We conclude Country/Folk Thursday with the top song of the year, and current bottom song of the year for us…

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[3.06]

Taylor Alatorre: User: “Please compose a paragraph-length song review, otherwise known as a ‘blurb,’ for a collaborative music writing website called The Singles Jukebox. The song in question is ‘Last Night’ by Morgan Wallen, who was an established star prior to your January 2022 cutoff but has since leapt into superstardom. Your blurb should briefly reflect on this rise on popularity before moving on to discuss the song itself, noting its subject matter of a drunken tryst within a troubled relationship, set to the backdrop of a repeated acoustic riff and soon accompanied by percussive hip hop-style snapping that heralds the apotheosis of the early 2010s ‘bro-country’ style. The next part of the review should be a joke about the large number of songwriters on Wallen’s albums, and how the predictability of these assembly-line productions is reminiscent of the uncanny, routinized output of language models such as ChatGPT. Please try to avoid making the joke a hackneyed or trite one, though I recognize the difficulty of this. Finally, end the blurb with a more positive couple of sentences that justify the decision to avoid giving the song an aggressively low numerical rating — perhaps praising it for not imposing itself on the listener or taking up too much of their time, or for creating a sonic atmosphere that somewhat evokes the feelings it’s describing. The overall tone of the blurb should be jocular, yet insightful.” [ There was an error generating a response ]
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: There’s a reason that discourse about the musical dimensions of the longest running Billboard #1 doesn’t exist: outside of its noxious role in today’s culture wars, “Last Night” is utterly boring. 
[3]

Will Adams: Really sums up the dire state of this year’s Billboard chart that of the spate of country #1s we saw, perhaps the least odious was a song by Morgan Wallen. “Last Night” hits the marks of your standard crossover via a slick production, but it hovers. We’re left anticipating a Zedd-esque drop that never arrives.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: This song was huge, and I probably didn’t need to hear it again but in the interest of critical integrity I did. And then it kept playing the album, and I was horrified that it all sounded well-crafted — except that each song has a bit that sounds like it was left blank for a committee to insert a gratuitous reference to booze. “Last Night” at least makes sense. I know he’s a dick, but dicks sometimes make passable art.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I try not to let past biases or other factors cut me off from music, especially what’s popular, because engaging with that stuff is always interesting even when I don’t like it. But if the price of never having to listen to the likes of this dude again is never quite understanding the genre that was incredibly popular in my hometown when I was growing up and I hated, and if he seems like a huge piece of shit too? Fuck it, I’ll take that deal. I hate “I like everything but rap and country” BS the same as most here, but if we all get our own little niches to be personally reactionary about, this particular flavour of bro-country is mine.
[0]

Frank Falisi: What exactly is a “Morgan Wallen?? An $80 haircut that smells like brand tie-in whiskey, which is to say, paint thinner? A law firm that represents boring pop country songs? (“The song in question didn’t know any better, your honor, and its love of Jason Mraz clearly speaks to its high moral character.”) An “Alan Smithee” pseudonym Nashville songwriters credit to projects they’d rather disown? Say what you will about the tenets of Billy Ray Cyrus, at least his pop’s got the beef. The disemboweled “Last Night” sounds like at least three instruments have been removed from the mix, like the chorus went unfinished but not in an interesting Roy Orbison aria way. It suggests the purest calcification of Nashville cultural aesthetic as the dominant songwriting engine of country songs. “Last Night” is a country song a la la croix: essence and static, wisps of myths, handclaps so you don’t forget to. It doesn’t ever start, so it never feels like it ends. You can’t just say you’re singing about desire. You have to actually sing it. Doesn’t a song about kissing need to have a body?
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: “Last night we let the liquor talk — I can’t remember everything we said, but we said it all.” So you can remember it, then. What exactly did you say? As Sam Sodomsky wrote in Pitchfork, Morgan Wallen’s music now has the double task of functioning as love songs or drunk songs or whatever, while alluding as vaguely as possible to the real-life events (i.e., getting filmed saying racial slurs) that he knows he’s being forgiven for. Did the songwriters have that in mind? Probably not; nothing about “Last Night” has the specificity to be meant for any particular singer. Does the subtext loom? Yes, and hard; that’s probably part of why this went No. 1. But a larger part is surely “Last Night”‘s routine politeness. I miss when bro-country sounded bro-y. And when I didn’t think I’d ever write the words “the enduring influence of Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite.”
[2]

Leah Isobel: “You know you love to fight / And I say shit I don’t mean” is really the whole story here, huh? It would be interesting if Morgan took the position of an unreliable narrator — if that line was meant to come across as an insecure projection — but the way he flips the title around to land precisely on the tonic indicates to me that, no, he’s supposed to come across as a clear-eyed truth teller. And the truth he’s telling is one shared by many: that men always deserve context and understanding; that women are always crazy; that entrenched power differentials are natural and good. Why else would he be so popular?
[3]

Brad Shoup: This is dirtbag music in the worst possible sense. It’s nearly three minutes of someone being hunted for sport. Like the townspeople of Wake in Fright, Wallen cultivates a boozy grayness wherein only he can draw out black and white. His would-be ex’s friends send her back; her calls never reach her mother; her truck never makes it out of his driveway. It feels like horror-movie shit. Country usually deals with these situations wryly or with regret. He’s just smug: a drunken master of sex and debate. The only time he cracks is when he barks “I know you packed your shit“: an ominous sneer. Otherwise, Wallen is flat, just bobbing along the mud-brown production, a mush of perfunctory snaps and guitar. Out of everything on One Thing at a Time, this song feels legitimately evil.
[0]

Alfred Soto: The Morgan Wallen Problem wouldn’t exist if he wasn’t a rather ruthless chronicler of his own dissipation. Let’s face it: just about all of the (many, many) songs on his last two albums depict embarrassments, whether it’s saying the wrong thing to a woman or picking unnecessary fights, but all for the sake of another shot. The songs would be as sodden as him if the negotiation between programmed beats and hot country band weren’t so careful. The guitar twang of “Last Night” complements his Bert-of-Sesame-Street gnarl, and as a result I’ve no problem with this mega-hit sharing space with a similar Zach Bryan tune — only Bryan isn’t as good a collaborator. 
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: A love song to alcohol and spite with an incidental romantic relationship tacked on for cover. Just imagine how exhausting it must be to be be friends with either of these people.
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I have not categorically ruled out the possibility of enjoying Morgan Wallen — I liked “7 Summers” a lot! But this is dire. What was once a crowd-pleasing lack of specificity in his work has become complete blankness, the four writers here managing to include no relevant details about any aspect of what they’re writing about. “Last Night” is one of those songs that’s a massive hit by any standards but has inspired essentially no worthy critical appraisal, a piece of pop dark matter looming in the background of the culture, too boring to analyze. Every line, every production choice, every aching honk in Wallen’s voice is a Potemkin village.
[2]

David Moore: I’ve gone the whole year without knowingly hearing this song. It’s fascinating — the unholy endpoint of Lil Nas X and Taylor Swift’s shadow transformation of modern country’s sound (hypnotic go-nowhere rhythmic twang, clumsy rap cadence, restriction of vocal range to three to five inceessantly repeated notes, markedly reduced distance between verse and chorus) as interpreted, not unfaithfully, by some racist C.H.U.D.
[3]

Harlan Talib Ockey: What if Maroon 5 went country?
[1]

Jonathan Bradley: Wallen structures “Last Night” like a rap song, his wandering guitar figure looping back on itself like the Red Hot Chili Peppers sample that Crazy Town used on “Butterfly.” There’s also some rap cadence in how he delivers his lyric, which country singers like Sam Hunt have proven can be effective for this storytelling genre, but here it reveals the weakness in Wallen’s narrative. He just doesn’t have a lot to say, and what he does have to say isn’t very inspired. Wallen let the liquor talk, he can’t remember everything he said, he said shit he don’t mean (yikes, maybe this isn’t a subject you want to bring up, dude). The anger and angst in his voice as he growls “you packed your shit and slammed the door” is the rare moment where it sounds like he might be referring to a specific event rather than a generic couple’s fight, and “you call your mama and I call your bluff” is a good-enough bit of wordplay. But for the most part, this is a sub-three minute song that returns to its bland hooks too often.
[4]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: As much as I want to find the repetition annoying, and as intolerable as the keyboard affectation of the looping acoustic becomes, I can’t deny I enjoy this. There were undoubtedly some truly awful high school talent show covers of this around my hometown last spring, but I might have joined in on them twelve (TWELVE?!) years ago. It’s the persistent singability of the melody coupled with the tragic human affection for patterns. This is what Heat Waves did to me all over again. 
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I’m afraid this sounds too much like the first song I learned on guitar — City and Colour’s “Hello, I’m In Delaware” — to truly hate. I just wish Wallen didn’t add the stock drum track; the song is propulsive enough in both its gliding melodies and self-impressed vitriol. He sings with a smirk, well aware that he’s getting away with every empty word, and it’s catchy enough that you know people will join in. Someone should probably **** him.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Fuck Morgan Wallen and everyone who loves him.
[0]

An old Jukebox fave meets a new country darling we apparently also kinda like…

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[6.57]

Nortey Dowuona: There are 3 white men I trust. Zach Bryan is one of them. Mainly because he doesn’t attempt to append holier than thou posturing for internet brownie point, beg for bigots approval to make his crashing career successful or fuck around making bad Jeremih songs to appear ahead of the curve. He just writes honest, sincere songs about being a deeply flawed man who is consistently putting himself out there to be loved and to love back, despite the consequences or the punishment of pain, shame, loneliness, failure. Kacey thrives in the midst of these moments and within the turmoil, making a home for herself alongside him, despite it coming apart at the seams due to the aforementioned flaws. And as they sing the final chorus together, you feel the strained, flickering love that is leaning and diminishing, only one breath away from being extinguished.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Imagine Zach Bryan two decades ago: this ex-military ne’er-do-well recording lo-fi country ballads on his lonesome out in Oklahoma would have been signed to Lost Highway and then lost in the thickets of Paste write-ups. Now he’s number one on Billboard. Times change, but so do the hooks, and Bryan has landed on a good one, the way he and Kacey Musgraves wail “you only smile like that when you’re drinking,” lovelorn and desolate together. Bryan is a folk singer of negative space; he illuminates his glowing little melodies while the song surrounding him lives in that vast blackness stretching into the great plains beyond.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Zach Bryan writes about blasted, blighted lives, and his workaday conviction elevates the occasionally staid material. Rotgut whiskey and Kacey Musgraves can’t ease his mind. So he dwells in the shadow of memory.
[6]

Michael Hong: Bryan’s gruffness sounds great on his plain arrangements, but the thinness of Musgraves’ voice on her solo take of the chorus makes the whole track feel stiff. The real gem off his self-titled album is with Sierra Ferrell, the plainness making their harmonies and its melodic simplicity shine.
[4]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I’ll be honest: the first several times I only listened to this for Kacey Musgraves. The more I hear “I Remember Everything,” however, the more I see how Kacey’s diaphanous, hazy delivery only works because of how Bryan acts as a brusk, grounded foil. He seems like a perfectly pleasant, reclusive, well-therapized man, one who has earned the moment in the sun he’s experienced this year. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: It is kind of wild to think that this guy is considered the same basic genre (and has hits on the same charts) as that Morgan Wallen fuck; chunks of this are not that far away from, say, Damien Jurado. I’m sure it’s not Bryan’s only mode (he put out a fucking triple album, for god’s sake), but it works here.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: The music on the verses (especially the first) almost sounds like it’s being played at the wrong speed? And what’s with Bryan’s mush-mouthed singing voice? Not to mention that this doesn’t sounds like the duet it should be, just two singer’s verses spliced together. I’d love to like this, but not much about it works for me.
[4]

