when the chorus kicks in. Katy’s scratched, thinning voice sounds stronger than it does — until the drums touch down and the song flattens and shrinks away in terror.
[5]

Andrew Karpan: With her last two albums written off as “flops,” Perry has become a walking signifier of yesterday’s pop — figuratively and sometimes literally: If “Dark Horse” didn’t actually knock off a decade-old christian pop dud, then “​​Never Really Over” managed to actually rework an incredibly minor Norwegian pop hit into a pleasing Icona Pop pastiche. “When I’m Gone” doesn’t buck this idea of her so much as try to spin it into gold, a fun workout on a riff from an EDM has-been who once worked in the very shadows of the big pop sound that Perry herself once represented. The lesson? Go harder or go home. Perry could very well have a future as a kind of grand dame of deep house cuts, but needs to dig a little deeper to work it out. Maybe give Major Lazer a call next time?
[4]

Some familiar amapiano names make their return…

[Video]
[6.86]

Crystal Leww: Amapiano continues to gain ground in the global dance scene — with Boiler Room parties in London and Major League Djz featured as part of Apple Music’s latest New Year’s lineup. Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa are two of its fathers, and “Asibe Happy” with Ami Faku is the latest of their looooooooooong history of collaborations. (Seriously, they have six joint albums together.) Apparently, “asibe happy” roughly translates into “let’s be happy,” and it’s a feeling that comes through on this track, with Ami Faku sounding like the sunshine on your face on a summer morning: glowing, simple, kind pleasure.
[6]

Will Adams: I enjoy the way the bass evolves over the song’s seven-and-a-half minutes. It begins as the root of the electric piano chords, deepens to a warm sub-bass synth, morphs into a percussive strike and culminates in a robust throb. It’s the only really dynamic feature of “Asibe Happy”, but when dealing with a genre as reliably gorgeous as amapiano, that’s not the worst thing.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Wishing there was a bit more dynamism here does feel like looking a gift horse in the mouth, since the level it does simmer away at for the duration is very, very good. But even after multiple plays, it does feel like there’s another gear just waiting to be slipped into.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: One of the beauties of the many samplings of amapiano we have covered here are the deep, plush sweep of the piano chords. When I hear them deep into the track as the drums build and build for the first minute of the whole song, it always feels like a relief, a cool refresher into my ears, cooling them down from the heating percussion rumbling against my eardrums. With this, the relief comes from the singer. Ami’s voice, like many singers within the small sampling of amapiano I’ve heard, is soft but largely feathery, Azana one of the few with a stronger tone. But Ami uses her soft tone to dim the buzzy synths pulsing in the background and make their brightness warmth. She is laying back in the lower end of her range, seeming raspy and thin, which, as she slides into a brighter, smoother tone in the chorus, circles the piano warily, well aware of its possible warmth but it’s probable potential to burn you alive. And every time Ami retreats, the mix becomes brighter and shinier, more and more a frightening red color that dims to a cozy one as Ami returns. Both Kabza de Small and DJ Maphoriza have built a standard (if there is such a thing) amapiano track, with three plush piano chords, lumpy and jolting synth bass stabs during the chorus and post chorus, and the percussion so bright it might blind you — but here goes da da, da da and ur becomes visible and calming, a warming fire instead of an unsteady blaze.
[10]

Katherine St Asaph: While I’m on the topic of hypothetical ’00s dance compilations, “Asibe Happy” could be off another one, something with a saturated sunrise on the cover and Ibiza somewhere in the title, sequenced between Cathy Battistessa and Nicola Hitchcock. I instinctively love this sound too, and it isn’t even embarrassing!
[9]

Alfred Soto: I love shakers and minor key synth melodies — especially with a dynamic vocal.
[4]

Oliver Maier: Too deft to leave a real impression, despite the ambitious runtime. I wish it really went for it in the way that the house bass portends, but undeniably pretty pleasant for what it is.
[6]

Read 25/1/22

[Video]
[6.50]

Andrew Karpan: To reach today’s zoomers, SZA has compressed her mission statement into the form of a question, followed by its only possible answer, a sort of mailably melodramatic performance that can be twisted and turned around. Like Prince records — an influence SZA consistently nods at without slavishly reinterpreting — this is the kind of R&B showmanship that nobody can learn anything from because it’s all tone and style, which she can convincingly vamp with ease. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: I imagined Jazmine Sullivan singing this — no difficulty. Her producers would eschew the way the arrangement insists on irony: background vocals pitched at a different key, the enthusiastic “fuck you!” response. SZA can of course sell sincerity too, hence my suspicion that the neither-here-nor-there performance is for a demo sold as a finished track.
[6]

Oliver Maier: So half-hearted and obviously beneath SZA’s calibre as both a lyricist and writer of melodies that I’m not entirely convinced someone at TDE didn’t just dust off the Ctrl USB stick and upload whichever demo sounded the most like TikTok catnip.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: The beat uses a lagoon’s worth of reverb to sound more sumptuous than it otherwise would. And I mean, the trick usually works. The track just ends up a little muddled, as does a lyric that doesn’t seem sure whether it’s angry or sad.
[6]

Al Varela: During the holidays, my dad and I were watching a video from Rick Beato where he listened to the Top 10 on Spotify, and my dad laughed when he read out loud the title of this song. I guess I never really thought about how strange it is for a popular song to be called “I Hate U” until then. The content is certainly as venomous and spiteful as the title was. Describing all the ways this ex sucked, not letting anything back, and disillusioning him of any chance that they will get back together. I think the production is what I love most about this song though because it’s a song that sounds hateful and fed up. Sluggish, but keeping a murky, bassy tempo where every other bar feels like a stomach drop. The synth that carries the melody is just flighty enough to show some playfulness, but the texture is still rough and bitter. SZA plays along with this beat so perfectly too, that even a song this ugly and unpleasant can still sound gorgeous. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: If anyone wanted to know if I like this too… I doooooo.
[8]

Tobi Tella: Nowhere near the deepest thing she’s ever written, but may be up there for the catchiest. If I was grading on a scale of how much I relate to the toxicity exhibited or the intensity with which I sing “Fuck youuuu,” this would be a [10].
[6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
[7]