Missed opportunity for an “Electric Boogaloo” reference…

[Video]
[4.86]

Vikram Joseph: For all the discourse about “Lightning I, II” sounding like old-school Arcade Fire, no one is talking about how much the glossy space-opera of Part 1 sounds like stadium-era Coldplay, if we’re being kind, or Angels & Airwaves if we are not. This is not an entirely unpleasant thing, but let’s not pretend it’s not far closer to Reflektor than to the fevered intensity of the band that made Funeral, or even the more bloated ardour of Neon Bible. Part 2 lights a sizeable and very welcome flame under its arse — squint a little and maybe it’s “Month Of May”, if not quite “Power Out” — but even then it’s the virtuoso drum fills that steal the show rather than the actual songcraft, which batters away with great effort but little precision. Grand universal sentiment about perseverance, redemption and, uh, lightning are fine if you can be convinced that there’s something more acute that lies beneath them; at their best, Arcade Fire understood that.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Where once Arcade Fire emulated the panting momentum of Springsteen, now they choke on The Killers’ polyurethane. 
[2]

Ian Mathers: I mean, it sounds great (especially on headphones), but it risks turning into a “great gowns, beautiful gowns” kind of sounding great. Did they always sound this much like the Killers? Just imagine the meal Brandon Flowers would make of this thing. Great catharsis, beautiful catharsis.
[6]

Alex Clifton: I would like part I of this a lot more if it were the Killers. It feels like Arcade Fire is aiming for that level of grandiosity. It’s not like that’s new for them, but the main difference is that Brandon Flowers has a manic, kinetic energy he’s been able to maintain for fifteen years. Win Butler just doesn’t have the same charisma as a frontman, so the first half of this flags before the second half picks up the pace. “Lightning I, II” is miles better than anything from Everything Now, although that’s not a high bar in the first place, both conceptually and musically. Still, I hesitate to see how this matches up with material from their heyday of The Suburbs and Reflektor. Arcade Fire can go big and make things fun and theatrical, but this feels more like going to a fireworks show that’s promised to be half an hour and instead it’s just five minutes of half-hearted bangs. It’s certainly more exciting than most other things happening, but compared with the show you expect, it ends up disappointing.
[5]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Strings strain in a way that sounds almost pastoral deep in the mix of “I”, feeling as if they’re being pushed to the point of breaking. When that break comes, I feel brought back to the first time I ever wrote a music review, listening to The Suburbs without ever having heard of Arcade Fire, much less their status in the indie pantheon of the time. I just filtered it through the music I had heard, stumbling in a childlike way to make them fit into the neat boxes of my dad’s cd collection. I loved that album, and I really did love its follow-up, as overwrought as it was. But this isn’t about the feelings Arcade Fire are finally bringing back in me; it’s about this one specific single, which, while bogged down in production choices that I now find overly sentimental, still harnesses the tension of its disparate elements to explode in “II”. I find it just slightly too disconnected to be perfect, but it still hearkens back to what made me love this band in the first place.
[7]

Andrew Karpan: Maybe every Arcade Fire song sounds like this. A promise, held together by incandescent chanting, speaking in a logic is beyond language and cast by a frighteningly oblique figure, crossed always precisely between an early 19th century revivalist preacher and the labels’ latest New Springsteen. For the stans, this is a comforting step backward, to the songs they used to know and sing out loud while driving to high school. But this is not to say that the hardest vamping man in blog rock doesn’t have anywhere to go himself: a nice guitar solo lifts the second half of the song; demarcated neatly, as if the record were something authored by Max Fischer or maybe Colin Meloy. But even more familiar faces await: “Jesus Christ was an only son,” Win Butler later testifies, a pleasing reference to both himself and another christlike figure in indie rock, Isaac Brock.
[5]

Ady Thapliyal: I have affection for Montreal indie pop and the broader 2000s New Sincerity intellectual moment it was part of, but “Lightning” dramatizes the dead-end those sensibilities have found themselves in post-vibe shift. In other words: the track is well made but could have been made ten years ago. 
[4]

Apparent magnitude, to two decimal places…

[Video][Website]
[5.50]

