Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

Dadi Freyr – Think About Things

In addition to seeing this gem on stage at Rotterdam, we also dearly missed hosting our annual Eurovision liveblog :( (Next year! Hopefully! Please…)


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Alex Clifton: 2020 is a year of “what ifs,” where every event that was cancelled takes on slightly mythic proportions. What would’ve been the biggest surprise at Coachella? What would’ve been revealed at SDCC? How would Eurovision have turned out? That last one is the most disappointing for me of the bunch, because I live for Eurovision in all its catchy campiness, and I was extremely excited to see how “Think About Things” would fare in the competition. It’s a clear winner from the get-go, which is to say it’s a dance song about parenting. (Only in Eurovision would that sentence make sense!) It’s a lovely mix of goofiness, as evidenced by the band’s pixel art sweaters, with a real shot of earnest love directed at Dadi Freyr’s daughter. It’s not something I believe I’ve heard before in this particular combination, but it gives me chills each time. Eurovision 2021 should be taking place in Reykjavik rather than Rotterdam (arguably, it should never have gone to Rotterdam at all, but Oslo) and I’m upset that Dadi Freyr didn’t get the time on the Eurovision stage he deserves, virality and all. It’s the least I can do to award him top points.
[10]

Alfred Soto: This Eurovision contendah boasts a few surprises: the collision of synth bass and a glancing acoustic bass slump, those harmonies, the way Dadi Freyer slips into the chorus like a second-tier love man like Ne-Yo or Ray Parker, Jr. Is it allowed to be summer yet?
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Will Adams: Endearingly kooky disco, something like if Hot Chip traded Alexis Taylor’s warble for Freyr’s peanut-butter thick vocal (speaking of…). The first half is nimble, relying on just a few strong elements: close harmonies, slap bass and synth interplay, chord smears. But then more elements appear — chintzy horns, percussion, a key change — and it starts to wander toward Margaritaville territory.
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: It became suddenly apparent when they actually remixed this how much it has in common with Hot Chip. Winning playfulness belies an open heart, and the altogether lack of soppiness only makes the concept more touching. Taut and bounding, it does give a sense of (self-acknowledged) precision engineering, but far less than it does a sense of genuine delight. It was clear he had a lot in him three years ago, but “Think About Things” goes further; in another lifetime, quite likely all the way to Reykjavik 2021.
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Tobi Tella: The fun is very controlled, but that’s not a bad thing; every second of this feels meticulous and purposeful, the synth comes in for the rescue at the perfect time, the voices are just the right amount of overproduced and the way they release that post-chorus breakdown is smart and thrifty. The strange level of poise makes the slide up and true breakdown at the end feel even more spontaneous and rewarding. 
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Edward Okulicz: Eurovision 2019 was one of the worst editions of the contest in recent memory, and I wish it could have been cancelled retroactively. 2020 was shaping up a lot better, so much so that “Think About Things” didn’t stand out to me as much as it must for others. It’s dinky in a way that exposes Dadi’s limitations — he’s adorkable but the song is too twee for its own good. It’s wimpy, and honestly, the music sounds like something you might have as stock, free music behind a PowerPoint presentation. Too much like Hot Chip at their weediest, I’m afraid. It gets to above average just on charisma, but to me it’s diminishing returns (both song and shtick) from his sublime previous attempt to represent Iceland. I would have taken Russia’s Aqua-with-a-meth-habit submission this year as my pick, and I reckon the juries would have gone with Italy.
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Katie Gill: The 2020 Eurovision winner of our hearts. God, I love this song. It’s a bright, fun, peppy piece of electronica that I’ve been blaring since February. This is a song that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is all the better for it. It’s light and goofy, treading a fine line of ridiculousness without going into full-blown Eurovision camp. It’s about a literal baby! It’s an almost love-song with a dance that deserves to get TikTok famous, a catchy melody, tight harmonies, and again, it’s about an actual baby. If this were a just world and not the apocalyptic hellscape that we currently live in, Dadi Freyr would have won that Eurovision contest (or at least came in second; Azerbaijan was also pretty strong this year) and the entire world would have joined me in having this song perpetually stuck in our heads.
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Steacy Easton: This is just a plain good time, with some excellent horns. 
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Reader average: [7.66] (3 votes)

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One Response to “Dadi Freyr – Think About Things”

  1. DON’T WORRY ALEX, I am still angry as well.