There are approx. 3.4 billion girls in the world…

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[5.20]

Megan Harrington: The going #hottake for “Steal My Girl” (and really, this dates back to the Midnight Memories reviews) is pointing out which rock groups have influenced the songwriting and/or production. Depending on the context, this is either an attempt to co-opt a pop group for rock’s grand narrative or the suggestion that pop music at this late date is largely an exercise in plagiarism. Sure, I agree, we’ve heard these chords before but isn’t it more interesting to think of how they’ve flipped the themes of “Faithfully” from a dude’s road fidelity to a woman’s road pursuers? Many of the song’s minor narrative details align nicely with Zayn and Perrie’s relationship; it’s not hard to believe she’s the girl everyone wants. Or, perhaps, it’s another song for their fans to self-insert — in which case I find the renewed use of Romantic 80’s power ballad tropes an ultra enjoyable move. Big piano chords spent a couple decades out of fashion, presumably due to a mix of smoking bans, fire hazards, and a preference for electronic sounds, but One Direction aren’t the only recent act to mine this particular past. Taylor Swift’s 1989 is dedicated to the decade, and even Paramore’s “Last Hope” is made in the sensitive rocker mold. Having seen the latter live, I can speak to what a perfect, ephemeral beauty it is to see everyone wave their flashlight app around, literally aglow in their feelings. “Steal My Girl” manages to unbox this dated sound without any mustiness; listing all the songs that made it possible does a disservice to the group’s cleverness. 
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Alfred Soto: Last time Def Leppard haunted their chants. This time it’s… Bruce Springsteen? If The Boss can get away with writing about a guy who spits in your ear about death traps and strapping herself to his engines while Phil Spector grins in the corner, then Harry Styles or whoever can follow “every jaw drops when she’s in those jeans” with a Roy Bittan keyboard line and clapping. Then the soccer stadium conspires with the horny lads in making sure they trample to death the dude who’ll steal the girl.
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Anthony Easton: There are 4 billion women in the world, at least. Also, can the woman who is the subject of this song, who gets no details, no name — really nothing but an object — can she not make choices herself? She doesn’t belong to you, she doesn’t belong to anyone. With the painfully earnest chorus, the silly handclaps and the derivative guitars, no one would want to belong to you either.
[1]

Iain Mew: It’s less than six months since Elyar Fox just missed the UK top 10 with “A Billion Girls”. I never managed to track down the population pyramids for the correct answer, but I prefer One Direction’s “couple billion in the whole wide word” because i) it’s probably more accurate; and ii) the imprecise feeling of “couple billion” introduces some welcome wriggle room on age ranges. That goes with the confident looseness of the song’s sound, too, though blowing it up to stadium size makes clear that there’s not a whole lot there.
[5]

Jer Fairall: “Steal My Girl” distinguishes itself with a piano-and-hand-claps riff, one of the few affectations of Big 80s pop production currently in play again that I haven’t tired of yet, and the solid reasoning of “a couple billion in the whole wide world / find another one, ’cause she belongs to me.”
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: It’s absurd that folks are writing things like “1D are making great pop-rock records” (Billboard, I’m looking at you) — this is simply the melody line from Journey’s “Faithfully” harnessed to a super-generic Max Martin shuffle-beat. And it drags. A chorus of nah-nahs and 5 seconds of squealing guitar does not equal a rock record by any stretch of the imagination. This doesn’t just drag, it is a drag. It’s like 1D are determined to suck all the fun out of boy-bandism.
[2]

Jonathan Bradley: The purest realization of the One Direction project is the live show, where five beautiful and charismatic young men spend two hours loping around an arena stage, goofing alternately on one another and on the audience: their presence always effortless and every invited guest always having the time of her life. It makes sense then that they would increasingly turn their attentions away from tightly focused power pop to stadium rock. “Steal My Girl” is in the mold of “They Don’t Know About Us” and “Little White Lies”: concise songs made large through exploding power chords and anthemic sustain-and-release. This one has an already classic piano riff that would be better if it weren’t left to carry the song on its own. The lyrics, marvelously, are pop-punk crisis: everybody wants to steal his girl; he wouldn’t exist without her.
[6]

Josh Winters: These “The Winner Takes It All” piano vamps make me think of Meryl Streep running up a hill during a Grecian summer sunset, and therefore, I believe that’s ideally how this track should be enjoyed. Replace an elegant, dignified woman with five rambunctious boys and it becomes a thought silly enough to entertain.
[6]

Sonya Nicholson: I’ve been replaying 1D’s album preview track “Fireproof“ since it was released two weeks ago — it’s got all the narrative good parts of “Story of My Life” plus a pleasant mellow bounciness, AND ALSO everyone and the guitar sounds great on it — but I really can’t get into this reheated Journey ripoff, just on principle, even if the vocals do happen to have an energy to them (and they just so happen to have a lot). It’s just semantics that this is the single and not “Fireproof”, right?
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: Timberlake meets Journey is great for somebody, just not me.
[2]

Scott Mildenhall: Once again, One Direction adopt a flush, frictionless sound that nonetheless resembles nothing their chart peers are doing. They play to their own tune, unbound by era, and were “Steal My Girl” to be placed in one it mightn’t be anywhere in the past twenty years. Beside the key-changing drum clatter and general expanse of chiming pianos, the backwards Belinda Carlisle lift almost seems modern. It’s like Let Loose’s “Crazy For You” played at half-speed and double-possessiveness, the one trait that rubs alongside the gloriously consuming sweetness glaringly.
[6]

Ramzi Awn: Beat should have gone to Sugarland. But I can see my imaginary niece listening to “Steal My Girl” and not hating it.
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Brad Shoup: No mewling, no prostration — she’s not even being addressed. But I am. I’ve got box seats to a swaggy victory lap, scored to “Faithfully” piano chords and a bass like a big ol’ thumb, telling me to hit the exit. A solo would have been rad (I hear the first few notes of one in two different places), but that’s not the kind of grandiosity that plays on the charts right now.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Still simultaneously sounding like nothing else out there and like a little dollop of it all — the wall of last-call piano is Journey, but in the percussion I hear “Paper Planes,” because I hear “Paper Planes” everywhere. I like this less when I imagine the Will Young-like pablum this sort of boy band sound is the foundation for.
[6]

Josh Langhoff: To accuse these bounders of possessiveness (“she belongs to me,” “find another one”) and solipsism (“the sun doesn’t shine, the world doesn’t turn,” “nah nah nah nah nana”), you’d pretty much have to bundle up all Western pop music made by males since ??? along with them and chuck the lot into the woodchipper. But 1D and their team are one bound ahead of you, since such bundling/chucking/chipping is the essence of their musical project. Like the Ramones and the Beasties before them, they bundle together their favorite song parts, chuck the sections that are just Steve Perry moaning about sad clowns or whatever, and chip it all together into a fecund mulch that trips olfactory triggers you’d forgotten you had. In this mulch all music — whether “Walk On the Wild Side,” “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” the Mumfords, or this Springjourneysteinman riff — becomes exactly what it is: a cool hook overheard at a crucial party. I know I know, all musicians play this game; but when 1D is on they play it with scary efficiency.
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