Ady Thapliyal: “Starlight” has the TikTok tendency to marinate in one vibe when it would have been better served by a contrast of emotion, but I guess I can’t dislike a song that is two degrees of separation from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: It’s hard to tell if Dave’s being a wife guy or not by the second half of the song, but his flow bounces enough with “Fly Me to the Moon” to make me not care. The production is just busy enough. Any denser and it wouldn’t float.
[8]

Ian Mathers: At any given moment here, until he pulls back and lets the “Fly Me to the Moon” interpolation that started off “Starlight” backwards unspool forwards at the end, Dave manages to hold the camera pretty effortlessly. But there’s a bit where he repeats a bunch of lines and it feels weird — there really isn’t a chorus and this generally works better as one unspooling narrative instead of trying to force one in there.
[6]

Oliver Maier: The beat is cute but it doesn’t really gel with anything Dave is on about — as usual his rapping is sturdy but uninspiring. A glorified freestyle with none of the spontaneous energy.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: I guess it’s clever that you can use a great sample, hope that’s the bit that gets picked up when people are flicking between stations or social media feeds, and get your biggest hit. But Dave’s both boring and bored here, barely making an effort. Workmanlike rhymes and flow never sounded so bleak in the context of what they’re trying to achieve. 
[4]

Alfred Soto: With his occasionally humdrum self-produced beats and terse sincerity, Dave reminds me of J. Cole, albeit with more to say. He’s entered the self-conscious phase of his career when fame-what’s-your-name quashes more worthwhile subjects. History suggests it’s a passing phase. 
[6]

Do you like scary pop songs?

[Video]
[5.00]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: If this is haunted by anything, it’s Underwood’s past crossover success. While it’s not exactly bland, “Ghost Story” feels produced to fit in on any radio format. A friend described it as Underwood’s “Wildest Dreams,” which feels apt: It’s a piece of lost relationship poetry that’s inoffensive but largely forgettable. 
[5]

Stephen Eisermann: A definite earworm, even if the catchiest part is also the cringiest (“haunting” and “wanting”? Oof). I’m pretty frustrated, though, that this is what Carrie is giving us when her voice appears to be at its prime. Her radio reign is seemingly over, so why release something that so clearly sounds like an attempt to go back to the top? Why not finally release the more engaging, if less radio-friendly, music she has proven she is so capable of (“Choctaw County Affair,” “Someday When I Stop Loving You”)? This is just good, but she’s way past giving us “just good.”
[5]

Al Varela: Listening to this made me realize I’m just not really a fan of Carrie Underwood. Her voice is certainly one of a kind, but I feel like she’s never evolved past her usual brand of big pop-country power ballads. Yet, when I look back at her older singles, even if she still resided in that area, there was more of a bite or power to those songs that really sold her as a force to be reckoned with. “Ghost Story,” by comparison, is toothless. The production is mediocrity coughed up by a radio-friendly machine, the writing isn’t especially creative or sinister, and saying Carrie sounds good on it feels more like a formality rather than an honest compliment. Part of me thinks I’ve just grown past her brand of pop-country, but I also think by her own standards this just kinda sucks. 
[4]

Leah Isobel: It kind of rocks how “Ghost Story” wraps a deeply vengeful conceit within the frame of a power ballad; Carrie makes these lyrics sound like she’s cursing the dude in the very act of singing them. Still, the bombastic chorus underwhelms after the hushed, twinkling intimacy of the verses.
[6]

Ian Mathers: A good example of how a strong melody and a stirring performance can make some fairly nothing lyrics not as big a problem as they’d be in a lesser song.
[7]

Vikram Joseph: There’s a moment in the chorus where the full force of the expensive country-pop production convinces you this could be a decent Fearless outtake. Unfortunately, it’s the high water mark of a song that’s melodically undercooked, lyrically juvenile and — I cannot think of a better way to say this — just annoyingly plinky.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Confident her strangled wail can redeem feeble conceits, Carrie Underwood is at her most commanding, maybe even diva-esque. I don’t for a moment believe, for example, she has the patience to haunt a man’s dreams, no matter how cute.
[6]

