Will Adams: I have never played Minecraft. I do not know what “chicken jockey” is, nor do I understand why it has caused Vesuvius-grade eruptions of popcorn in theaters across the nation. Who is Steve. What does Jack Black think about all this. Is he just cashing a check. Is he genuinely excited to sing about this fictional snack. Are jingles songs. Am I still human. Does anything matter. [3]
Iain Mew: To my seven-year-old and friends this is one of the best things in pop. The children yearn for the memes. Except their other favourite is “APT.,” and not just for the title chant. Instead, the success of “Steve’s Lava Chicken” is perhaps at least as much to do with it sounding less like a jingle and more like a song shrunk down to component parts and bashed together into a weird new small space, down to the miniature solo. As comedy it’s not a patch on “Peaches,” but as pop it’s a lot stickier. [6]
Taylor Alatorre:18. In a recent film based on a popular video game, an advertisement for a fictional food item claims the following: “Steve’s Lava Chicken, yeah, it’s tasty as hell! Crispy and juicy, now you’re havin’ a snack. Ooh, super spicy, it’s a lava attack!” Which one of the following, if true, would most strengthen the persuasiveness of the advertisement’s argument? (A) Spiciness levels are subjective and can vary from person to person. (B) The chicken’s appearance in a video game-themed film suggests it is popular with younger audiences. (C) Most consumers in a taste test described Steve’s Lava Chicken as having a noticeable kick that lingered after eating. (D) The pairing of Jack Black and Jared Hess in 2025 is as quaintly anachronistic as the use of “Time After Time” was in Napoleon Dynamite.(E) Digital chickens cannot feel pain. [6]
Jel Bugle: Er, what’s the point of reviewing this?
Loveable everyman Jack Black, fallen from grace, never to recover
32 seconds of my life lost, 64 seconds as I played it twice.
Though, I did think — what if Jack was still favoured would I give this a higher score, maybe a 3?
Actually, it’s 3 days later and I can’t remember how this ‘song’ goes, so I have revised to [0]
Claire Davidson: Jack Black’s manchild schtick has led me to repeatedly forget that the guy does have actual pipes, which lend him a sense of conviction that makes this musical fragment — a four-line ode to spicy chicken — mercifully less annoying. Still, I do not envy the parents who will inevitably have to hear their bored tweens scream this song ad nauseum throughout the upcoming summer, so I can only assign so many points for commitment to the bit. [6]
Alfred Soto: Get Jack Black to write choruses for Drake, stat. [7]
Tim de Reuse: Buoyed by a punchy nu-disco beat, and smooth, glassy rave piano, Black belts out a razor-sharp, twisty performance. The momentum is stymied only by the bizarre mixing – his tone is high and astringent over the instrumental, and the piano struggles to make itself heard. I assume they’ll come out with a much longer remix for the standalone soundtrack album that will address these issues. [5]
Joshua Lu: I guess every generation deserves their own Jack Black movie music moment, but didn’t Gen Alpha already get “Peaches“? Even A Minecraft Movie acknowledges that this song amounts to little more than a commercial jingle; a decent jingle, sure, delivered with conviction and riding a bouncy beat, but a jingle nonetheless. I also haven’t played Minecraft in years, but wouldn’t the cooking methodology in the movie not even work in the game, because the lava would instantly burn the items? [3]
Ian Mathers: Look, lava simply would not do that to chicken. [4]
Al Varela: BigXThaPlug making country music is such a no-brainer idea that a song like “All The Way” was inevitable. I would have expected a Morgan Wallen collab first, but getting the Great Value version of him also works. Unfortunately, I feel like the concept of a “BigXThaPlug country song” is all this song has. BigX is a strong rapper on his own, and his hard-hitting, quick-witted flows sound great over the twang of the instrumentation coupled with the brittle trap snares. The copy/paste nature of its chorus loses me. Bailey Zimmerman doesn’t let loose the way he does in his other breakup ballads. It feels a bit stiff, a bit too scared to truly let the venom and exhaustion seep through the melody. I do think Wallen would have done this chorus a little more justice. Plus, the abrupt way the verses and chorus switch into each other is too disconnected to flow well together. You can tell they came up with the chorus separately, and BigX ended up mostly freestyling his verses with the general goal of “vent about a breakup.” I know what both of these artists are capable of, and I wish they just did a little more with it. [6]
