Not all of us were!

[Video]
[5.73]

Jackie Powell: Like her father, Paris Jackson is a haunting figure. There’s a clear resemblance in the fact that she can sing with vulnerability and pain in her voice but also can create a visual component that’s eerie and attracts attention. The music video treatment is valued, and there’s theater involved in not only the mini-films end where Jackson’s love interest quite literally rips her heart out of her but at the 2:30 mark where this group of masqueraders and veiled figures begins tugging her and forcing tension. Sonically, there’s almost no real patrilineal resemblance in “Let Down,” which was clearly is an active choice on her end but is also a refreshing one. Her voice is smooth, a tad bit breathy and deep. Her harmony with producer Andy Hull is actually soothing amid how depressing of a moment this track is supposed to describe. At what stage in the breakup timeline should this song be inserted? Based on the mood, it might be past the initial intense emotional reaction right after the jump. “Let Down” is the calm after the storm, the moment of reflection. Jackson’s vocals are so light that I couldn’t even notice how this track was written as a straight couplet. I’m not sure if that was forced, but looking at genius had me cringe a bit. This single and her debut album Wilted were apparently based on Radiohead, and while Jackson isn’t swinging for the fences here with major mainstream success, that seems to be where she wants her musical journey to begin.
[7]

John Seroff: “Let Down” is a wan and unconvincing celebrity amplification showcase for a celebrity already famous for being famous since birth. Jackson’s watery Lana Del Rey impersonation lacks ambition or passion and seems selected more as a match for her vocal range than anything else.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: Influenced by LDR but without most of which I find so irritating about her, Jackson’s debut single has a dreamy yet grounded quality roooted in her thin voice. The production swirls, the guitars glimmer — has she been listening to Spiritualized? — and I get it. 
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The spindly guitar careens into the mix, followed by Paris’s soft pastel voice. Grey clouds of synths hover overhead, followed by little spurts of backups popping out and dragging up a bass umbrella and drum poncho. The synths begin to rain, but Paris sings gently and wafts off the raindrops, her drum poncho whirling. The synth rain continues to fall, but she doesn’t acknowledge it — until a speedy hit of guitar sweeps her up and carries her into the sky, high above the clouds, her drum poncho spiraling below her as she sheds the guitar and falls to the ground.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Coming off like Mazzy Star produced by Beck, “Let Down” wants grandeur but is hobbled by its banality, and banality at this scale ends up sounding rather stupid. 
[3]

Katie Gill: This song came to us through a wormhole to an alternate universe where it was written ten years earlier and featured alongside Christina Perri, Death Cab for Cutie, and Florence + the Machine for a Twilight soundtrack. And honestly, that exceedingly specific niche is why I’m enjoying the hell out of this song.
[7]

Andrew Karpan: Falling from the cliffs of an ethereal and luxurious fantasyland, the best moments of Jackson’s debut single come from the shoegaze-adjacent swirling guitars, which bring pleasantly to mind last year’s gently charming-but-dispensible Vanessa Carlton record, the result of a curious collaboration with the Flaming Lips guy. The rest is a glitter-90s aesthetic that really ought to evoke Mazzy Star more than it does, but there’s no fragility, no cliff dangling, no edge. It’s a breakup song from the “a pure child of the 21st century” and, consequently, it feels made to be listened to while boarding an airplane.
[3]

Austin Nguyen: There are no songwriting points earned for a “ground”/”underground” rhyme, nor do I know exactly what “hit the wall” is supposed to mean (Are we going with the Cambridge Dictionary definition, the Urban one? Or is it a literal post-rage quit wall punch?). Pre-chorus slip-ups aside though, the lilt in the guitar strums and Paris Jackson’s voice — wispy and weightless, like smoke from a burnt out candle, ever-so-slightly more reverb’d in the second verse — twine together for a simple waltz in the ballroom of Angelea Carter’s House of Love (the imagery in the music video is there, yes, but it’s namely the idea of a fragile, fatal, necessary hope — “let me down again” — one that gnaws away at some inner essence, smiles at oblivion — “flush me down the drain”). At its center is an abyss, widening more and more as the border crumbles and the electric guitar riffs on, and eventually, there’s nowhere else to step but into the void below, nothing left to do except ooh into distorted devastation.
[7]

Will Adams: Mazzy’s in there, obviously, but the closest comparison I hear is “Circle the Drain,” both in the lyrics and the gurgling sound effects cutting through the otherwise balmy rock. The slower tempo and waltz time signature make it less relatable and more of a straight-up bummer, but that doesn’t make it any less affecting.
[7]

Vikram Joseph: An elegant waltz which has clearly (perhaps a bit too clearly) been modelled around Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”, all watercolour acoustics and gossamer atmospherics. Paris Jackson’s smoky, controlled vocals are more than up to the job, but “Let Down” doesn’t quite achieve the emotional impact it aspires to, hamstrung by lyrics that are goth-kid diaristic at best (“eyes painted black / a tragic paperback” — come ON) and by a stateliness that precludes any real visceral power. For the time being, Paris is merely smouldering.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: When everyone was saying that Taylor Swift’s “Lover” sounded like Mazzy Star I thought I was losing my fucking mind. Well, here’s a track that does uncannily evoke “Fade Into You” — though it’s really more “Be My Angel” — from Michael Jackson’s celebrity daughter, of all people. (Which provides a benefit, at least for those of you who read this: since she’s already a celebrity with a very well-known name, we can just skip past the exhausting Authenticity discourse, the rooting around her family tree for money and connections, just all of that Nancy Drewing for clout.) “Let Down” is fully of the Lilith->Hotel Cafe lineage; the chorus evokes Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why,” the soft-focus masochism Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing. For once a song’s not chill enough; the percussion swells and occasional sonic distortion lets some of the sigh out of the air (and also exposes how “Let Down” runs out of lyrical ideas halfway in). But I’m still really pleased this exists.
[7]