Ady Thapliyal: A depressingly literal take on “ghosting,” without any countryfied wit. IMO she got eaten up by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
[3]

[2]-[6]-[4]-[9]-[3]; [1] is less high, too…

[Video][Website]
[4.17]

Claire Biddles: Between the twee Sandi Thom-core aesthetics and the numb-on-antidepressants message, there’s no way this isn’t a Scientology anti-psychiatry psy-op for the TikTok teens.
[2]

Ady Thapliyal: What “Happy Little Pill” was to Tumblr, this is to TikTok. Credit to Beihold for good hooks and simple lyrics that don’t affect an angsty poetic tone (Troye’s downfall); negative points for an anonymous vocal performance and production that’s a worse retread of “Groundhog Day.”
[6]

Ian Mathers: I can’t really put my finger on a specific-enough articulation of why, but this song keeps making me think of all those candle reviews that started showing up in early 2020 complaining that the candles were no longer scented.
[4]

Al Varela: I think I’ve gotten so used to Gen Z’s usual snarky, ironic, self-deprecating way of talking about mental health that I’m genuinely thrown off when a song on the subject is completely honest and vulnerable. There’s still a trace of irony, mainly in the upbeat piano instrumental and catchy hook, but Em Beihold delivers the song with the straight-faced, exasperated sigh of someone who just wants to be told what she’s feeling is normal. It’s the weird middle ground between depression and happiness where you have no strong feelings one way or the other, yet still have the desire to feel more. Obviously, the song is about depression, and it describes it in such a blunt and honest way that it doesn’t really need much else to reach the listener. Just the experience of being unhappy but not to extremes is so simple, relatable, yet really intense and personal. It’s made this song stick out as a fantastic depiction of depression and the struggle of managing it, even when you’re on medication. It didn’t need to put up its guard or deflect feelings in order to ask for help, and that’s the bravest thing about it.
[9]

Alex Clifton: Do you ever feel… like a plastic bag…
[3]

Oliver Maier: I really, sincerely hate the wave of pop songs that sound like this, sterile and frictionless and filled with these stupid little twee flourishes, flinging coherence aside in their desperation not to slip off your attention span. A miserable litany of bad hooks (one of which is surely just Mumford and Sons) and bad lyrics (“about mental health” in the most vacant way imaginable).
[1]

At long last: Nadine 3.0…

[Video]
[4.56]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Why release this on March 11 when pi day was just three days away? Let’s call it a metaphor for everything about this collab feeling just a little bit off the mark. 
[4]

Alex Clifton: I’m thoroughly annoyed because both Megan and Dua have much better songs about sex that stick in the mind far more than this one. It’s not terrible, but both have set their standards so high that it feels really rote in comparison. Having said that, I’ll give “Sweetest Pie” an extra point because the video is fun/demonic (a combination we need to see more often).
[5]

Andrew Karpan: In what might be most outré record in both of their careers so far — more so even than the Seussian jungle gym of “WAP” — the debut pairing of Megan Thee Stallion with Dua Lipa takes place in a disco haunted by desire, a deep abyss held inside a rubber band-Nile Rogers dress-up that recalls the land of hit Lipa songs like “Physical” and “Levitating.” (The Canadian producer Koz appears to be the big link between the two.) Inside this club at the end of the world, the pair lure wayward men with promises of love scavenged from remembered betrayals. “Don’t be goin’ through my phone ’cause that’s the old me,” Stallion warns. This is the promise of renewal, deferred like dreams. Like a dream, the sweetest pie is the one on the ledge; untouched, heat wafting into the air forever. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: You know, I love pie but by the end here I was beginning to suspect this song is not actually about pie at all! Unlike that Pop Smoke song Dua Lipa is perfectly adequate here on the hook. It’s hard not to wish there was a lot more Megan, though, and that chorus feels looooong.
[5]

Ady Thapliyal: Megan Thee Stallion is trying to reverse-manufacture a pop crossover here from the hottest trends in Top 40 radio, a departure from her usual strategy of making pop radio accept her TikTok-fueled hits without concession. I hope she changes course.
[3]