Claire Davidson: That BigXThaPlug actually has some credibility fusing country with rap doesn’t make “All The Way” feel any less haphazard: his gruff, deeper timbre doesn’t congeal at all with Bailey Zimmerman’s more nasal drawl. If anything, this song feels like two different fragments stitched together, a matter not helped by the speed of BigX’s flow, which leaves him even more unsupported by the flimsy trap beat and vaguely twangy guitar that powers the track’s verses. I will say that the relationship BigX details in his bars does prevent me from dismissing the song as a throwaway, as he narrates the crushing disappointment of realizing that his partner, who once shared their most intimate secrets with him, now takes his devotion for granted, and may very well be cheating on him (“Sent a text, it turned green, why the fuck it ain’t blue?”). That is surely a very frustrating dynamic, and BigX says his piece on the matter with an almost breathless fervor; I’m particularly fond of the way different vocal takes interrupt each other toward the end of the second verse, as if BigX is voicing his frustration in rounds. Yet any catharsis his level of commitment may have provided is stifled by the song’s lack of a climax that would’ve been provided by, say, the inclusion of a bridge, to say nothing of the underpowered snarl that dominates Zimmerman’s hook. [5]
Jel Bugle: I thought it was going to be another one of those sad nu-country songs, well yer man is doing the sad country chorus, but I enjoyed the rapping, that was good! It’s quite simplistic. [6]
Taylor Alatorre: BigXthaPlug’s burgeoning career is proof of the newly coined wisdom that “you can just do things.” Turns out that in the era of rage and plugg and who knows what else, you can just put out a bunch of straightforward two-minute rags-to-riches bangers, backed by a syrupy Southern drawl and a set of outrageouslyobvious sample flips from the disco and post-disco eras, and people will love it. You can even title your album Take Care like you’re the Replacements doing Let It Be, and no one will notice this because they’re too busy anticipating the next “ay!” drop. The Dallas rapper’s decision to Go Country is as predictable as his go-to rhythmic patterns, and yet “predictable” need not always be a pejorative. A better word here might be “systematic,” and there’s a base-level pleasure in listening to BigX cleanly hit every target according to his self-designed fundamentals. “All the Way” follows the template too religiously to mask its naked crossover intentions — the lyrics give us the broken-hearted troubadour, but the staid verse-chorus routine has him domesticated. Still, the basic formula holds up even when country-fried, and BigX’s voice retains its rare ability to command every square inch of your mental space. [7]
Mark Sinker: Mid-tier extracts from r/AITA: whiny bois blow it up [2]
Ian Mathers: Damn, white boy jump scare right out of the gate here. The guitar lick loop is a lot more effective than Zimmerman’s hook, but he’s not bad here; both he and BigXthaPlug are kind of let down by how generic the take on heartbreak is, but I could imagine the melody getting stuck in my head. [6]
Nortey Dowuona: Was looking through producer Bandplay’s Apple Music producer playlist and stumbled upon a rapper called Upchurch who worked with a rock band called Dixielanders to make Creeker III, all of which are part of a discography that has songs called “Bonnies in the Coupe,” features with Boosie Badazz, Project Pat and of course everyone’s favorite donut. Anyway,I guess doing records like taught Bandplay how to build a home for both BigX and Bailey. [10]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This is so stupid. “All The Way” is the most basic possible implementation of the concept of rap-country fusion, a rudimentary lost-love country hook appended to bog-standard breakup-rap verses. There’s no musical synergy between the two, no attempt to weave together their styles or attitudes beyond simple juxtaposition. Perhaps that’s what is most interesting about this — while prior iterations of this formula emphasized the fish out of water qualities of one or the other participants, here the cohabitation is completely normal. This could be any anonymous collaboration between two artists in the same field — Zimmerman could be Polo G, BigX could be ERNEST — and it still would work to whatever extent it does. It’s a complete blunt force instrument of a song, and unfortunately I am susceptible to those! [6]
Leah Isobel: Me in 2024: Wow, this Doechii record slaps! I can’t wait until she becomes a huge massive gigantic star! Monkey’s paw: [curls] [2]