Leah Isobel: “I Remember Everything” is approximately two steps away from Pity Sex; even its flashes of humor bend toward flowery emo sentiment (“You’re like concrete feet in the summer heat/ It burns like hell when two soles meet”). It’s fertile ground, but the weepy arrangement and Zach’s whimpery, crackling vocal oversell it a bit.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Three things elevate “I Remember Everything” from the staid “see, this is real country music” ballads that it’s not far off from. Zach Bryan’s songwriting is carefully observed, and his muted voice suggests a low emotional ceiling — making it extra powerful when he rips through it. And in turn Kacey Musgraves’ voice, while still youthful and winning, is maturing nicely into a less tremulous Emmylou or Dolly.
[8]

Hannah Jocelyn: There’s this slightly late guitar strum at 1:34 (and again at 3:03) that’s annoyed me all year, and I have to point it out because nobody else has. Otherwise, this is an above-average Civil Wars song with some pretty 7/4 verses, marred by a rushed production job — the arrangement aims for gravitas, but you need lush Daniel Lanois or Gary Pacsoza production for that, not first-take-best-take performances. Yet if it’s Zach Bryan or Noah Kahan, I’m taking Bryan every time.
[6]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Between this and Noah Kahan’s ascendancy I’m convinced that folk and country will make it 2013 again through science or magic. If it means more duets, I’ll take it!
[8]

Tara Hillegeist: Soulful melancholy over gentle strumming meant to put the emphasis on the observed detail, the folksy reminiscences, of the singer’s well-waxed lyricism is as much a posture as the cocksure drunkard’s swagger, where country’s concerned; it all comes down to whether you can back the pose up with a sincere enough delivery to match. Good thing Bryan has a voice like an old train engine run hard off homemade distillations, instead of something studio-smooth and syrupy-slick; it sells the vibe almost as well as the images his lyrics conjure up can manage, all by themselves. Musgraves’ lighter touch doesn’t shift the tenor of the piece so much as add another tone to the portrait being sonically painted; the flecks of sunlight and gold, coming in through the glass bottle you can all but hear, sitting not far from Bryan’s hand. Indeed, she’s the one to shed a little needed light on one of those ironic details that can give the rest of a song the kind of wry, bittersweet bite it needs to go down feelingly. For all that the song is a story told by Bryan’s narrator, it’s Musgraves’ girl that’s remembered early, lyrically, as the better tale-spinner of the two. So, naturally, when it’s her turn on the verse, it comes out that the one time Bryan’s narrator went so far as to imagine up a future between the two of them, she already knew he couldn’t really mean it. A less controlled song would’ve found a moment to resolve that tension before it ended; “I Remember Everything” simply lingers in the revelation, and the melancholy, and the might’ve-beens, till the sun comes up and the unwise urge to do more than live with it passes.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: He’s just some guy, which is the point. And this is stately, well-struck, and a little bit boring — “Dawns” did it better, and not just because Maggie Rogers is a much better fit within the Zach Bryan sonic universe — but I still find it charming even through all of the tedious talk of authenticity and roots rock stardom. Much like everything he’s done, “I Remember Everything” is self-conscious of Zach Bryan’s place in the world — the lyric is all lived-in small town signifiers, less a narrative or even a “Don’t You Want Me” style point-counterpoint and more a slice of life, but everything else aims for grandeur. Kacey Musgraves is perhaps the crux of “I Remember Everything” — unlike the rest of the guests (The Lumineers and a bunch of guys that sound like The Lumineers) on Zach Bryan by Zach Bryan, she’s (a) made interesting music herself and (b) grappled with that same lyrical/musical divide in her own work. And yet the slight distance in her performance is what ultimately consigns the song to being an interesting curio rather than a barn-burner: the two sketch slightly different frames on the same moment, Musgraves remembering but Bryan desperately asking to be remembered. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: Maybe it’s the sand or the “grown men don’t cry” bit, but this feels like Bryan’s Lana Del Rey homage: I’m kinda surprised the violins weren’t boosted about 25%, or that the drummer didn’t try something more martial. As soon as I realized we were getting a boy-girl duet about slugging down whiskey, I thought about Paisley/Krauss. But Bryan’s not interested in that kind of operatic tragedy. He’s more glum than maudlin, fiddling with the memory of a truck like the screwcap on some Kentucky Gentleman. Musgraves is the voice of reason, or maybe just exasperation; she can’t caress the melody alongside Bryan because that would be commiseration.
[5]

TSJ Today reports…

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[7.29]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I need to get a couple things out of the way: 1) Why wasn’t this released as a single during the actual Lover era four years ago?; 2) My enjoyment for this song, as I suspect it may have for many of you as well, has decreased since it turned from an secretly adored album cut to a Billboard #1 in 2023; 3) Why did a song called “Cruel Summer” go #1 during the second half of October? Who was in charge of this timing?; 4) The gaming of the charts to get this to go #1 is expected for all major artists, but still pretty craven: these remixes and live versions are… not it; 5) Love it or hate it, this is Jack Antonoff at his most Jack Antonoff, vocoders and all; 6) We were deprived of a real music video for this and I’m still annoyed; 7) Taylor’s voice sounds shrill, especially when she’s reaching the high notes in the chorus; 8) Tickets for the Eras tour were way too expensive and comically absurd to acquire; 9) My extreme audiophile boyfriend continues to tell me that Taylor releasing four different versions of every vinyl record is choking up the global market and causing all records to be more expensive; 10) Everyone is exhausted by the Travis Kelce media cycle already, and I’m salty that this song was written about Joe Alwyn. Now, enjoy.
[10]

Alex Clifton: “Cruel Summer” is a shot of dopamine straight to the heart. It turns everything neon and demands to be screamed loudly in a car with the windows down. I want to inject it into my veins. It makes me thrilled to be alive in a way few other songs do these days.
[10]

Alfred Soto: Listening to Lover before masks went on all over the world, I noted superficial resemblances to Bowie in his so-called Berlin era. “Cruel Summer” is Swift’s “Joe the Lion,” Bowie’s 1977 desperate, almost frantic account of Berliners crawling home from bars who can’t quiet the din in their heads. I liked it in 2019, I love it now. Her most easeful collaboration in years, her best single since “Blank Space,” the electronic clippety-clops and vocoderized enthusiasm building to a chorus of sustained euphoria. For all the blather about her songwriting prowess, let’s hear it for the instinct that left oooh-ahh-ahh as a placeholder. 
[10]

Will Rivitz: By far the most vibrant, well-written, and captivating single off Lover.
[4]

David Moore: The unfortunate reality of dealing with Taylor Swift in 2023 is that she has dominated the few remaining metrics for gauging commercial pop success for almost the entirety of her career, in a sort of never-ending imperial phase, so it gets harder to enjoy her with each passing year even if you’re so inclined. I’ve been writing about it a lot lately: Taylor Swift’s consolidation of dying formats in old-media youth culture, like the Bain Capital of teenpop; Taylor Swift’s absurdly stable career trajectory and how the only analogue I can think of with 15 years of unfettered and untroubled dominance within their milieu is “Weird Al” Yankovic; my increasing antipathy toward Taylor Swift’s success, stemming from my evergreen bitterness about what happened to Ashlee Simpson; the cosmic weirdness of how Taylor Swift’s gambit for world domination depended on the slow-burn success of “Teardrops on My Guitar,” a song literally no one on earth has cared about since 2007; Taylor Swift’s limited melodic palette and how her emphasis on rhythm and personality are of a piece with rap’s melodic turn in the 2010’s. And all that is just the stuff no one was already writing about! There’s a full-time reporter for Taylor Swift! She broke box office records with a tour movie so dorky that the background dancers aren’t allowed to dance, and the costumes look like an intern snagged them from TJ Maxx 15 minutes before the show, and when Taylor Swift doesn’t have a guitar or a piano shoved in front of her she mimes every! single! lyric! with her hands (on enough occasions that I lost count, she sings the word “time” and points to her wrist)! So of course an OK summer song she didn’t even bother finishing the chorus for got trotted out four years later for “impact” and it actually worked. Everything Taylor Swift does works. Taylor Swift can do whatever the fuck she wants. We can’t get rid of her. No one is even trying to. We’ve been living in Taylor Swift’s 2008 for 15 years, and we might have to walk another thousand miles to find one river of peace.
[6]

Tara Hillegeist: Relistening to Lover-era Swift is the sort of experience that makes one yearn for the days when the UN actually tried to enforce the Geneva Convention anywhere outside of the Steam storefront.
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: The problem with “Cruel Summer” is the problem with all of Taylor’s infinite songs about supposedly dangerous lovers: I have never heard anything less dangerous in my life.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Look: I am a Taylor Swift hater. It is my divine calling. The way she vocalizes “devils roll the daice” is like a needle digging into my brain. The fact that if you search “Cruel Summer” you get this and not the endlessly superior Bananarama song is a crime against pop music in general and me, specifically. She sounds like fucking Hannah Montana when she yells that last line on the bridge. All of her music comes across to me like a teenager discovering, to her disbelief, that other people exist with their own individual desires — that being alive in the world means contending with those desires, learning how to coexist — and throwing a tantrum about it. It’s not that I don’t relate, but that I listen to her music and I feel forcibly emotionally regressed, like I am eating candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; like I am driving a Fisher-Price car to work at an Easy-Bake Oven. And yet. Listening to “Cruel Summer,” trying to nail down a score, I am forced to admit that this random Pennsylvanian lady knows how to write songs. Kill me now.
[6]

Oliver Maier: The sunset on the horizon beyond Reputation and a late bloomer from the only Taylor Swift record that doesn’t totally scan like a coherent chapter in her narrative (though I’m hardly a scholar). One wonders what her career would have looked like had the pandemic, and Folklore, not intervened. More like this would have been nice.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I don’t think I ever noticed just how gonzo background Taylor sounds going “he looks up grinning like a devil!” at the end of the bridge. I’m not going to wade into trying to figure out whether it’s amazing they accidentally left that in (she sounds like a goof) or it’s some sort of 3D chess move to make sure yet another market segment finds her endearing or it’s a key that when combined with other lore tells you the middle name of her 3rd last boyfriend (or some secret fourth thing). Even if it is calculated, it makes me laugh like a drain. I can’t not hear it now. Tik Tok is good for something after all.
[6]

Kayla Beardslee: This is obviously a [10]. It’s been a [10] since it came out four years ago. Its fate as the hit of Lover was written in stone before the album was even released, thanks to the Secret Session whispers. This is Taylor Swift parting the impossibly wide pastel-colored ocean before her to somehow make room for her presence, dominating thanks to the sense of reckless abandon in her voice that dwarfs even the reverberating Antonoff synths. Her desperation is delivered with a wink, slideshow images heightening the drama for the sake of performance (“cut the headlights, summer’s a knife”). Yet this is also Taylor Swift, whose only constant has been always being able to put it into words, collapsing into “ooohs” at the end of the chorus and admitting defeat. Her career is performance: a stab to the heart on stage will still leave a mark in her mind, sincerity betrayed in moments like the loss of composure on “If I bleed, you’ll be the last to know” or her scream of “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you!” The delicious thrill of going too fast is inseparable from her fear of the crash, sure that it’ll happen just around the next bend in the road, so hold on tight right now and feel this moment to the utmost before it disappears — but when the song ends and we’re drawn back into the real world, all that’s left is a soft, nostalgic smile among the pastel-pink clouds. It’s the tale of a summer of girlish hedonism: sure, you got a little too drunk and fell a little too hard, but it was ultimately harmless. They were your own mistakes to make, and you had the freedom to make them. The summer may have been cruel to you, but it was only casually cruel in the name of being honest. “Here’s how ‘Cruel Summer’ can still be a single!”, went the gleeful cries of stans in fall 2019 who were still holding out hope. Nothing on earth could come along to diminish the force of this brightest-shining, joyfully hollering star of “I’m drunk in the back of the car,” not even — shit. And now it’s 2023, and we’re looking back at that summer through rose-colored glasses and trying to bring it back to life. No, it’s not the same, but we just want to know that we were holding on for something worth it after all, and that idealism and excitement still have a place in the moments in between. Have you or a loved one lost the summer that you were promised? If so, you may be entitled to compensation. At least that compensation comes in the form of a few perfect bars of pop music that gives you an excuse to scream at the top of your lungs.
[10]