Stephen Eisermann: Both Megan and Dua are too good, individually, for this track. Together? It’s an insult to them and fans alike. How did nobody on their team point out how beneath them this is? Dua sounds disinterested and even Megan, who is rarely off, sounds like she isn’t really giving it her all. The flow is weird, the vibe is off, and there really is nothing left to say. Maybe it’s better we don’t have our powerhouses team up.
[3]

Claire Biddles: The definition of middling — doesn’t play to either of their strengths, so ends up as a non-committal version of a song that neither can elevate. 
[4]

Leah Isobel: I’m on record as an enjoyer of both of these artists so I want to like this more than I do. There’s a strong first draft energy – the mixing is bizarre, the double chorus wears out a bit on its repeats, and the metaphor feels a little one-dimensional. Like, I think “Bon Appetit” is an underrated Katy Perry single, so I’m not opposed to a sex-as-food metaphor, but this lacks flavor.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Solid + adequate = 3.14
[5]

Arson is the slamming screen door, sneakin’ out late, tapping on your window…

[Video]
[3.57]

Andrew Karpan: It’s no understatement to say the peculiar fantasy of Mimi Webb’s biggest hit so far haunts the psyche. West End Caleb. Jacob Elordi’s turn as Nate in “Euphoria.” Somebody should really do something to these dudes, and Mimi Webb has an answer that’s allegedly informed by getting right under the line of the burden of proof needed by your local prosecutor’s office. 
[4]

Will Adams: An electropop “Sunny Came Home”, eh? Sure, I’ll take it. but at least Shawn Colvin didn’t conspire with cops.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Opening a light meme-bait pop song with a line about making friends with the police? In 2022?
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: “Before He Cheats,” minus the country, plus a higher class of felony. Also a little bit of “Call Your Girlfriend” and “I Love It,” in how Mimi Webb and producer Cirkut summon SURGING POP ANTHEMRY! in hopes that the resultant dopamine flood will make listeners forgive the narrator’s crappy behavior. But while they do bring the loudness, they don’t bring the emotional stakes. Not once does Webb’s performance feel fully, viciously engaged with either the heartbreak or the crime.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Well, that’s two “on fire” songs in a row here where it feels like there’s a weird tonal mismatch, like there’s no real heat to them. There it was a minor problem; here it’s a major one. If you’re not going to go for intensity to match the text, then your relative restraint still has to give us something — to be imperially icy, or sharply disdainful, or even stunned into blankness. “House On Fire” just feels like someone acting the way they think they ought to act.
[3]

Ady Thapliyal: The pop singer Carly Smithson, then known as Carly Hennessy, was unceremoniously dropped from her deal with MCA Records after just one push. One (pretty good) single, one promotional campaign, one debut album, and that’s it. Her story became one of the definitive snapshots of the dysfunctional 2000s-era music business, just as Mimi Webb’s will be one of the 2020s. Today’s media landscape rewards a firehose-like release schedule, so Webb, backed by Epic Records, has blasted us with single after underperforming single. As for the music, I can honestly say that “House On Fire” captures the feeling of being endlessly doused by Big Content’s water cannon.
[0]

Alfred Soto: After a scrumptious opening synth squiggle, “House on Fire” settles into benign post-Lorde anonymity mitigated by a conceit that Mimi Webb may or may not mean. If she sets the house on fire, no wonder she made friends with the cops.
[5]

It was a face that didn’t have a care in the world…

[Video][Website]
[2.86]

Andrew Karpan: Okay, the magazine profile writes itself: facing the pressure of following-up their 6× platinum-hit single, the last rock band in America had one answer: “What, Me Worry?”
[2]

Tim de Reuse: The acoustic guitar-strummed interlude, violin flourishes, growling brass stabs, and chunky backbeat all serve to distract you from the fact that you’re listening to a song that rhymes “running through my head” with “should’ve said;” a song that celebrates how little it has to say about any of the subjects it brings up; a song where a 40-year old dude from Alaska falsetto-chirps “I ain’t even trippin’” six times.
[2]

Will Adams: Because we all know the best route to an incisive commentary on our current existential malaise is to invoke Alfred E. Neuman.
[3]