Claire Davidson: This is the second time I’ve written a blurb for a Doechii song on the heels of her proving, once again, that she is indisputably that girl, this time in the wake of her donning one of the standout looks from an already spectacular Met Gala. Still, like with “Denial is a River” before it, my admiration for Doechii’s talent can’t quite override my qualms with “Anxiety,” namely that it takes a monumental risk in sampling the beat wholesale from Gotye and Kimbra’s “Somebody That I Used to Know,” a song that is both widely acclaimed and ubiquitous to anyone who listened to the radio at some point during the 2010s. The challenge therein is that, while “Anxiety” doesn’t necessarily have to be better than the original article, it does have to offer a fresh take on the material, which Doechii’s dissection of the titular emotion doesn’t really do—yes, the song’s stalking instrumentation is appropriately cryptic, but that was something the original track already understood, as evinced by the inclusion of both Gotye’s explosive chorus and Kimbra’s incendiary verse. Doechii doesn’t really exploit the song’s climatic structure to its fullest, either; the reason why people remember the chorus of “Somebody That I Used to Know” is the howling passion Gotye employs to deliver it, a sense of full-throated desperation unmatched by Doechii’s variations on the phrase “Anxiety, feel it tryin’ me” that fuel her hook. That said, even if the comparisons “Anxiety” invites are difficult to overcome, Doechii is still never one to half-ass her work, and the boundless energy that crests in her first verse is a fitting evocation of the experience of having thoughts that race faster than can possibly be articulated. I do wish Doechii maintained a bit more focus on the topic of anxiety throughout the song—it has the feel of a freestyle at points—but even the second verse, with her staccato enunciation of lyrical fragments (“No lim–its, no bor–ders“) is so catchy that it manages to endear all on its own. [7]
Al Varela: Doechii never intended this to be anything more than a freestyle to build her platform into the star podium she would eventually gain. The fact that TikTok latched onto it years later as she’s reaching the heights of her fame is, well, a little unfortunate. She has a whole mixtape of some of her best ever material, and yet the song the public flocks to the most is an old YouTube freestyle built on the instrumental of “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye. Now that the song is severely overplayed and Doechii draws the ire of extremely online people who insist on telling you this is the worst song ever made, it feels like a lot of messaging has been completely lost in a sea of venomous discourse. I don’t blame anyone who sees this as a cheap novelty, whose blunt lyricism and merry-go-round chorus gets annoying after the fourth and twentieth listen, because yeah, it is all that. But I like that merry-go-round chorus! I think it’s cool to hear how she layered her vocals to depict the spiraling voices in her head. Her otherwise calm flow and wispy singing are a great contrast to the tense, plucky instrumentation. And that feeling of being locked in by your anxiety and being desperate to do something about it is, unfortunately, relatable in the year of our Lord 2025. I get why this song blew up the way it did, and I happen to think the song, even with its humble beginnings, is pretty great! If nothing else, I’d rather have a song that takes a recognizable sample and does something with it rather than repeatedly point at said sample and tell you it’s the song you like, but again. [8]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I feel bad for Doechii — no one’s 2019-era juvenilia ought to be revealed to the public like that. But even though I would prefer about a dozen pre-2024 Doechii tracks as surprise hits (her “Wat U Sed” verse alone!), I’m glad “Anxiety” hit, if only to prove there is a limit for Doechii’s critical goodwill. We’re still hilariously in her corner, but perhaps not enough to give this baffling act of Gotye revivalism the high marks we gave “Nissan Altima.” [3]
Harlan Talib Ockey: Things I have heard this song soundtrack on my Instagram Reels feed recently: boyfriend reveals, matcha whisking tutorials, best restaurants in Gangnam, get ready with me for the gym. Is it fair to hold that against “Anxiety” itself? Not really, but I can’t blame Instagram for only hearing the comically obtrusive sample obstructing the far sharper song underneath. [5]
Joshua Lu: The bizarre success of this song had the group chat concocting other nightmare 2010s sampling scenarios. Teddy Swims interpolating “Just the Way You Are”? Gracie Abrams doing a stripped down reconstruction of “Price Tag”? Ava Max, generally? Every hypothetical, however, did not sound as annoying as the current reality of Doechii huffing and whinging over the incongruent “Somebody that I Used to Know”. At least I can cleanse my ears with Megan Thee Stallion’s freestyle over “Like a G6”. [3]
Iain Mew: In 2012, when Doechii was 13 years old and “Somebody That I Used to Know” became a global megahit, Gotye made a rather lovely remix of it. He constructed it from a collage of many, many cover versions, mixing choirs and shredding and a lot of vocal layers into a strange and happy journey through the possibilities of one song. More than the original that “Anxiety” actually samples, it’s that remix which it makes me think of. Doechii ranges around modes and vocal styles and layers them up to construct something that sounds suitably overwhelming, at the same time as leaning into its stageyness. She’s solely layering herself, but that now includes layering a new vocal over a 2019 song, and doing so in response to its popularity running away from her. The sense of genuine celebration comes through in every relished moment of her performance. [7]
