The Singles Jukebox

Eleven years now since Willow made her Jukebox debut…

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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The antidote to the plodding doldrums of 2021 is… a languorous pop-punk cut from March 2020 (a whole album cycle ago) revived by TikTok? “Meet Me At Our Spot” delivers on its promises of a vibe: WILLOW and Tyler Cole’s voices intertwining, dancing, and bleeding into each other with spellbinding effortlessness.  
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Andrew Karpan: I was disappointed to discover that the 16-second edit of the record that made this early-2020 release randomly a hit on TikTok last month actually slices out much of the pure angst that make it otherwise an another entirely pleasant exercise in pure Girls-core, a genre that hangs ominously over a collectively burnt out youth. (A CNN SEO-blogger, struggling to write about the largely forgotten album upon its release, took note that the Willow Smith-fronted act “call themselves The Anxiety and have been open about their struggles with anxiety.”) Instead, the edit on our feeds is reduced to pure vibes, the rush of driving in a car and going nowhere. But maybe the market is right and that’s the point. We can only get the vibes we deserve. 
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Alex Clifton: TikTok may have ruined this for me (I think that’s what happens when you hear the chorus a hundred times divorced from the rest of the song) but even without that I think I’d be kind of “meh” on this one. I’m bored all around. Maybe I’m too old for songs about escaping into the night for a moment of freedom at this point, but “Meet Me At Our Spot” stays in the same place the entire time, which seems counterintuitive to me. I suppose there’s something to be said about how popular this has become with quarantine, but I’m not feeling it.
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Oliver Maier: Everything you can expect from WILLOW — self-impressed, aimless, annoying to a level that probably counts as a scientific breakthrough — now with the aid of a chap with the exact same problems. Who says romance is dead?
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Nina Lea: As it is, “Meet Me At Our Spot” is fine, a punk-rock-inspired, mid-tempo, sort-of-boring track that sounds like the TikTok zeitgeist. But it contains hints of a better, more interesting song: one where Willow Smith’s rangy, mellifluous voice can actually give space to the restless, desperate undercurrent of youthful anxiety that “Meet Me At Our Spot” glimpses but never really captures.
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Ian Mathers: The vocals (for both singers!) are much stronger in the live version that seems to be picking up steam right now, and there the performances really are the highlight. I’m now old enough I’m able to go “you kids are too young to be this tired” and also viscerally remember how often I felt this weary and wasted at their age. (I don’t know what to tell you — it gets better! Also worse! Frequently at the same time!) Which means that “Meet Me At Our Spot” manages to both hit me where I live and make me feel very removed from where I used to be living, which is a neat (if faintly unintentionally cruel-feeling) trick.
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Alfred Soto: Every couple months I play a single whose purpose and audience eludes me. I can hear The Waitresses and Haircut 100 post-punking the schoolyard chants. In its current form, it has the shape of a demo by people who refuse to be too clever for their own good.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Some real teen movie climax shit.
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