Joshua Lu: “Cruel Summer” is probably the most median Taylor Swift™ song in existence, and your enjoyment of this song probably depends on how much Taylor Swift™ you’ve been able to withstand this year. It’s largely made up by lines that sound nice and cohere poorly — especially that chorus, which features many words that rhyme together and not much else, or the bridge, with familiar images of crying in cars and her scream-singing that’s become a literal legal cornerstone of her artistry. The song’s catchiness and overall dramatic charm still shine through, like many of her best songs, but in revisiting this Lover highlight, it’s evident how much that era lacked a proper point of view.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The fun of “Cruel Summer” has waned with every year since it came out — even at the time, I liked “The Archer” better in terms of moody synth-pop bangers off of Lover, but every moment here that once felt anthemic has become tedious. It’s a song that’s become a pop hit because enough fans convinced themselves it’s shaped like a pop hit — of course it’s sharp and hooky, shorn of the overly-writerly trappings of her more recent work, but every time someone accuses “Cruel Summer” of pop perfection its flaws become all the more apparent. Those verses are rough — all that doggerel about bad boys and shiny toys — but the bridge, and in particular its climax (you know, the big line where he looks so gritty like a devil or whatever) is where my disbelief fails. For all of the skill with which its crafted, I can’t tell what sort of feeling “Cruel Summer” wants me to take away from it — for all of the illicit thrill the lyrics glance at, Jack Antonoff  surrounds Taylor with so much high-wattage synth work that none of her lines really land. It’s all too much — a grand spectacle of a pop hit that feels more inert the more closely I look at it.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: I’m by & large not a fan of Swift in pop mode (I miss her as a country artist, and think her best albums are — cliché alert — evermore and folklore), and I’m happy to largely blame production choices: Max Martin was a bad pairing for her, period, and Jack Antonoff doesn’t generally do it for me behind the boards either. To my ears, maximalism doesn’t become her. But this works, and part of it’s definitely the production, particularly the Daft Punkish touches Antonoff and Swift provide. St. Vincent’s songwriting contributions help too. That second verse opening line — “Hang your head low in the glow of the vending machine” — is so dead-on, and a perfect exemplification of Swift’s lyrical prowess. Somehow, “Cruel Summer” is nearly magical, the kind of thing that more mainstream pop should sound like. 
[8]

Brad Shoup: Once again I’m hearing Mutt Lange where it doesn’t matter (those robotic yeahs that end the track on a self-deprecating joke) but not where it does; on a chorus that could have dug in harder, and maybe have managed a not-goofy rhyme for the title. Somehow both frantic and grandiose: is there anything she can’t do? 
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Reputation was Taylor Swift’s villain era, but only in the sense that any White Girl Whose Cringe Is Swag should be considered illegal. Hearing her coo “You like the bad ones too” before Future barrels through his “End Game” verse? Sublime levels of dorkery. The stilted EDM chorus in “Dancing With Our Hands Tied”? You can practically envision her stiff, awkward swaying. The strained heaving of “Take it off, off, off” on “Dress”? Well, not all of us can sound sexy when horny. She reached unprecedented levels of personable, and with this came new changes in her approach to songwriting. Most obvious was her newfound love for alcohol (She’s drinking beer on rooftops! She’s spilling wine in bathtubs!) but more subtle, and lost beneath all the “Taylor Swift is rapping!” discussion, was how her toplines became more flexible. Every verse on “Getaway Car” is a chance to put on voices in miniature, to stumble through lines for syllabic emphasis, and to consider rhyme schemes for their texture. That song is the blueprint for Lover‘s “Cruel Summer.” Everything’s just a little bit better — the vocoder is tastefully incorporated, the chorus is more anthemic — but it’s all a bit too cotton candy. She’s not drinking old fashioneds, she’s just drunk. The shouting is more summer camp than summer romp. The vibe is undeniably “ME!” It was painful in 2019 and it’s painful now. She hasn’t been this uncool since.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The lavender synth haze of Taylor Swift’s Midnights first found life in the swelling pastels of Lover, so the return of “Cruel Summer” four years on fits her current sound just fine. Swift and Jack Antonoff allow the swollen chords to drift over soft and sleepy textures that envelop like a warm bed or a warm night, punctuating the verse lines with a warped and treated backing vocal murmuring come-ons in dream language. But Swift’s own words are glittering sharp, hers is a summer that cuts headlights like a knife, slices to the bone, invites devils to roll dice and kills with desire. Swift sings of a tryst so forbidden that its pleasure can only be expressed in terms of panic and crisis. This is a relationship that needs to remain discrete, and the tension and thrill balanced between her marvelled “the shape of your body is new,” and cry of “I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you” shifts this into the queerer end of the her catalogue. Swift’s fans have memed her faculty with a bridge into dull received wisdom — “We have arrived at the very first bridge of the evening,” Swift says during her “Cruel Summer” performance in the Eras Tour film, knowing what’s expected from her — but this one spatters synth shards that pull the narrative into a sudden climax. Swift tipsy and sobbing, her careful plans and subterfuge undone, being driven home from the pub, her night miserable and magical all at once.
[10]

Aaron Bergstrom:  The fact that “Cruel Summer” had to wait its turn behind singles that the Jukebox (charitably) scored at [3.53] and [3.65] is the kind of decision that makes me wish you could send FOIA requests to record labels. (There were meetings! There was market research! This is someone’s job!) I know Jack Antonoff’s Whole Deal™isn’t for everyone, but this is the Swift/Antonoff playbook run to perfection, an update on the best parts of 1989 centered on a bulletproof bridge that lets Swift debut her punk-rock snarl on a line that I mistakenly heard as “he looks so pretty like a devil” for an embarrassingly long time. (She is not at all convincing, but that’s what makes it so endearing.) A [10] when it was released, and the summers have only gotten crueler since. 
[10]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s only a cruel summer if you watch the world spin on your terms and your whims, when you’re the most powerful musician in the world and massive corporations and governments need to attain your approval, when you’re criticized for being so much that your most dedicated fans will silence anyone who says so, when you can stop one of the most powerful sports franchises to pay you ever more attention, when you can re-record the entire public legacy of your songs and erase the memories made with the music you made now stolen from your grasp, when anyone will pick up your call and accept your terms. It’s a crueler one when you are utterly powerless in the face of all the public scrutiny.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Is it too much of a stretch to view the belated popularity of “Cruel Summer” as symbolic of the possibilities that were either foreclosed or deferred by a confluence of events in early 2020, including but not limited to the removal of Bernie Sanders as a relevant figure in U.S. politics? Probably, yeah, but this is the kind of song that makes you want to stretch that far. It livens the spirit, it quickens your step, it justifies an album that didn’t need to be justified in the first place. “You say that we’ll just screw it up in these trying times; we’re not trying.” How one feels about that slacker-chic line, with its simultaneous wallowing and reveling in youthful apathy, is perhaps as much a barometer of 2024 sentiment as “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
[9]

Lauren Gilbert: This is how Cruel Summer can still be a single.
[10]

Smokin’ in the boys room…

[Video]
[6.35]

Tara Hillegeist: Like much of boygenius’ output, group name included, this is sublime hangout music with pretenses towards something sublimated — pretenses that just about manage to get in the way of the autumn-sunset-at-lakeside vibes the group’s folksy gestures are set on evoking, instead, before falling apart in the face of that sideways glance of a crescendo this song calls a bridge. But it’s hard for me to argue with the evidence at hand that boygenius’ reason for being is a sound one. Imagine if all the anhedonia we shared with each other could sound this sweet; maybe that less-lonely world would have need of fewer critics.
[6]

Hannah Jocelyn: I’ve been working on a Boygenius essay all year, that I may or may not publish; how I relate to, differ from, and yes, envy their collective gender presentation as a trans woman. I’ve written 4,000 words, a lot of which are probably filled with tangents and redundancies, but very little is about the music. That’s because, for the most part, The Record is an unapologetic major-label victory lap, where the three musketeers indulge in mushy love songs for one another and celebrate their bond. It’s impossible to tell who wrote what, as the trio peacefully melt into one another until they’re a massive sapphic hydra. “Not Strong Enough” soars above all this, Sheryl Crow allusion and all, because it’s just a good pop song. It doesn’t have the wit or emotional resonance of their best individual material, but it does have a hook worthy of Crow and some great ear candy (the pumping sweep effect at 2:07, Lucy Dacus’ echoing ad-lib of “go home alone”). Also, Julien Baker name-drops “Boys Don’t Cry” over the chords of “Just Like Heaven.” Nice!
[7]

Michael Hong: On their lead tringle, you can trace the songwriting down to each member: Julien Baker’s nihilistic self-disgust is present under the messy “$20,” Phoebe Bridgers is blunt despite all apologies on “Emily, I’m Sorry,” and Lucy Dacus’ “True Blue” is laced with rich detail — except when it isn’t. “True Blue” cops out on the bridge. “You’ve never done me wrong, except for that one time / that we don’t talk about,” an awkward aside for anyone who hasn’t been disillusioned by the group’s PR campaign. “Not Strong Enough” attempts to split the songwriting and in the process lands with the same issues. Its in-jokes and references are played without so much of a wink, too serious to sound clever. While the three-part harmony at the tail of the bridge is a nice reminder of the distinctions of each vocalist, their verses are economical to the point that individual characteristics, for better or for worse, are difficult to trace in the song.
[4]

Alfred Soto: Bored by the well-intentioned poignancy of their solo music, I was surprised by the speed at which I fell in love with boygenius’ group work. They love performing their intimacy — can you imagine how queerness might’ve advanced had, say, CSN&Y bussed each other on stage? “Not Strong Enough” marries a strong strummed melody to lyrics that take advantage of Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridges’ harmonic strengths, a pleasure in itself. The plainspoken confessions match the women’s timbres. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Remember when Chance the Rapper decided to make a great pop rap album as the rapping member of the SoX Experiment and people wanted the next Chance solo album instead and then he did that and y’all hated him more and more? Pray this don’t happen to Phoebe Bridgers.
[7]

Crystal Leww: Women can be fuckboys, too — set to guitar! 
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The closer that these three get to being an actual band, the more they leave me cold. I loved their EP from half a decade ago in part because it kept the essential character of each songwriter intact — these were demos that they had brought to their friends to finish up, not hivemind exercises. Despite working with musicians I like (can we just hear the Melina Duterte/Sarah Tudzin/Carla Azar trio instead?) and doing everything they’re supposed to do as an artistic unit (If I have to hear about the three of them going to therapy together again I’ll have to go to therapy myself), the returns still diminish. “Not Strong Enough” is neither good enough to save rock music nor bad enough to capsize it. Instead, it’s a charmingly indistinct piece of big gesture indie, the kind of song that I can intellectually understand the appeal of while feeling nothing for. It’s end credits music, a slow fade that, for all of my wishing, won’t ever be fireworks.
[4]

Ian Mathers: It is hard to avoid the “people are so weird about this band” field boygenius generates now to just write about the song. But I am 30 or 40 years old and I do not need that (to those shouting “skill issue” or “you deliberately haven’t been paying attention to that stuff”… I see you, and you’re valid). I listen to boygenius as a band, not some weird referendum on who’s solo stuff I like best. And so with “Not Strong Enough” I just hear a lovely and frequently moving song where all three singers get to take a good chorus around the block, and all of them nail it in different ways. The only extra commentary I want is the line from Bridgers I saw quoted on Genius: “Self-hatred is a god complex sometimes.” It sure fucking is!
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: I just think of the thousands of singer-songwriters who get a fraction of their press, while making music that isn’t bland.
[4]