Ian Mathers: I am trying to figure out why the sample here works so much better for me than most of its peers, and I actually think the length of “Anxiety” is part of it. If this was more on the scale of many of the two minute tracks on Alligator Bites Never Heal, it would still be good but might feel more like just “the Gotye track.” Doechii does so much with those familiar elements, and varies what parts of them are being used and how, and the result both sounds more like “Somebody That I Used to Know” and like its own thing than just a loop would. Of course, it’s also a smart choice of theme/source material; the original wasn’t about this particular kind of bad feeling, but there’s a foreboding and maybe a tentativeness in those plucks and strums that suit what Doechii’s singing and rapping (both excellent) like it was designed to. [9]
Taylor Alatorre: YouTube juvenilia gets plucked from comfortable obscurity by arcane algorithmic magick, possibly because today’s teenagers love to have vague aural memories of their childhoods reflected back at them. I’m of the generation that made frat rap a thing, though — “I Love College,” “Opposite of Adults,” things of that nature — so I don’t have much room to complain there. Anyway, glad Doechii is getting the extra exposure, and her voice sounds great on this re-recorded version, but I could go without hearing that specific xylophone melody for at least a couple more decades. [5]
Mark Sinker: Jokes as deflections, jokes as tells, those ugly proto-thoughts agitating for attention, what she’s thinking, what she’s hearing, the whole evil wider world endlessly bursting in. You think it’s a scripted stage invasion and “just” a “metaphor,” except actual real cops are disappearing actual real people. Her control keeps her (us) right at the shimmering cross-point between portrayal and what we see on the news and have to process and fend off by listening to e.g. Doechii as she processes it to fend it off. [9]
Nortey Dowuona: Jayda Love did a great job on those backing vocals. the trrrahhs, the da da das, the chanting of the hook, the oww, oww, oww, the shake, shake shake, the the background echoes, all perfect, all clean, all claustrophobic. Doechii herself sounds just as clean, smooth and poised, as this was a messy, awkward yet endearing freestyle and yet it turned smoothly into a neat pop song just as Wally De Becker turned a little known Brazilian guitarist into the cowriter of a massive smash. The backlash is what seems to have swept this otherwise charming little rework into a symbol of the music industry’s corruption, but i would like to genuinely ask two questions; is this a better cover? And is an artist you like not on this list? [8]
Julian Axelrod: Doechii’s meteoric 2024 was all the more impressive because she survived an appearance on Katy Perry’s year-defining crashout 143. “I’m His, He’s Mine” smothered an agile Doechii verse and a deft Crystal Waters sample in regressive trad wife platitudes, but “Anxiety” has the opposite problem: The earnest insights on racism and mental health are hamstrung by the chintzy plinks of a decade-old Gotye hit. At this point, Doechii has proven she can sound comfortable in pretty much any style, and to be fair, she fares better on the nostalgia bait beat than anyone else possibly could. But is this really what we want to hear from Doechii? [6]
Alfred Soto: Of course one of my favorite new artists sullies my affections by interpolating one of the most noxious pop hits of the last 15 years. I admire how the Goyte bits tick-tick-tick like telltale hearts, and the chorus doesn’t fuck around. If Doechii needs “Anxiety” to fuel those crossover dreams, then I’ll give her a pass and wait for the next single. [5]
Nortey Dowuona: Apparently we don’t have popstars anymore. I’d like to say, bullshit. We have popstars. We have too many. Most of the aspiring Rihanna/Taylor/Lorde/Billie/Olivia wannabes are largely ignorable to mediocre at best, no matter the folks touting their genius/talent/savvy. Even possessing all 3 just makes you Tinashe. Or Kehlani. Or maybe even Coco Jones. But Tyla, the only reason we are reviewing this song, has all 3, and has hits, but just like all of them, is receding into the morass as well, no matter how great her songs may be. This remix allows her a chance to re-emerge; her voice is more supple and subtle, while WizTheMC sings like any rapper: inert, cheap and endearing for both. The song itself was already very good, but Tyla is a popstar; that’s why Bees & Honey put her on this song. Did you even know that they put out a solo remix?
[8]
Ian Mathers: Usually if I say a 3-minute song feels twice as long I mean it in a negative way. But here my surprise at finding out how short “Show Me Love” is relates purely to the way I want to luxuriate in it, just as the beginning of summer is hitting (it is almost 2am here and it’s 26C in my apartment).
