The score will not prevent this subhead being What’s the [4.11]?…

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[5.12]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I get why these guys have played every festival in the world. This stuff is perfect for the 5:30 lull before the people you’re really there to see go on.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: An unexpected notion: this would be better if Alex Clare were singing it. In fact, it would be improved by quite a lot of people. Tyrone Lindqvist fails to fully handle the more melodic moments, left sounding like a well-connected national celebrity who has inserted himself into Eurovision. Are the elephant noises intentionally bathetic? It’s worth leaving that a mystery — the heady mix of proficient po-facedness and unclear conception of cliché makes this morning lemon entertaining.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Most of what’s going on in “On My Knees” works until the chorus, which has too much blarting horn preset, elephant noise and weirdo backing vocals to sit right. Would have made more of a splash in 2000 than 2021 (maybe it’s just that the bit after the second chorus reminds me of “Everything In Its Right Place,” but it reminds me of it in a good way). It’s like the ostensible seriousness is being sabotaged by some kind of weirdo ironic artsy tendency to put in ear-grabbing sound effects rather than have a fully ear-grabbing song.
[5]

Oliver Maier: The vocals have a Kiedis-esque warble to them which I quite like in isolation, but which deflates the erotic menace that “On My Knees” is gunning for. That in conjunction with the whoopee cushion beat leaves this sounding like boneless New Order.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The stirrings of a solid dance track get undermined by an ill-chosen vocal performance. Even masochism needs forethought.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The chattering bass is so frigid that the chanting synths rush back into their cave. Tyrone’s voice carries across their wind, drawing a team of sled kicks, marshaled by a howling vocal with a brief twinkling of synths. The snares follow, carrying Tyrone onto the sled so the kicks can rush him back, his howling vocal wrapping him tight. As they mush on, the twisted words and tipping synths duel in the sky until the howling vocal sends a cry up to them, cracking open as the sled kicks and pursuing snares fly off the snow and upwards, allowing Tyrone to sit up and see the spinning synth aurora borealis.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I like a dark ‘n chunky synth possibly even more than the next person, but after a very promising beginning it was kind of weird to get the vocals we do here. It just feels — and this is my absolute gut reaction, not sure it totally makes sense — like Giles from Buffy is singing or something. Not bad vocals, just a little out of place.
[6]

Tim de Reuse: The instrumental is inoffensive, if you can stand the way it keeps building into anticlimaxes before celebrating the energy it failed to bring. But the vocals — dear god, the vocals — so dead-behind-the-eyes, so flat, so text-to-speech, they make me physically itch. Perhaps I would be less harsh if they were not processed in such a way that the word “knees” gets a terrible strain to it every time he hits that modest peak in the melody; or, perhaps I wouldn’t mind it if the melody itself weren’t so one-dimensional in its evocation of the minor key and nothing else. If you’ve absolutely got to center an entire track around a lyrical and melodic hook that a sitcom writer would compose for a dull parody of Nine Inch Nails, could you maybe find some other things to repeat?
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