Aaron Bergstrom: The boygenius project could have been a success even if it never exceeded the sum of its parts. It could have been a long-distance book club and mutual admiration society, three wildly talented songwriters who occasionally got together to sing backing vocals on each other’s songs. Maybe it stops there. Even the most like-minded artists can’t always find the same creative wavelength. It happens. When the first three singles from the record were very clearly The Julien Song, The Phoebe Song, and The Lucy Song, it wasn’t necessarily a disappointment (all three are excellent in their own right). It just felt like the group had a ceiling. “Not Strong Enough,” though, points to something bigger. It’s the first song that sounds like boygenius as a band. It’s a song that none of them could have produced individually. The titular hook is Phoebe’s, the “always an angel, never a god” climax is Lucy’s, and Julien’s guitar holds it together (plus she gets to drag race through the canyon singing “Boys Don’t Cry”). There’s a collective joy, a thrill of possibility, something above and beyond their individual brilliance. Listen to them talk about it. It’s cool that they played Madison Square Garden, and Saturday Night Live, and it’s great that they’re going to be near the top of every year-end list that anybody cares about, but none of that explains why this was The Year of Boygenius as definitively as “the way Phoebe looks at Lucy when she talks about songwriting.”
[10]

Leela Grace: In fall 2017 I called my friend from where I was camping in Montana and said, “I heard a song that reminded me of us!” and I sang her the verse from “Funeral” that ends with “we talk until we think we might just kill ourselves/then we laugh until it disappears.” This year we got married. The members of Boygenius have sad-girl brands musically but together, their extratextual joy makes its way into the harmonies. Finding people who understand you is such a rare and special thing, in whatever form it takes, for however long it lasts, and sadness shared is easier to bear. Maybe you can’t control when people leave you or the marks they’ll leave on you: you are always an angel, never a god. But when you sing together you come close.
[9]

Josh Love: The Record is a real “greater than the sum of its parts” type of album. Over the course of its whole running time, the camaraderie and charm of these three women swapping songs and verses, harmonizing and singing background on each other’s cuts, communicates something far more resonant than a single isolated song. There’s not even a Lucy Dacus verse! The greater magic here is how these three roughly similar artists can each evince such distinct personae, to the extent that it’s incredibly easy to attest to an allegiance for any one of them above the other two. I went into boygenius sure I was a Phoebe, but now I’m convinced I’m a Julien.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Gorgeous, lush — antiseptically corporate. A paint-by-numbers masterpiece in half-formed suburban anxieties. A sleek vehicle assembled by collage: the indie rock appeal to road trips, the indie rock domestic imagery, the indie rock rousing chantalong. I, too, have spent many nights staring at a ceiling fan and catastrophizing. It didn’t sound like a delicate synth arpeggio. I don’t think something this grandiose would comfort me, either.
[4]

Oliver Maier: I don’t really agree with the critique that boygenius is total wallpaper mood music; they’re not here, anyway. The production is satisfying and crisp, the drums clatter compellingly, as if unable or unwilling to find a firm footing on the beat, and there’s no denying the swoop of the chorus melody. But, since by ideology there’s no jostling for space on a boygenius song, accomodating everyone makes “Not Strong Enough” feel like a whistle-stop insecurity sightseeing tour, where nobody has time to explore their stop. Julien Baker revs up a car crash fantasy that vanishes into the hook. Phoebe Bridgers’ lyrical style — rushes of home video vignettes designed to push out the waterworks — doesn’t always land for me, but she usually has more lines than this to give it a fair shake. As for the Lucy-led bridge…well, I’m sure it sounded cool in their heads. 
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: Designed more for Red Rocks than for headphones, the “angel/god” chant-along is the record‘s most obvious effort to transcend the comforting strictures of indie rock nichedom and instead seat the trio in their rightful place as arena rock eminences. It doesn’t exactly do that, mainly because it telegraphs its intent too cleanly and presents too big of a contrast with the rest of the track’s artful self-effacing. The good news for Boygenius is that it didn’t need to do that, because everything that came before that point in the song was already grand and sweeping and buoyantly pensive enough to make any U2 comparisons seem beside the point. (Sorry, I’m not strong enough to avoid making a U2 comparison.)
[7]

Brad Shoup: Along with Drop Nineteens’ “Gal,” one of two alt-rock tracks I’m aware of from this year that references a Cure song. I love how magisterial this sounds–elevated adult alternative — how everyone gets to step into the light. “Always an angel/Never a god” seemed like a weird complaint to me at first — I’d much rather be an angel, people don’t get mad at you — but I was missing the theme.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: That acoustic guitar is strummed with enough vim that you can feel every clang. It provides an initial pulse, then too the bassline and snare. Everything just keeps marching along, traces of beauty found amid the doldrums: listen to those electric guitar flutters, arriving like sunlight upon your face; hear the way each vocalist’s timbre provides new shades of beige. It has an everyday beauty that hides everyday pain. And then the bridge arrives: bullshit tedium in the name of profundity. Always content with the fine-enough, boygenius draw emotion from a vacantness that I wish were all-consuming. Those flickering synths announce a precious listlessness that reminds you that there’s more — I just wish it weren’t so A24 meets Hallmark.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: “I don’t know why I am the way I am,” the Boys sing in turn, their thoughts so dislocated from their surroundings that walking through the kitchen might as well be speeding along a highway. An insistent drum rhythm hustles the decidedly gentle guitar arrangement, capturing with unsettling precision the feel of being completely lost while the world is rushing headlong without you.
[8]

Jeffrey Brister: Writing about exactly WHY I like a song can be so difficult, because I love this one. It has a lush, full, utterly beautiful arrangement–an array of guitar sounds layered over one another, with a the right amount of synth flourishes that let the ear wander and notice things on repeated listens. Tightly played drums that aren’t too reverb-drenched, dry enough to sit in the middle of the mix without overwhelming or getting lost, an anchor holding the song in place. Three incredible vocal performances, each pulling out different aspects of the melody, and singing in brilliant harmony. A structure that builds and breaks, that drives and explodes with melancholy. It’s a song that I would simply say is “gorgeous”, and leave it at that, but I feel like I wanted a bit of a word count.
[9]

Will Adams: Eh, it’s pretty, I guess.
[5]

Your Fun Pop Factoid Of The Day: the uncredited vocals on will.i.am’s “I Got It From My Mama” are by Kat Graham.

[Video]
[7.65]Nortey Dowuona: I TOUCHED A JAGUAR’S SWAG AND NOW I HAVE A TAIL: STORYTIME
[9]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The backstory for Victoria Monét’s “On My Mama” may overpower the song one day: sat in the studio during COVID, battling postpartum depression, singing affirmations that she didn’t yet believe. It’s powerful, and now that it’s a hit, it’s the type of tale that pastors will add extra sizzle to, knowing it’ll ring the congregation’s bells. And yet, the song is slinkier and more pared-down than the built-in uplift would have you believe. Cheekier, too, zapped with tossed-off gags that are Monét’s secret weapon: I always giggle at “[I] might be too fine to hit it from behi-yi-yi-yind“. Ribald and heartwarming — quite a combination.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The bassline’s two-note filigrees are self-assured in their minimalist swerve — effortless cool without lifting much more than a finger. “On My Mama” operates in this reserved mode for its entire runtime, capturing the righteous act of feeling yourself via Chalie Boy’s “I Look Good.” Ironically, the hook sounds constrained in this new context, trapped inside the hallowed gloss of triumphant brass. It’s less thrilling when the instrumentation telegraphs that — why let anything else explain that you’re good enough? Still, this sleeked out take on Southern-rap braggadocio does find a moment of comparable excellence when Monét utters “sex game go stuUUupid.” It isn’t playful or horny, just domineering and cocksure; she doesn’t sing that line for anyone but herself.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Monét weaves so effortlessly and precisely among all the little bass pushes and gently peaking horns that it’d be easy to overlook how crucial her performance is here. But it is, and she nails the hell out of it. She rightfully mentions being deep in her bag, but this whole thing is also almost impossibly in several different kinds of pocket at once.
[9]

Oliver Maier: Professional, fairly tedious, sounding so built for Tiny Desk that I’m shocked it hasn’t happened yet. This would really benefit from some oomph, or at least some hi-hats.
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The bass doesn’t slap quite as hard as I want it to. But really, that’s the only note I have here — Ms. Monét is so self-assured here on this slab of funk, stringing together one-liners that lesser artists would be lucky to get one of like she’s got an infinite supply. I always want extended versions of pop songs, but I especially want one here.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Like a suite in a four-star hotel, everything’s where it’s supposed to be: the horn section, the bass line, and Victoria Monét’s polished vocal. From Jamila Woods recording her own Avalon and Corinne Bailey Rae her own Sign ‘o the Times on one disc to K Michelle reveling in tradition, 2023 was a wonderful year for female R&B artists: they sing their bodies eclectic. “I think we deserve it, right?” Monét asks rhetorically.
[8]

Leah Isobel: “I just wanna live in a fantasy,” Monét sings, her voice burnished gold. “I think we deserve it, right?” This song — by design — makes me remember 2000s R&B and pop, the era of Ciara and “Do It To It” and Usher’s imperial phase, when the whole industry’s center of gravity briefly shifted to Atlanta. The welding of hip-hop’s stance and production with pop’s melody created what felt, at the time, like the most impossibly cool music I had ever heard, both celebratory and strong. That trend passed, as all pop music trends do; as I left childhood, pop music became more nihilistically post-human. I like that stuff, too. But “On My Mama” triggers a specific memory button in which I remember a version of the world in which it seemed like people could keep pace, if you were tough enough. Monét brings a soft allure to that fantasy: it could be good. It could still be good.
[8]

David Moore: There’s been a scourge of millennial hip-hop worship that somehow takes some of the most joyous music ever produced and reduces it to the great gray blob of content, just execrable nostalgia-mining of the lowest order for almost every major rap and R&B hit between c. 2002 and 2007, so how refreshing is it to hear a pitch-perfect post-Aaliyah minimal R&B performance with the period-appropriate accoutrement to match: is that a real horn section? Chopped and screwed ad-libs? Oh my god, are those punchlines?? “I’m so deep in my bag like a grandma with a peppermint / they say ooh she smell good, that’s because I’m heaven scent.” Perfect.
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “On My Mama” is sexy, swaggering, and most importantly, fun. Victoria Monét’s glow-up from Ariana Grande sidekick to Grammy Award nominee is the exact type of thing everyone should have predicted on their 2023 bingo card. Extra point for making me smile with “I’m so deep in my bag/Like a grandma with a peppermint.”
[8]

Kayla Beardslee: “I’m so deep in my bag, like a grandma with a peppermint / They say, ‘Oh she smell good,’ that’s just ’cause I’m heaven-scent” isn’t actually the lyric of the year… or is it??
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Cocaine-decor sumptuous to an almost surreal extent. Wish Monét hadn’t crammed all her good lines into the second verse, though.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Starts off luxe and slinky, a getting-ready ode that annexes the club before she walks through the door, similar to Kelly Rowland’s “Like This”. After the first chorus, she’s thoroughly feeling herself, and the jokes and vocal elasticism put her in Post Malone territory. Not a bad thing! Peak Posty would’ve avoided the triumphant “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” horns (his loss), but probably wouldn’t have bothered sampling Chalie Boy after a perfectly fine interpolation. Feels like padding.
[7]

Alex Ostroff: Any song with even a passing resemblance to “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” is always going to hit almost every pleasure centre in my brain.
[8]

Michelle Myers: Jaguar II is a phenomenal album, but I’m hard-pressed to pick a single track that demonstrates how sophisticated and immersive this record is when experienced in full. It’s definitely not “On My Mama.”
[6]

Rachel Saywitz: “On My Mama” isn’t Victoria Monét’s best single, but it’s unsurprising that it’s the one that’s garnered the most critical and commercial acclaim. There’s a homely essence to its meandering horn lines and grounding low rumbles, like the human-shaped indent on your grandparents’ old leather couch that looks like it’s been there forever. Here, Monét eschews her honeyed voice to command in a deeper, wiser tone, as if relaying knowledge from her elders onto a new generation, and I’d absolutely love it if I didn’t already know that Monét is capable of more wondrous and sexy R&B. And yet, listening to “On My Mama” still sounds like a bit of a triumph. The song, along with its success, seems like a testament to all the work Monét has put in to get to this moment: you can hear, for example, the trademarks of her writing that are more widely known in the voices of others, such in the Ariana-like playful tilt of its second verse. For those fans who’ve been with her for years, it’s hard not to think of “On My Mama” as anything other than a long-anticipated greeting — a toasty home on a chilly day, a sweet smile and open arms, the words, “welcome home.”
[7]