[8]
Will Adams: It’s odd for a song that doesn’t go past the three minute mark feel so luxuriously drawn out. Each element that serves to enlarge the arrangement — sub bass, deep synth pulse, kick drum — is added piece-by-piece, creating the signature amapiano slow burn. Tyla’s presence on this remix only improves it, with stronger lyrics and additional vocals blooming in the final chorus. And just like that, it’s gone.
[7]
Claire Davidson: The spacious, multitracked hook that opens “Show Me Love” promises an ecstatic track built for the summer, but the remainder of the song underplays that scale, sketching the verses with thinly pattering beats and faint synth pads. Yes, Tyla’s subtle cooing is alluring on the second verse, but I kept waiting for the moment when this song would really explode, bursting into an undeniable groove or crescendo that would make the illicit sexual chemistry detailed in the lyrics truly come alive.
[5]
Alfred Soto: As I wrote about Tyla last year, I can listen to these gentle shufflebeats as guilelessly as I do a Rochereau or Can side, and while this lands on the ephemeral side, who says ephemerality can’t signify on its own?
[7]
Leah Isobel: Tyla’s star power brings a little extra juice, but mostly the song just bops along pleasantly until it evaporates.
[6]
Mark Sinker: Very pretty, very summery, everything but the song, which never quite shows up.
[5]
Jel Bugle: It feels very artificial and computerised, I couldn’t get through the whole song.
[2]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Perhaps my expectations are low, but I was genuinely relieved when this sampled neither of the prior “Show Me Love”s of distinction. Unfortunately there’s not much else here of interest; Tyla sounds as good as she usually does, but even her vocals can’t save this precision-engineered piece of Euro-pop summerjam bait from mediocrity. I don’t want to play fantasy A&R, but we need to get Tyla some better collaborators as soon as possible.
[4]
Alex Clifton: I’ve got a soft spot for Ed Sheeran — he’s easy to dunk on at times but I do admire the man’s songwriting and ability to hit upon a melodic line that scratches my brain just right. I also appreciate that he’s no longer sticking exclusively with “man with a guitar” material but expanding his musical palette. “Azizam” is a fun party song, made to get you off your feet and into the crowd, and it’s certainly different from a lot of the radio these days. Moreover I just like hearing artists not take themselves quite so seriously and have fun with the material, and clearly Sheeran is having a ball here. Added a point because the music video is my kind of doofy.
[7]
Mark Sinker: The feel and the groove and the utopian glide of 80s Level 42 — and if not quite the full unhinged Mark King underlay, the bass has a nice plump sound too. Plus a sepia-filter echo of the kind of Orientalist inflection that once marked the very best Eurovision entries — Greek, Turkish, ranging ever east after 1994, to enrage Terry Wogan, and please those with ears. This possibly makes the song sound more exciting than it is.
[5]
Alfred Soto: With a laryngeal massage designed to make him sound like 2007-era Justin and a bass thump as seductive as any crunk, Ed Sheeran wants audiences to know he moves like water (oh) and he’s in love with the shape of you (again). I don’t at all mind it — the dude’s adept with the hooks, as usual. I would not meet him on the floor tonight but I can trust a friend to meet him.
[6]
Claire Davidson: The balladry that has become Ed Sheeran’s trademark may prompt an eye roll from me at its most treacly, but it’s always been Sheeran’s straightforward pop material that truly exasperates me. Like his frequent collaborator Taylor Swift, Sheeran lacks the buoyancy to carry a hook with any real propulsive groove to it — he is, for better and for worse, far too earnest for the ephemeral quality inherent to uptempo pop. “Azizam” has an advantage over tracks like “Bad Habits” and “Shivers,” if only due to the momentum of its aggressively stuttering bassline, but everything Sheeran adds to that foundation leaves the song feeling airless, from the bona fide choir that accompanies him on the hook to the chipmunked repetition of the phrase “get up, get up” that’s just audible enough to grow irritating. Sheeran, of course, sounds more anxious than eager to join his partner in the dance he narrates in the lyrics, to the point that the line “Show me how to move like the water” is almost laughable for how ill-equipped he is to sell it. More than anything, “Azizam” seems desperate, busying itself with far more ideas than it can hold in the hopes of reclaiming an audience that has grown bored of Sheeran’s bland sincerity. Even the title, a Persian word that translates to “my dear,” reads like a flagrant grasp for novelty—am I supposed to believe this is the work of one of the hundred most influential people in the world?