Alex Clifton: We sure do live in a society, huh?
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I was gonna become the Joker, until this song made becoming the Joker sound so goddamn boring.
[4]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: I would’ve enjoyed this more if I hadn’t heard it 20 times since 2005. 
[4]

Ady Thapliyal: You have to respect any band that managed to climb out the wreckage of Landfill Indie and still have a career, let alone a major label deal with Atlantic Records. No, this song is not good, but they’ve earned these two points. 
[2]

Doubly negative…

[Video][Website]
[2.89]

Jeffrey Brister: I LOVED Michael Bublé in high school. His voice has a natural flair for the theatrical, and he could back that up with prodigious ability (his cover of “Feeling Good” made me lose my shit, just a perfect encapsulation of his appeal). I was a goofy kid with a flair for the dramatic and loved crooning, how could I not fall head over heels? So, with that in mind, I’ll say I hate this. Not even because it’s particularly bad — a bland love song with a bland vocal performance, set against a bland arrangement that ends before it can offend. But I just can’t get past that it’s him doing the singing, this guy that I idolized for a short period in my late teens. I just listen and feel sad. I want vocal acrobatics, crooning, not this. I’m going to forget this song exists now.
[1]

Oliver Maier: I’m aware that Michael Bublé has a prolific career of non-Christmas songs but trying to engage with any of them feels disingenuous. Let’s stop kidding ourselves. If this had some sleigh bells and a few lines about mistletoe it would at least serve a purpose.
[1]

Edward Okulicz: At his “best,” Bublé has a voice that is a big fluffy cloud of emotional comfort. You are loved by his voice! You will love it, and him, back! But I think maybe he’s farmed out the job of making records to an impersonator, because this doesn’t have that effect — it’s neither cloying, nor warming. In fact, this is a voice with no character whatsoever, singing a song with no character whatsoever. And I’m not a fan, but that’s not Michael Bublé!
[4]

Ian Mathers: Wasn’t the whole point of ol’ Bubbly his voice? So why does it sound so awful here? He sounds like he’s got a digital cold, or like he’s trying to voicetune his way out of a hangover. The content is… fine, you kind of know how florid it’s going to be from the title. If anything it’s at least trying to justify why such a protestation is necessary by spending significant time on how she’s really not into him the way he’s into her, but by the time we get “But if you give me more time I swear you’ll see the light” it kind of just feels like he should back. If you love someone let them go and all that.
[4]

Will Adams: The trance-y pulse is good, but it’s the only sign of life here. For someone ostensibly known for his voice, Bublé sounds flattened, over-processed and completely unaware that the title is meant to be somewhat humorous. I’ll never not forget this song the second it ends.
[4]

Ady Thapliyal: I swear on the spirit of Kworb that I tried to check my biases about Bublé at the door and give this a good, honest listen — but basically any male vocalist could have improved upon Bublé’s bloodless performance. Can you imagine if Cody Johnson covered this song? 10x diamond, international smash. 
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: Only a “mouth” and a “couch” away from being an Ed Sheeran cast-off for a reformed boyband; the studied blandness is jarring. While Bublé is known for making inoffensive music, “I’ll Never Not Love You” sands down anything resembling an edge, and that includes his trademark tone. Such a choppy, changeless tune could be held by even a weak singer no more forgettably — this seems a waste of a good one.
[4]

Alfred Soto: I don’t understand insolent comparisons to oatmeal. Oatmeal is nutritious! Warm! Maybe these people cast aspersions on oatmeal’s porousness, its absorptive virtues: add whatever you want, etc. Michael Bublé isn’t oatmeal — nobody has poured anything into him. He remains a crooner who loves the pop more than he has the imagination to understand the songs he sings and the pipes that would render these hesitations moot. “I’ll Never Not Love You” represents another Bublélicious attempt to embrace the legacy of Corey Hart and Richard Marx — without Marx’s sardonic Twitter presence.
[3]

Alex Clifton: I’ve got a soft spot for Michael Bublé’s voice, but I think this song did it way better.
[3]

No doubt coming to a wedding, graduation or funeral near you (if it hasn’t already).