Aaron Bergstrom: Man, to tell the truuuuth, my opinion is irrelevant.
[9]

Spooky season lasting a little longer than anticipated…

[Video]
[4.75]Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Doja Cat’s music and Doja Cat’s public image are in this weird inverse dynamic where the more outré and provocative she gets the more boring her work gets. This has no distinguishing features at all, an expensive sample wrapped around a platonic solid. For an artist that, at her best, could be either an exquisite pop-rap irritant or an effortlessly charming hook machine, here she seemingly intentionally choses to be neither. At this point, she’s an empty retread of her empty retreads.
[3]

Michelle Myers: Massive, obvious samples like this are actually quite bold if you consider how easy they are to do poorly. Helps that the selection isn’t arbitrary. “Paint the Town Red” channels the same refined resentment that Dionne Warwick mastered in the ’60s. The raps are flowy and villainous with some genuinely weird phrasing. Euch!
[7]

Jackie Powell: I couldn’t be more glad that Dionne Warwick, an underrated legacy artist, once again gets her mainstream due. First she was the queen of Twitter before Elon Musk turned it into a dumpster fire, second she was impersonated by Ego Nwodim on SNL, and now she’s been included in a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit. Unfortunately “Walk On By” didn’t have a random revival cover, but rather Doja Cat took Warwick’s hook followed by the two-bar trumpet riff that follows it to serve as the heart and soul of her diss track “Paint the Town Red.” Warwick’s original song is about getting over heartbreak, but Doja Cat uses Warwick’s vulnerable hook as a chiller means to say buzz off. That’s why “Paint the Town Red” feels lyrically out of place. Doja is trying to emulate an I-don’t-give-a-fuck type of attitude alongside one of the more vulnerable hooks of the 1960s. That contrast leads me to believe that Doja Cat actually does care about the droves of people on the internet that have a problem with her. Using the phrase “walk on by” to dispel haters might make sense initially, but writers Burt Bacharach and Hal David intended for it to be much more introspective and about personal accountability. That doesn’t happen in “Paint the Town Red.”
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Every time I hear this song, I immediately cue up its slowed and reverb remix, and then I am at peace. I’m going to avoid engaging in Doja Discourse (you hate your old music and your fans, okay), but for something that’s supposed to be a demonic clapback, this ends up feeling a little too bouncy and endearing. The snaps in the percussion leave the trumpet sample sounding oddly jaunty. Even the title is quaint, more “pleasant carousing” than scaring the haters into submission. (Unless the implication is she’s painting the town red WITH BLOOD, but that’s just funny.) The one element that is genuinely intimidating is the vocal harmonies, and I think what keeps dragging me back to the slowed and reverb remixes is the extra depth and menace they gain.
[6]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Tik Tok background music that dissipates into invisible wisps of smoke when it’s asked to foster any IRL connection.
[3]

Tim de Reuse: I do not like Doja Cat. There’s a featheriness in her aesthetic that itches at me. At high enough energies her delivery is like being caught on the kiddie coaster at the fair malfunctioning at sixty miles an hour. I [1]’ed her breakout hits on this very site back in the day. I hate fun; My poptimist card has long lapsed; I’m never here to have a good time. But here, there’s a heaviness to her delivery. No longer failing to seduce, now proudly misanthropic, her style — finally, finally! — clicks into place, immune to my curmudgeonly nitpicks. If I dug in, I might find insincerity, awkward rhymes, lazy lyrics, but that’s not a fight I can win. She is not here for me to have a good time. Finally, we agree on something.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Doja Cat deciding to embrace her super serious Little Brother side proves that some folks need to stop running from liking browbeating purist rap. We’ve been doing it for years now, and whenever this happens. it’s dispiriting to the actual true schoolers who won’t switch up and chose to continue making purist rap and the cynicism by certain pop rappers who wish to escape the scrutiny and hype caused by their own actions and sharpen their hooks, pick more important and complimentary beats, get makeovers, then chafe at the restrictions and try to become serious without undertaking the necessary effort to make oneself — at this point, the writer realized he was in this picture and ragequit.
[6]

Ian Mathers: An earworm of a chorus deployed over a lovely use of the Warwick “Walk on By” and maybe the only song I’ve heard to make me think of both Kendrick and “212,” but ultimately with this kind of power move it comes down to: when she starts off with “bitch, I said what I said,” does it signify? I discounted this one on first listen and then came back a few days later and rewrote this blurb after I couldn’t get it out of my head, so you tell me.
[8]

Oliver Maier: Boring, mostly because Doja is entertaining as a rapper when she’s being a weird little sex gremlin, not brandishing a huge inexplicable chip on her shoulder about being one of the most successful musicians on the planet. Even the touches of whimsy — like the breathy, higher register she brings out on the god-awful chorus — feel perfunctory, like they’re only there to remind you who you’re listening to. More whole lotta nothing than whole lotta red.
[3]

Brad Shoup: A jaw-dropping heel display here, a weapons-grade blister agent: like prime Eminem without the self-thinkpiecing. She makes one feeble attempt to sort the fans from the freaks–otherwise, it’s omnidirectional menace. The jokes are great; the image she inhabits is too. To sound famous, Doja Cat risks looking ridiculous (“ain’t no sign I can’t smoke here”), getting so deep into her lore I’m honestly surprised she didn’t threaten to show feet. The sophistipop sample is big and obvious, but she doesn’t interact with it like on “Vegas”. In fact, listen hard enough and Warwick becomes a beleaguered member of Doja Cat’s team, pleading with her to drop it already.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: At the risk of engaging in the sort of parasocial shit Doja Cat openly despises, including on this song: What demon lord are we talking here? Lamashtu? Oublivae? What is the Doja Cat lore? (Besides an Internet history of far-right chat rooms and a present history of working with Dr. Luke. Just pretend the “Walk on By” sample is siphoning more of the proceeds to Burt Bacharach than it probably actually is.)
[7]

Michael Hong: Explained Doja Cat lore to my friend under the dim lighting of a restaurant, from “she was showing feet! in the racial chatroom!” to her berating her fans for acting like they know her. Knowing that, it’s incredible how little bite, or anything resembling weirdness, her music has.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: For most people under the age of 60, “paint the town red” is not a phrase that immediately calls forth any specific, tangible emotions or experiences, if indeed it ever did. That doesn’t mean it can’t be used as the basis for a contemporary song, but it should ideally be expanded upon, with some sturdier reference points brought in to help with the heavy lifting, rather than left to fend for itself in an ocean of tetchy self-justifications. Name-drop Carti or Trippie, claim a tenuous connection to the Bloods if you have to, just do something. Maybe the Dionne Warwick nod is meant to do that — an old-timey phrase paired with an old-timey tune — but I doubt it. If that were the case, they probably would’ve done something with the sample beyond giving it the most basic Pro Tools treatment imaginable.
[1]

Aaron Bergstrom: It sure doesn’t take long for that sample to go from pleasantly hypnotic to painfully tedious, which is a problem since it’s the most interesting part of the song.
[3]

Leah Isobel: This year, Kim Petras released an album called Problématique, a title that petulantly nods to her association with Dr. Luke and the aura of controversy that has consequently clung to her work. Earlier that week, “Paint The Town Red” hit number one. While Doja’s association with Luke hasn’t impacted her career in precisely the same way as it has Kim’s, his presence has undoubtedly shaped the discourse around her. “Paint The Town Red,” and the whole Scarlet album cycle, demonstrates how that discourse has, in turn, shaped Doja right back. The needling repetition of the line “Bitch, I said what I said” has big I’m-not-bothered-you’re-bothered energy, turning the laid-back bounce of the sample into something testy and passive-aggressive; the post-chorus slide into the third person is like she’s psyching herself up, trying to summon her persona in order to escape her own emotions. I’m very sympathetic to Doja — her work is admirably honest about how dehumanizing it is to be a woman who makes pop. This feels more and more vital as the industry contracts around the demands of major labels, who have a habit of hiring dudes like Luke to flatten out creative and talented women. In this light, Doja’s edgelord heel turn isn’t surprising; it’s just sad, and predictable.
[4]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Becomes tiresome with every passing minute. Everyone who complained about TikTok songs being 90 seconds was wrong.
[1]

Just saying, we covered “Shooting Stars” all the way back in Two Thousand Fucking Nine. So, yeah.

[Video]
[6.43]

Aaron Bergstrom: The 2009 Jukebox got this one right the first time around: “Electronic dance that’s dressed in inexpensive pastels.” “For such a florid production, it’s surprisingly withdrawn.” “The mosquito riff and use of space find the right balance between serenity and obnoxiousness.””Great little processed twists on familiar riffs that nonetheless fail to excuse a middling chorus and dull hook.” If Troye didn’t really feel like adding anything to the original source material, I don’t see why I should have to.
[5]

Ian Mathers: There are specific risks to interpolating a meme song, and “Got Me Started” does so little with Bag Raiders that it’s just genuinely distracting. The rest of the song is pretty decent, and then every so often it just stops for me to picture a kid on a go kart flying through space.
[6]

Will Adams: Yes, “Shooting Stars” was a hit down under over a decade ago, well before Katy Perry used it in a a video; it’s conceivable that an Aussie would want to pay tribute. But for a lapsed YouTuber (and co-writer Leland, Drag Race fixture and MUNA collaborator as he is), there’s no way they didn’t consider the meme. And yes, it’s distracting. The rest of “Got Me Started” is polite, of-the-moment pop fluff, but when that reedy synth pops in, I’m taken out of everything.
[4]

Leah Isobel: The first time I heard that fucking sample, I cackled. Troye, my favorite emotionally vacant twink, just as allergic to genuine feeling as ever, just as unable to let something be without putting quotation marks around it. But where past Troye singles made that feel like a flaw he wanted to make up for, “Got Me Started” makes that resistance feel like part of its design. His voice is pitched up and around, part of the track’s silvered machinery, so that the feelings he’s expressing can separate from his body and throat; “we should experiment even to the detriment of whoever’s on the couch” is a perfect pop lyric, stupid and profound and precise. It’s the sound of desire entering from another dimension, like a half-remembered song heard on the radio, or in a meme.
[8]

Michael Hong: Troye’s music has always put well-manicured taste over everything else, so this stupid joke of a sample feels at odds with his approach, its piercing melody overpowers his quiet earnestness.
[3]

Oliver Maier: I don’t really object to the sample choice, but it’s deployed like an afterthought rather than a centerpiece, as if Sivan couldn’t write a riff and realised that “Shooting Stars” worked well enough over the chords. “Experiment/detriment” is an unconscionable rhyme.
[5]

