No, we’re not cheating using a featuring… well, maybe a bit.

[Video][Website]
[5.88]Crystal Leww: The Sound of 2014 sounds suspiciously like the sounds of 2013. To the credit of Gorgon City and MNEK, both were part of the scene that spawned the sounds of Duke Dumont and Disclosure last year. However, this is an average dancefloor filler despite MNEK’s crooning and Gorgon City’s bleeps, largely due to the bizarre disconnect between the vocal and the drop on the hook as though the two are un-synced by half a step. If we were evaluating MNEK holistically rather than just this track, he’d win points as he refixed this track and turned it into a smooth, dreamy 90s callback. Alas…
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Given MNEK knocked up and recorded the vocal parts of “Need U (100%)” with A*M*E in about 30 minutes while tired he should have had enough time to sort the other aspects of this. The vocal parts are again great, but while they’re all about finding the beauty of butterflies and then setting fire to them (figuratively, don’t worry) they have an unfortunate lack of spark with the music. To hear anything of the sort takes effort, and there was none of that required with “Need U.”
[6]

Anthony Easton: I do not think that he is ready to go out in public with this soppy Euro-sentiment.
[2]

Alfred Soto: I’m a sucker for disco catchphrases over 808 basslines and midtempo post-midnight melodies, and MNEK sounds enough like Antony Hegarty for me to wonder if Andy Butler has any idea what these folks are up to.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: Why do I like Disclosure so much while listening to Gorgon City leaves me nonplussed? They aren’t doing radically different music. I think it’s how they use guest vocalists — the Disclosure brothers find ways to make singers sound even better, like giving Sam Smith plenty of space to do his thing, or guide Eliza Doolittle along via a follow-the-bouncing-ball track. When I hear a Gorgon City song featuring whoever, the vocals always seem like a secondary concern. I don’t know who MNEK is and I don’t care to learn anything else, because on “Ready For Your Love” he’s just there, to the point that he might as well have been a sample. The pre-chorus bit where his voice sorta echoes a bit isn’t interesting, it just sounds like Gorgon City trying to usher him out and then remembering, “oh, right, a hook!”
[4]

Brad Shoup: The places MNEK pitches “your love,” and the holes the bassline jumps into, nearly put this over. Strip out all non-refrain text, give that intro riff more of a feature, and please tell me he’s singing “shake my cans.”
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: 2013 was an awful year, where everything didn’t fall apart so much as rot and fester. It ruined itself quietly, went away quietly, and now it is 2014 and everything is quieter still. At first I was too worn down for resolutions. Then I couldn’t stop making them, more fevered than resolute and all the same one: meticulously slough off everything from 2013 until I’m rubbed as clean as this song sounds. Of course, “Ready For Your Love” is a product of 2013 too — literally by release date, and figuratively by sound and personnel: Black Butter’s Gorgon City and MNEK, who’ve collectively written or produced about half the UK dance-pop interzone. A charitable description might be “startlingly straightforward,” which is to say it’s got every cliche the year re-codified: birdsong over waves, drifting mist of a high synth; hands up to the sky, rain down like redemption, “blue” deployed solely to rhyme and love deployed as stand-in for mostly whatever. But the charitable description of that is that anyone can feel it, and MNEK does a lot toward that, his lithe voice more palatable than Sam Smith’s histrionics or the 2014 Class Of’s placid, interchangeable chill. It’s pleasant and professional and ever so faintly tense; as adjectives to strive for in 2014, those are as good as any.
[7]

David Lee: Last June, MNEK expressed his love for “two-step, garage, female vocals and 90’s R&B” — a string of styles that neatly describes Black Butter Records’ output of throbbing rubber-pipe cuts. Indeed, it seems natural that someone who describes “music people can dance to but…also makes you feel something” as progress for the British pop scene would contribute vocals to a song like this. Don’t let this fool you into thinking that he’s settled, though. MNEK is nineteen years old but he’s already adept at playing chameleon, concealing some of his more breathtaking capabilities — skittering Rodney Jerkins blingee pop or 90’s house fed through dancehall sensibilities — in service of the current genre he calls home. Even then, he navigates this genre so well — inverting it and integrating it — that it’s hard to sell him as lazily aligning with a cultural force on the upswing. (See also: Max Martin.) That’s the case here. He knows about the imperative of dance floor universalism and platitudes, of raising hands to the sky and figurative, sweaty rebirth. But then he swoops in, focussing solely on the magnetism between two bodies in motion, and erupts in falsetto squeals and fluttery harmonics. He lets the deepwater seismic waves of rhythm do the remainder of the legwork as they draw the dancing couple further into each other.
[9]