[Video][Website]
[5.88]

Al Varela: Last summer I found myself at a Cody Johnson concert, and he previewed a lot of songs that were coming up on his soon-to-be-released double album, Human. All of them sounded great, with Cody Johnson being a magnetic performer, but the one that stood out to me the most was this one. It’s a galloping, anthemic song about seizing the chances you’re given and making the most of every day because one day, it’ll all be gone and left to be a memory. Cody Johnson’s incredible performance was so inspiring, it made me hang on to every word and reflect on how often taking a chance led to some of my happiest memories. Especially towards the end of the song, when Cody Johnson’s energy was on fire and the guitar was letting loose, crowds cheering and jumping to his music, I thought to myself, “Man, how has this man not managed to get a massive hit song yet?” A Few months later and this very song became one of the biggest country songs of the year. Funny how life works.
[9]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: This leans more anthem than ballad, causing a bit of cognitive dissonance between some palindromic and trite lyrics that read much sadder than they’re sung. The instrumentation is impeccable, but it just doesn’t fit for me. 
[5]

Oliver Maier: The verses are sweet and understated, and make Johnson’s point clear without being heavy handed. The hook, of course, can’t help nuking that.
[4]

Ian Mathers: Cody, buddy…. I can’t.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: Solid “Live Like You Were Dying”-esque country, solidly sung and well produced. I wish Trent Willmon’s production had a little more Texas grit on it, but considering the state of radio country in 2022, I’ll take what I can get.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Absurd lyrical strategy. Substitute any conceit and it works: “You can always bake alligator meat/Til ya can’t.” But Cody Johnson’s sexy burr almost sells them — til it can’t.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: A “Live Like You Were Dying” with the mortality scaled down a notch, and with the addition of a full-bore sprint in the spirit of #fomo making it enough of its own thing. Cynically, the combination means it could be the soundtrack to enjoying life or ruing missed opportunities, or celebrating what you have or missing who you’ve lost, and as such the corny lyrics means it lacks the bite of specificity in the aim of some kind of UNIVERSAL FEELING. But damn, this has some charm, and damn, it works.
[8]

Ady Thapliyal: Cody Johnson wants to make the EMOTION of ’90s pop country, so he assembled a crack team of Nashville hitmakers to guide the sound of his second major label album, Human. That album’s lead single, “‘Til You Can’t,” basically stretches a country skin over the frame of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” with added flourishes of classic rock guitar to broaden the nostalgic feel across multiple generations. The single sounds like it would cross over to pop radio twenty years ago, so all I can say is that Johnson’s conceptual gambit has succeeded. 
[7]

Becky G’s biggest hit yet — but how do we feel about it?

[Video]
[4.50]

Alfred Soto: I like the leisure with which the song eases into its reggaeton rhythm, from which the singers also take their cues. Perhaps they intended their diss to come across as insouciantly as possible: not reflexive so much as practiced, a diss by women who’ve endured shit.
[6]

Stephen Eisermann: Like so many collaborations that stans salivate over, this left a lot to be desired. I’ve always been a big fan of (and very forgiving of) Becky G’s… more unique flow, but here it feels even more unhinged, and not always in the best way (1-800-jódete). Karol G feels more comfortable on the beat, but even then this feels like two femmes fatales taking the stage for an encore, after spending the entire evening getting crossfaded. It’s more mellow than expected and by the end you can hear them literally walking off the stage ready to exit the building. 
[5]

Ady Thapliyal: This song has nothing going for it. The two Gs have no chemistry, the beat feels underproduced, the lyrics are boring, and the groove isn’t danceable. Payola has a tight grip on Latin Pop radio, however, so congrats you two for your #1. 
[0]

Ian Mathers: It’s genuinely hard to know what to score a song that is perfectly enjoyable when it’s on but that basically erases itself from your memory when its over (my regrettable monolingualism may be part of the problem, yes). Call this the gentleman’s 5, then.
[5]

Thomas Inskeep: Simple, poppy reggaeton with a little personality but not enough action.
[5]

Oliver Maier: A worthy addition to the vast pantheon of very nice reggaeton songs that I’ll probably never listen to again. Maybe someday I’ll be tired of this drum pattern at least.
[6]