Kayla Beardslee: I don’t know the sample well enough to have the Pavlovian reaction to it that I know some of the other writers do, so to me this song is just a crowning achievement in the possibilities of sensitive and sparkly synthpop. (Shoutout to Ian Kirkpatrick, this is one of the best things he’s ever produced.) I’m obsessed with the balance of textures in this track: it’s so vibrant and shimmery, but with a ton of depth and movement beneath the pretty surface, and the tasteful playing with vocal delivery grounds the song in little moments of honesty to keep it from sounding too perfect (the subtle crowd noise in the background of the first verse, the whispered “let’s go” before the chorus, the ever-so-slightly pitched-up hook, the background vocals echoing the title of the album at the end of the song). Yet there’s still enough empty space left between the gentle chords to sit, reflect, and look at at someone the way you would look at a sunset.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The ethos of Sivan’s recent work is the primary truth of the physical above all — yet he can’t quite seem to get there on “Got Me Started.” He says that he misses using his body, and everything here does feel slightly disembodied. The production is most of the problem: that sample, those nods to UK Garage, every single one of Ian Kirkpatrick’s Mura Masa-isms, all adding up to slightly less than what it should be. Troye himself does better; his default inclination of ecstatic, wan yearning continues to work just fine on the dancefloor, but he doesn’t quite achieve enough in the joyous lack of subtext here to overcome limpness of the production.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Sivan’s Something to Give Each Other is what I wanted Kylie’s Tension to be: sexy, groove-riding, not working overtime to be full of hits. You can hear Sivan smiling as he sings! The light 2-step rhythm on “Started” becomes him. Producer Ian Kirkpatrick worked on Dua Lipa’s first record, and of course, this has a similar smart & knowing vibe. This is a single that knows just what it’s doing.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: I actually dig that having a terrible television show that praises immense abuse and violence doesn’t end your career anymore because we wouldn’t get this tender, vulnerable song from Xander towards the first man he’s met since getting out from under Mauricio and Jocelyn’s thumbs, who’s charismatic but warm, passionate but empathetic, funny but sensitive, someone you can lay your worries down on without worry about them weighting him down — wait, his name is Troye? Oh. Yeah, it is kinda weird all the YouTube I watched of him referring to him as Troye never mentioned Xander before this year. Gonna fix th- (gets up and dances, never actually finishes the blurb-
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang:  “Why does he have my psyche in a chokehold?” quipped SNL. It’s a good question. Shirt small as can be, pants as big as they come, Troye Sivan is finally commanding his position in culture, and “Got Me Started” is but one of the tools in his arsenal. If this song can get Timothée Chalamet, the moisturized Machine Gun Kelly he is, to do the choreography on SNL along with Lucy Dacus, Pheobe Bridgers, and Julien Baker; if this song can inspire local drag queens to lean the choreography in one night and perform it the next day at brunch; if this song can have me clamoring for my own Gucci glitter suit; if this song can take a meme and turn it into a supremely danceable sing; Troye might finally come the mainstream pop star he deserves to be. 
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: A Y2K masterclass. The Bag Raiders sample is relatively modern but evokes the halcyon days of Venga; the “oh baby baby” tag evokes the ingenue days of Britney; the percussion obviously evokes the newly re-beloved days of garage. Everything is just so evocative, and tasteful, trading curated competence for feeling and immediacy. The lyrics actually do a pretty good job of describing the sort of lightning chemistry that yanks you away from propriety (“we should experiment to the detriment of whoever’s on the couch” — damn). But nowhere is that spark found in the song.
[6]

Anna Katrina Lockwood: This song sounds like being absolutely blitzed drunk at a pie shop in Collingwood at 2am, a very Australian experience I’d hazard a guess I share with Troye Sivan. I’d be totally on board with this song if this vibe matched the lyrics, but that’s not exactly the case here. Also, the Australian-ness of that Bag Raiders sample is completely subsumed by its meme-ness at this point, so it’s hard to think of this song as anything other than a minor failure, though a decently entertaining one. 
[5]

Alfred Soto: That sample is a menace — couldn’t he have found a more complementary sound to play against that lovely electric piano? Maybe he thinks the voice distortion is that sound. Still,  Sivan’s in fine fey form, and lines like “we can experiment to the detriment of whoever’s on the couch” will make Neil Tennant double check his relative pronouns.
[7]

Brad Shoup: I have no relationship with “Shooting Stars”, so I’m delighted by what Alfred  delightfully calls a “mosquito riff”. I find it thoroughly agreeable, unlike Sivan’s mosquito voice on the chorus, which intrudes on an otherwise chill golden hour. (Blame Ian Kirkpatrick for that.) Otherwise, it’s tame fun, a sleepily flirty garage-pop track that suggests Zayn handing “Love Like This” to Harry.
[6]

Rachel Saywitz: Feel like one day this will be cited in an academic paper called “The Sexification of Mememology.” Also gotta give Troye credit for creating a new meme from the sexifying the old meme. 
[7]

Josh Winters: If anxiety is the sensation of the desire of the other (as Lacan once theorized), it’s a dilemma Troye Sivan seems to run into regularly. It’s intriguing to hear the paradox in how he plays it cool while processing his arousal, laying down a level-headed vocal melody between the 2-step beat skittering about and the sample buzzing like a heart monitor on high alert. The bursts of excitement that initiate the choruses help to move the action forward, but it’s in the moments where the beat drops out, time hangs in the air for a second, and he taps into his vulnerability to offer it to the other. “Boy, can I be honest? I wanna tell you what’s on my mind.” Eventually, the many pulses of the present align, and Troye can surrender to the heat of the moment in all of its sexy glory. It’s hilarious and frustrating how navigating desire can feel like finding yourself in the same tired situation, but then each experience can provoke something unearthed in us with every new person we come into contact with. And yet, despite the discomfort, it’s a threshold I’m willing to push through time after time. After all, aren’t anxiety and excitement one and the same?
[9]

Alex Ostroff: This is where I hear Damita Jo not just in Troye’s lyrics, but also the music. The smooth glide of “SloLove” is all over this, albeit filtered through the current UKG and 2step revival. My ignorance of the sample can’t be chalked up to age – we apparently covered it on Jukebox five months after I started writing here – but I’m still protected from the intense meme-related reactions everyone else on the planet seemed to have. Instead, I’m captured by Troye’s whispered, “Let’s go”, as he finds a man in the corner of a crowded house, locks eyes, and confesses, “Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body”, then suggests experimenting to the detriment of the sofa’s current occupants. Or by his deep muttered “yeah” at 2:45. The brazen sample is also just tacky enough to disrupt the perpetually chill tastefulness that risks taking over other parts of the album. Neither track we’re covering today is the best single from this era – that honour belongs to Troye’s fascinating, thorny, pathetic, power tripping, horny, vaguely self-loathing exploration of the appeal of ostensibly straight boys, but “Got Me Started” is definitely the one most likely to get me on the dancefloor.
[9]

David Moore: If you’re going to pay to jack Bag Raiders so two thousand and late, why would you try to flatten it into atmospheric mush like this, like trying to roll gumballs into cookie dough? Either wrangle with what the thing is or at least chew it up and deface it; for god’s sake, Katy Perry was the last one to touch it. It’s not some hiding-in-plain-sight gem from a bygone era, it just sounds unfashionably old, like everything from 2008-2010 will sound forever (not sure why this is, some sort of world-historical demarcation point, but subtler than electrification or a world war). And this in turn makes Troye Sivan sound old, even though he’s only 28, which I guess must be 40 in Troye Sivan years. Anyway, I just went back to listen to “Whatever You Shoot” from Dirty South Dance 2 to see if that sounded old, too, and guess what! It did. But not as old as I thought it might, and certainly not as old as this one makes me feel.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: Even in the best of cases where a recognizable sample is used as a song’s backbone, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a bit of cynicism was at work in its creation: they did it because it was easy, or because the label asked them to, or just to flex on us that they could, et cetera. I detect absolutely none of that cynicism here, as it’s clear that Sivan is approaching “Shooting Stars” from a place of wide-eyed reverence and awe, and a desire to extrapolate upon the dreamily familiar soundscape rather than crassly exploit it. The transitions between late-aughts indie dance and early-aughts garage aren’t totally seamless, but the implicit link that the song draws between online and offline forms of connection is compelling enough to smooth things over.
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The sample is an admirable choice, all silliness-turned-serious to match the way love and libido make all things new. Imagine if a celebrity sexted “kinda miss using my body” and a screenshot of that message went viral on Twitter. People would spout opinions about it being corny and cringe. They’re right, but isn’t that true of anything that involves our body?
[7]

Poppers, to two decimal places.

[Video]
[6.83]

Rachel Saywitz: Heathens, debauchers, partakers of libations, gather round, for this is a story most foul. It’s a titillating tale of delight, a sensuous account of the sweetest carnal pleasures. For here bare buttocks were slapped, saliva was swapped, and crotches were lit aflame. And on this most sinful of nights, the boomiest of bass ran pounded a skinny man with undead eyes. Yes, this was the God-hating demon himself. Using his nasal tone to elevate the most traditional of club beats into a sexual paradise. Giving his catchiest hook to a gaggle of men, no doubt caught under his spell. Beware this evil-doer. For he makes even the straightest of people fall into his gaze. Under any circumstances, do not feel the rush. 
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Xander went through a lot in that series. He got his music career ground into nothingness before he became an adult, got shocked into incoherence by a lame who has a godawful ponytail, got cussed with homophobic lies, it’s great to hear him launch off these exciting house drum programming that gets so big in the mix he kinda has to be – wait, his name is Troye? Wow, what else did they take — he had an actual singing career and acting career before this. He’s never been named Xander? decided to just dance to the song and fix the blurb later, never does
[8]

Oliver Maier: Sivan’s a curious export to me, a mostly middling songwriter who converts more and more fans each cycle simply by existing, like the Luigi who wins by doing absolutely nothing of pop music. I don’t begrudge him it, I just don’t see his angle. “Rush” is a certifiable Big Tune™, but to me that has more to do with the shouty lads on the hook than Troye, who flits around like a cherubic chaperone.
[7]

Will Adams: So the solution to my problem with Troye’s just-okay voice (besides Hot Chip remixes) is to baton pass the chorus to a full Village People chant. Brilliant! It’s the cherry on a just-too-tailored piano-house instrumental, which makes me think that maybe he should phone Disclosure for some collabs.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: A rare show of genuine tension and heat from Troye Sivan. But that’s not due to Troye so much as the heady fog of reverb and posse of mega-masc guys he surrounds himself with.
[7]

David Moore: It’s too late for me to grok Troye Sivan’s whole deal, I think, but this reminds me of the fake-seeming dance tracks I constantly pull from Spotify’s new music playlists, most of which are designed for Dance Mode [picture of purple disco ball] and Beast Mode [picture of buff shirtless man holding dumbbells] and presumably many other Modes that I can’t imagine this particular song hyping me up for or, more accurately, helping me to survive with only minor shoulder injuries.
[4]

Will Rivitz: Free us from the tyranny of gang vocals.
[5]

Michael Hong: Not really a radical reinvention — if “Dance to This” were dialed to a 5, then this is amped up to a measly 7, and Troye’s been way more explicit with underage hookups and poorly disguised flower metaphors — but damn if this isn’t fun.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: Why isn’t Troye Sivan an international, honest-to-goodness, radio-saturating popstar?! (Spoiler alert: it’s because he’s so openly gay in his lyrics, which in 2023 is absurd but there you fucking go.) Sivan’s vocals here are simultaneously confident and dreamy, and goddamn, “Rush” is so swoony it actually feels like the rush you get meeting someone on a dancefloor and just connecting, immediately. And also, I mean, poppers; he clearly knows of what he sings.
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: This summer, after seeing Barbie & Renaissance in the same day, my friend found poppers on the floor of our favorite drag bar that were so strong that I’m convinced to this day that I have brain damage. Was it a coincidence that this happened two weeks after the release of this song? I think not. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: In everything I’d read about the Troye Sivan album I don’t recall seeing anyone mention “he sometimes sounds a bit like Friendly Fires now” and honestly I would have liked to have had that information.
[9]

Alfred Soto: I would’ve liked Troye Sivan as a model. Introverted but not shy, fluent in the ways in which a life of constructing an identity on one’s phone brings new adventures and stirs up familiar fears, Sivan isn’t coy. “Rush,” though, reminds me of Jessie Ware’s latest album: the forced euphoria of a camp counselor with two weeks to go before the end. 
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: An all-time great song to jump up and down and chant along to. To make beautifully head-empty pretty bro music like this is a true gift that must not be squandered.
[9]

Leah Isobel: “Rush” is suitably aerodynamic, with the exception of its blocky football-chant chorus. It’s like a beer commercial plopped into a DJ set, and its masculinity comes across as glib compared with the airy pianos and bouncy bongos. But I get that Troye is the chronicler of emotional distance within intimacy, and I like that he takes some time out from huffing poppers with the boys to wink, “This shit is so much fun“; that’s the kind of distance that feels true, the moment when your brain surfaces just long enough to realize how ridiculous it is to be a body in space.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The video version offers a deal: you get a post-chorus without violent panning between fore- and background, but also a comedown outro about loving “with reciprocity”. I’ll take the wispy original, which tries to bulk up with a great bro chorus but ultimately glides around corners, pleading for pleasure. (“Kiss it when you’re done” is such a good line. I can’t get over it.) Also, two-and-a-half minutes is the right duration for this kind of churning yet weightless pop-house encounter.
[7]

Crystal Leww: There’s a Tiktok floating around where a girl asks where are the men who like women who look like Troye Sivan. While it’s extremely funny, it also speaks to the fact that there’s a real dearth of men in Western pop who are out here popping their pussy and putting their whole back into it. “Rush” is a full pop song with a curated, cohesive vibe throughout the song, a hook that doesn’t stick out in a sea of blah before and after it, and a choreographed silly little dance that Troye and his boys do. The bar is in hell — we’re lucky we at least have “Rush.”  
[6]

Alex Ostroff: On the Something to Give Each Other press tour, Troye pointedly raved about how inspired he is by Janet. Intriguingly, his standom doesn’t focus on her Imperial Phase: Not her declaration of Control, the politics of Rhythm Nation 1814, nor the personal discovery of janet. Not even The Velvet Rope‘s blend of the internet, queer activism, kink & self-empowerment which left such an indelible mark on the last decade of R&B and underground dance music. No, when asked for his three favourite Janet songs, Troye’s picks are ‘Together Again”, “All Nite (Don’t Stop)” and “SloLove.” Two-thirds of those are from Damita Jo, Janet’s horniest record. Damita Jo featured “Warmth” and “Moist,” back-to-back odes to fellatio and cunnilingus so explicit that Janet cut them from the clean version altogether. That feels right for the Troye era that launched with “Rush.” It’s not that Troye hasn’t explored sexuality before — Bloom‘s title track is famously a bop about bottoming, after all — but those were his takes on “Let’s Wait Awhile,” “Anytime, Anyplace,” or the psychosexual therapy moments on Velvet Rope, where sex was a window into his emotional state and romantic relationships. Here, Troye just delves into the joy of spontaneous lust and delivers a femme top anthem where his masc bros chant about wanting your touch. He whispers “Breathe ‘1, 2, 3’ / take all of me” and instructs you to “Kiss it when you’re done”. Like Damita Jo, ‘Rush’ can sometimes feel uncomfortable or cringey (is the glory hole 12″ vinyl packaging too much or exactly enough?), but it also undeniably fucks.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Earlier this year, a relatively popular musician saw a tweet I made that called their music bad, and responded with a quote tweet that derisively called me a twink. It was wonderful. I have never been called a twink before, and never will be again given my body type, but it started to make me think about all the things I’ll never experience in life because of the ways in which we play into type when it comes to sex. Or maybe that’s just me being pessimistic. Anyways, how about those meatheads chanting here?
[6]

We’ll stop making the subheads about ourselves when we stop getting handed setups this easy…

[Video]
[6.44]

Alex Ostroff: This is perfectly fine for a Dua Lipa single. If it was the first one I’d heard since “New Rules” convinced me she could be a proper pop star, I might even be excited about it. But in the middle of the pandemic, despite remaining a quasi-anonymous presence in terms of persona, she gave us “Don’t Start Now,” “Physical,” “Break My Heart,” and “Levitating.” The narrative hasn’t solidified around whether Future Nostalgia was a fluke album full of great songs, or whether it was Dua levelling up and entrenching herself as a global pop star. “Houdini” tries to ignore the weight of expectations and avoid the question. It’s a pleasant post-disco tune that’s a little too scuzzy to fit in with the previous album, but lacks a chorus to match the ones that came before. The most interesting musical ideas are both saved for the end: (1) the descending synth line that shows up around 2:14, and (2) that funky filtered guitar (??) line that pops up for the outro at 2:45. If either (or both!) appeared earlier in the track, this might merit an [8] — even without a strong chorus — but they’re bafflingly treated as afterthoughts.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Firmly on the other side of the pop-disco rupture that was Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa presses forward with a harder, more streamlined, more singularly focused version of the same. The bass rumbles more, the synths stay squelchy, the delivery is more arched, and the hook is, perhaps, a little too willing to stay within its comfort zone. “Catch me before I go Houdini,” she sings; it’s a warning of evanescence, and distinctly not the boast of a daring stunt act.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Dua Lipa is the pop singer in abstract. Her previous record’s embrace of Memphis Group postmodernism parallels her music’s sock-puppet habitation of the forms of dance-pop without any grounding substance or, like, movement. To her credit, she’s a good ventriloquist. “Houdini” has a great little rollercoaster structure, rattling and clattering up to that big stomach-drop synth riff in the final minute; and while I’m not convinced that anyone involved actually knows who Houdini is, her perfectly irritating, nasal pronunciation of the name makes for an incredibly sticky bit of popcraft. (One wonders how many takes were required to land on “Who-deigh-gnee.”) But that’s just it. “Houdini” has been popcrafted and sanded to within an inch of its life, so that even its flashes of character feel workshopped. Its emptiness feels purposeful, as if she took “Go girl, give us nothing” as an imperative.
[5]

David Moore: I think whether you like this song depends on whether you buy that Dua Lipa is an A-list pop star. To me she’s always seemed to punch above her weight in the pop marketplace, and the dumber the song is the better I tend to like it. (Her Barbie song sounded terrible until I saw the movie — it’s like a LEGO Movie song without jokes.) Back in the “New Rules” days I didn’t see a ton of daylight between her and rock bottom (Bebe Rexha), so I found the s’fisticated disco turn unconvincing. This, by comparison, is minimally constructed and maximally efficient, like…I dunno, a solid dust buster. It’s small and doesn’t seem like anything special, but it really sucks!
[7]

Aaron Bergstrom: Maybe the critics have it backward: Dua Lipa’s fundamental blank-slate-ness is a feature, not a bug. There’s a freedom that comes with having absolutely nothing invested in her as an artist. I don’t want to make Dua Lipa friendship bracelets. I don’t want a Dua Lipa: Homecoming concert documentary. I don’t want to know what the Dua Lipa stan army calls themselves. Sometimes I just want a no-strings-attached pop song that seems completely uninterested in cultural relevance. Don’t overthink it. Kevin Parker is here because we’ve been doing disco for three years now and it’s time for something else. The central Houdini concept makes absolutely no sense. Who cares! Let’s dance!
[9]

Joshua Lu: Dua Lipa delivers another quality dance track, but one that could feasibly have been a lead-in to the nth rerelease of Future Nostalgia than an entirely new era. “Houdini” doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the many other ’80s-inspired hits that Dua has already inundated pop radio with — hits that also had proper final choruses.
[6]

Jackie Powell: Is it unfair to compare “Houdini” to “Don’t Start Now”? It might be because “Don’t Start Now” was Dua Lipa’s“Popped” moment: that old show that used to be on Fuse, which chronicled the song that helped an artist achieve household status. “Houdini” is the beginning of Lipa’s new era, one she’s made clear is far from the disco of Future Nostalgia and Barbie‘s “Dance the Night,” and on first listen, I wasn’t sold on how the song makes that statement. But “Houdini” is a grower, in particular via its hook. The verses aren’t impressive, but Lipa tells her story in the eight-phrase chorus, which she sings four times in a song that clocks in at just over three minutes long. Kevin Parker and Danny L Harle overlap ’70s rock synths in each verse alongside modern EDM synths that are very ARTPOP-era Zedd and work on a track that’s trying to sound psychedelic. Lyrically this isn’t Lipa’s best, but her intonation is one of her under-appreciated strengths — most obvious in the post-chorus when she accents the phrase “her ways” in the line “maybe you could cause a girl to change her ways.”
[6]

Will Adams: The knee-jerk Future Nostalgia comparisons upon “Houdini”‘s release confused me. (If anything, “Dance the Night” was the clear FN cast-off.) It’s disco, yes, but it also has grit, fuzz and a self-seriousness that’s carried by the insistent bass ostinato, as if you looped the brooding opening bars of Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and discarded its pleading chorus. Dua Lipa matches the production despite her silly (but endearing) pronunciation of “HOO-dee-nee.” And just when “Houdini” starts to feel repetitive, Kevin Parker switches on the rotating multi-colored disco ball, and the fun really starts.
[7]

Rose Stuart: The most magical thing about “Houdini” is how effortless it is. Though Dua Lipa has never had a particularly sexy vocal style, here she doesn’t need it, all the heat conveyed through that dirty bass line and fuzz guitar solo.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: No I mean this is perfectly good flashdance that verges on greatness, but I just feel like everyone involved (Kevin Parker excepted) could be trying a little harder. One point docked because Dua says “Houdini” like she’s still workshopping how to say it right.
[7]

Lauren Gilbert: Proof that nonsensical lyrics don’t really matter in pop music, as long as you have a hook this good.
[10]

Ian Mathers: Ruthlessly efficient, with so little time or space wasted that we don’t have the opportunity to think through whether the title metaphor makes sense (imagine if this was called “D.B. Cooper”). But the skronkier version of the backing near the end is even more effective. One wonders if foregrounding that element sooner might have come close to advancing the current state of the art rather than just reflecting it.
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Injecting a little grit, stakes, and vim into Dua’s music after the airtight polish of Future Nostalgia would work, if only “Houdini” had a hook strong enough to keep the package together. This is all work; where is the fun?
[5]

Andrew Karpan: Dua Lipa is tired. Not tired as in washed up or unwelcome, but literally, physically tired, the kind of thing you can hear on the edge of her breath, the pocketed sigh that occurs between her chant of “I come and I go” and “tell me all the ways you need me.” The parallels with the song’s titular Hungarian-American magician speak for themselves; he could slip out of everything but was beaten to death on a dare, a kind of desperation that is both mawkish and, from a peculiar distance, moving. But in the present, the grabs at post-tropical dance by way of that faintly familiar Kevin Parker riff are annoying.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Running through the chorus at the beginning sucks a lot of the momentum out of the later choruses, especially since the main instrumental explosion is saved for the end. That ending is really fun — it uses several of the same synth freakout tricks as Kevin Parker’s other child “Let It Happen” — but gallops offscreen just slightly too soon. I would happily listen to a six minute remix, but a few extra bars are all that’s needed. As for Dua, she’s become the Reliably Good Pop Star that will show up on time, put in an effortlessly confident performance, and then disappear back to some vacation resort. The lyrics are fine, with room for improvement — the title drop has “grocery bag” energy.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Somehow both coasts and tries way too hard, and it feels like the writers think Houdini was a cat. And Kevin Parker doesn’t remember that he’s the producer and can continue to do stuff until the last 30 seconds. Yet weirdly that works?
[8]

Alex Clifton: Thumping, glossy pop that’s sticky despite claiming a vanishing act — precisely what Dua Lipa does best. No notes.
[9]

Kayla Beardslee: Oh, she comes and goes like a glitch for sure. “Houdini” isn’t a revelation like “Don’t Start Now,” but still a good time. I kind of wonder if it would have been even more interesting if Dua had given up on traditional verse-chorus structure entirely and just started throwing in left-turn bits like the bridge and outro everywhere.
[7]

Brad Shoup: The garbled bassline is good, like a machine-learning “enhancement” of the “You’re So Vain” intro. This being a Kevin Parker co-production, there’s not much to hold on to, but the textures are exquisite. This being Dua Lipa, there’s urgency but no playfulness. Which doesn’t seem possible: she’s shoehorning Houdini references into a disco version of Styx’s “Blue Collar Man”.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: More restrained and understated than one might expect a Tame Impala/PC Music production to be, with its “experimental” mandate largely confined to flourishes and trimmings and subtle studio trickery, all in the service of another high-drama Dua Lipa floor-filler that sounds “different, but not too different.” The blast of Kevin Parker guitar fuzz that shows up out of nowhere in the last 20 seconds hints at genre-busting ideas that were left on the cutting room floor in order to make “Houdini” a more sleek, efficient vehicle for pop dominance. It leaves me wanting more, but from a business perspective I get it — save the actual psychedelia for the deep cuts.
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I still remember when A$AP Rocky was meant to seem revelatory for thinking T. Rex was the shit back in 2015, and now Dua Lipa is talking about “changing pop culture” by collaborating with, uh, Kevin Parker. It’s deeply dumb to think that rock and psychedelia have uniquely valuable cultural cachet in 2023 (Lil Yachty fans please shut the fuck up), and “Houdini” just sounds like the ’80s backwash she spit up on her last album. So what’s the point? As ever, Lipa can’t rise above the barest semblance of personality, using moments of flashy reverb to mask her passionless singing. The guitar solo adds some bite, but Parker’s whole shtick is having a single memorable riff replace good songwriting. “Houdini” is assembly-line pop: everything’s in its right place, and it sucks.
[2]

Dorian Sinclair: There’s this great sound in “Houdini” — a deep, croaky synth burp that recurs under the verse. It stands out because of how odd it is relative to the steely clarity of most of the other production choices; amid all the polish, that odd little groan brings some welcome tension to the overall sound. Sadly, it’s not here for long.
[6]

Alfred Soto: There’s a lot of bass line to measure up to.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The drums on this were rolled off a random 1980s pop disco song that never broke, so it got looped and chopped for Dua to continue tickling the nostalgia antennae of the middle-aged yuppies we are, making it clear that at this point in her career, she will appear on her terms. But those terms have already been accepted, praised, and rehashed, replacing the ones that had her making solid R&B with Miguel and doing soundtrack songs for Alita: Battle Angel. May the next Dua Lipa album give us something other than forgotten ’80s disco pop.
[6]

Oliver Maier: Let’s talk about that very first second. What is that? Is that Dua Lipa in the recording booth with the track echoing from her headphones, muttering a confirmation that she’s ready to record? Or — as I think the acoustics more readily suggest — is it Dua Lipa waiting offstage, track booming across an arena, psyching herself up for her new era? This moment, I think, invites you to view this song in context, as the first lead single since one of this century’s biggest pop albums, from a star who has made a personality of professionalism. Dua feels like an anomaly now as we survey a pop landscape smattered with songs about self-doubt and Mental Health™; suddenly, there she is on the hillside, a shimmering Amazon woman who doesn’t do vulnerability or care to try. She performs emotions — elation, desperation, trepidation — like an athlete, not an actor. When she got made fun of for sucking at dancing, she learned with ruthless efficiency how to do so, and now she’s one of maybe four or five popstars who bothers. The three minutes and five seconds of “Houdini” after that “okay” are all business, unlikely to disappoint hardcore Duacolytes and maybe just the right amount of Kevin Parker to win over some Duagnostics. But that “okay” suggests something like the weight of expectations, something hesitant and human. And yes, it’s artificial; it’s not a document of a real moment. But with some popstars, and especially with Dua Lipa, the text is all you have to work with. This is a moment she or someone on her team chose to insert. For whatever reason, Dua Lipa had to cast a shadow for a second.
[6]

But mostly we hate the way we don’t hate this, not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.

[Video]
[7.29]

Ian Mathers: Wait a minute… there are two kinda contradictory meanings of “get him back”! I’m on to your tricks, Olivia Rodrigo.
[10]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Drivers License” and “Vampire,” the two definitive Olivia Rodrigo tracks, are arresting because of their emotional directness. When Olivia sings “You didn’t mean what you wrote in that song about me” or “You made me look so naive,” it unleashes so much power and vulnerability because it feels like we, the audience, are eavesdropping upon a real, intimate, two-person conversation. “Get Him Back” flips this formula. The song plays like a drunken gossip session with a friend, or better yet, an inner monologue of confessions too embarrassing and honest to be said out loud. The guy that Olivia wants to get retribution against and reconciliation with is never addressed directly and almost irrelevant to the story, because this is all about Olivia unleashing every oddball thought she’s ever had about him. Olivia gets pigeonholed as a humdrum Disney Channel ballad princess, but this song is so deeply funny from the opening bars (“Wait, is this the song with the drums?”) to the way her therapist dad and his mom become tertiary characters in the plot.
[8]

Michelle Myers: It would be difficult to argue that Olivia Rodrigo’s music is sonically innovative or even especially interesting. Once you get past the initial delight of “teen pop Breeders,” you’re left with a few sticky tunes and a trove of snappy one-liners you can append to an Instagram story you hope your crush and/or ex will like. Of her 2023 singles, “Get Him Back!” has the cleverest, most caption-worthy lyrics, which means it’s her strongest release yet.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: One of the weaker songs on Guts, “Get Him Back” is largely indistinguishable from various lightly sassy artists of pop past–midcareer Taylor, mostly–with bigger riffs but less punchy punchlines. And on the subject of pop past, given the widespread press salivation over Olivia’s influences it feels underremarked-upon that Fiona Apple already did a track with this conceit, and it was better.
[4]

Oliver Maier: Olivia can be quippy to a fault, particularly in storytelling mode, but I find her sense of humour refreshing and pretty genuine — I can’t imagine this song working from someone like Taylor, even if this sounds like “We Are Never Getting Back Together” by way of Reputation. There are plenty of popstars who will tell you that they still fancy someone who was bad for them without daring to reach for a line as pathetic and self-exposing as “I want to make him lunch”. Hook’s good, too.
[7]

Josh Love: As much as I love Taylor, she’s a huge dork who laughs at her own jokes (actually not a point against her in my book, but still). Olivia is so much naturally cooler and more withering, so she can sell a line like “He said he’s 6’2″ / I’m like ‘dude, nice try’” while hardly lifting an eyebrow. I also love how “I am my father’s daughter / So maybe I can fix him” subtly subverts the expectation that you’d hear “mother” there instead.
[8]

Alex Ostroff: All of the attitude and humour and ’90s guitars of “Bad Idea Right?” filtered through Taylor’s “We Are Never Getting Back Together” and mid-career Avril. The chorus is the biggest and hookiest and poppiest on the album, so naturally it’s the one I like the least. Still, points for “I pour my little heart out / but as I’m hitting send / I picture all the faces of my disappointed friends” and “I wanna meet his mom, just to tell her her son sucks.”
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: More piss-take Beastie Boys raps, bright excited chant chorus, the same disappointment from her friends, the excellent whisper “so maybe I can fix him.” But this one has the line “I want to meet his mom, just to tell her son sucks,” so it’s obviously better. And there’s a great guitar riff in the back, so it’s really better. And yes you got him good — his mom is typing an angry comment on a 2-years-dead blog to refute this.
[10]

Michael Hong: “But I am my father’s daughter, so maybe I could fix him” is the kind of out-of-pocket thing your friend says to you, which you smile and laugh off because you’re not interested in starting a fight. Kind of bad, kind of fun, but Rodrigo’s final attempt to anthemize its final chorus with a lighter-up sing-along is an awkward conclusion to her giggled banter.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Her commitment to writing like teens talk and thinking like teens write separates her from those who poeticize these states. “Get Him Back!” says what it needs in declarative sentences, which, if you think about it, are not how teens express themselves either. She seems immune to bad faith. 
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: With a chorus that romps rambunctiously enough to set off the crowd at a late ’90s Warped Tour show, you might almost miss how well Rodrigo’s rapping captures the overthinker’s cursed inner-monologue. (Rodrigo is the kind of over-thinker quick with a witty quip and a self-aware observation.) “Brutal,” took the same tack, but that song was a doom spiral; this is anthemic enough to have an acoustic guitar break out strumming the bridge.
[8]

Andrew Karpan: A thrillingly monster pop-punk riff dedicated to the subject of dating the kind of faceless rich people that Drake writes songs about wanting to be. Of course, being mid can be as contagious as anything else. 
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: My enjoyment of this perfectly good song has been significantly diminished ever since I figured out that she’s 100% doing the “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” flow.
[6]

Aaron Bergstrom: Sometimes I just stop and reflect on how lucky I am to be living at a time when I can write the words “prominent Butthole Surfers influence” about one of the five biggest pop stars in the world, then come to find out that two major publications beat me to it. Long live our slacker-rock princess.
[9]

Brad Shoup: Speaking of “Pepper,” “I can taste you on my lips/And smell you in my clothes” was a pop couplet about 20 years ahead of its time. That song was blanketed in a psychedelically surreal menace. That cloud isn’t here (only the ramshackle rap), but Rodrigo’s casual note about her ex’s temper makes the menace uncomfotably clear. The conceit is dichotomy, but not like the crazy/beautiful regurgitation of “Bad Things”. Doubling her vocal on the verses just makes thematic sense, but on the chorus, she multiplies: manufacturing consensus.
[6]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The weakest of the Guts singles, if only because the verses’ talk-singing is of narrative importance more than anything else. Rodrigo’s most awkward phrasing and strained attempts at cleverness are all over this, surely in the name of relatability. What ultimately sticks is the double meaning of the titular line; all this humdrum storytelling feels perfunctory when the dizziness and spontaneity of the chorus comes crashing through. The bombast is so polite that it could be a campfire chant, and the faux straight-laced presentation reflects the sophistication of her songwriting, leaving the rest of the track feeling comparatively shallow.
[5]

Will Adams: Frustratingly anonymous by Rodrigo’s standards, “Get Him Back!” puts all its points on a massive shout-along chorus at the expense of having anything else to say.
[5]

Frank Falisi: To attribute a maybe apocryphal sentiment to the piano man: the keyboard is a percussive instrument. You pound it and it creates its own space, space which, in turn, is filled by collapsing mallets. And what about percussion? Is this the song with the drums? The drums dictate melody! They’re meant to be sung to, like guitars. On “Get Him Back!”, all lower-case and exclamation bang, the drum set drags Olivia’s voice around that most familiar narrative: sour love, curdled absence, and the slip-rap hem-hawing of getting a half-beloved back. Her voice hits skin, halts, snaps and turns on a beat. What does it sound like? Who does it sound like? And then, the greatest trick a pop song can pull off: it reminds you of everything you can’t recall because you don’t have a name or word for it yet.
[9]

Taylor Alatorre: Not since Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” has a tentpole pop single been constructed entirely out of the intention to cause as much visceral annoyance in one’s critics as possible. (Taylor made a few worthy attempts, but she couldn’t dethrone the Motherfucking Princess.) Going by the reviews, of course, Rodrigo doesn’t seem to have many capital-C Critics these days, but what can a song like this be other than a big-budget reaction to the idea that, somewhere out there, someone hates us? And the idea that, you know what would be really funny? If we made them hate us even more. Rodrigo takes this hyper-awareness of self and runs with it, making a virtue out of bratty petulance in a way that was thought to be extinct outside of bands with names like State Champs and FRND CRCL. Getting an acoustic breakdown with gang vocals onto pop radio in 2023 is an achievement in itself, and apart from the inexplicably Pinkerton-aping “All-American Bitch,” it’s the moment where Rodrigo’s simulacrum of a simulacrum of punk most approaches the real-fake thing. “Get Him Back!” is the aural equivalent of those Dark Brandon memes with the glowing red eyes, though distinctly different in that it requires less pretending and will likely age better in ten years.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: I have no idea how “hits” work in 2023. I’ve been following this YouTuber named Spectrum Pulse for several years now, who’s spent the past decade meticulously tracking the Billboard charts. Those charts are something of a no-man’s-land right now, with years-old songs making dramatic comebacks, new records disappearing immediately after debuting at #1, and the entire fucking spectrum of country crowding out any pop or even rap (!). It reminds me a bit of the shift in 2016, when once-surefire hits like “Into You” underperformed in favor of moodier music. I don’t know where the shift is going now, if it’s even shifting to anything. What I do know is that a chorus like the one on “Get Him Back!” belongs to a smash, and it would have been one even a year ago. The double entendre of the title is wonderfully mischievous, Rodrigo sounds phenomenal, and Dan Nigro’s Passion Pit-aping production is as good as his work’s sounded since “Deja Vu.” It’s not a revelation like that song, one of the greatest pop songs of the 2020s so far, but it doesn’t have to be. Clearly, it wouldn’t matter if it was.
[9]

Leah Isobel: Does “Get Him Back!” have the emotional weight of “Vampire” or the joyfully nihilistic invention of “Bad Idea Right?” No. Instead, it has something simpler: an absolute fucking 15-story kaiju monster of a hook. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
[9]