[5]
Ian Mathers: I keep hearing that Sheeran in person is a really likable, charismatic guy. So at this point I’m just wondering: why does absolutely none of that come through in his performances? Why is it that every time I become aware that I am listening to Ed Sheeran sing my first reaction is “wait, that’s what Ed Sheeran’s voice sounds like?” (Every time! I have yet to retain any memory of it.) Even with an international cast of collaborators here this sounds vaguely like every other Ed Sheeran song I’ve heard, partly because none of them have made an impression on me. But none of them are that bad either. I guess every era in pop needs its own avatar of Mid Yet Huge.
[5]
Jel Bugle: It’s Ed Sheeran! Almost tempted to give this 10, because he just keeps delivering the hits – a hit machine, unstoppable, the pinnacle! The pop overlord of the 21st century, the charts in his iron like grip! Anyway, it’s alright, it’s Ed Sheeran.
[4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Fun fact: Phil Collins was the exact same age when he released “Sussudio” as Ed Sheeran is now! Good for both of them.
[6]
Taylor Alatorre: It would be foolish to deny, as I’ve tried to in the past, that Ed Sheeran is an immensely talented songwriter. Here he uses his talents to wage a pitched battle against the distinctiveness and particularity of a non-native musical tradition, and by the sounds of it, the advantage is his. Sheeranization may be a more benign form of assimilation than that recently put forward by PM Starmer, in that if all else fails you can still at least imagine yourself dancing to it. More than dancing, though, “Azizam” is tailor-made for walking buzzed and bleary-eyed through the plaza of some faceless entertainment complex, sifting through the bar and restaurant crowds for something that doesn’t look like an overpriced scam, as a hypnotically familiar shuffle beat blares unheeded through every nearby loudspeaker. The real “island of strangers,” in other words.
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: Azizam feels like too much of a tender phrase for such a song. Sheeran foregrounds his perspective in both verses, starting with a drawn out “I” that starts off each lyric too high in his register, forcing him to wind back down to his lower register at each pre-chorus, which even has better lyrics: “til the sun is awake, be a magnet on me.” The flimsy, filmy verses diminish the power of both the pre-chorus and chorus, where his triumphant “AZIZAM” flutters up, so high his verses drag the song’s ebullience down. We are to use the lack of detail in each verse as a lookbook for our own relationships, but that lack of detail prevents us from doing so; what can “I want to live here in the moment we found” mean other than “I want to live in the moment”? The other person doesn’t enter into it. Azizam means “my dear” in Persian, and its a fantastic phrase to sing, but it belongs in a personal, detailed song for a person, not a simple placeholder phrase for a pop banger.
[5]
Harlan Talib Ockey: Help, I’m trying to figure out what this indicates about Westerners’ views of Iran, but I keep getting distracted by how slapdash the actual song is. Ed Sheeran, never a stranger to unwieldy hyper-literalism, has gifted us with such lyrical gems as “I wanna be close to your face”, while involuntarily rocketing away from Graceland at hypersonic speed.
[4]
Julian Axelrod: Nobody wants to be the guy who’s like “Actually the new song where Ed Sheeran does Persian music is good” but someone has to say it: The new song where Ed Sheeran does Persian music is good.
[7]
Claire Davidson:Melodrama has already been rightly canonized as one of the definitivealbums of the 2010s, so it makes sense that she would eventually return to that creative well — even more so, given that, due to that album’s contrast with the sleepy Solar Power, the length of time between “What Was That” and Lorde’s previous releases feels even longer than it is. Unfortunately, “What Was That” feels more like a B-side from Melodrama than an innovation on its source material, working with the same palette of icy, pummeling synth beats without ever allowing for a cathartic collision of those sonic elements. I suppose that ambivalence is somewhat intentional, given that the song’s primary emotion is one of confusion, as Lorde attempts to process a long-term relationship that, while clearly meaningful to her, remains difficult to define due to its sudden bursts of startling intimacy. Perhaps that, too, explains the overwritten chorus, where she magnifies scenes from that romance with disruptively specific detail, all in service of revelations that feels underpowered by comparison. Why take the time to mention exactly how you phrased an observation about a cigarette just to make a fairly standard analogy between love and addiction? This is the folly of attempting to recapture the spark of an album made by a teenager eight years after the fact: every decision that differs from the original article reads as conspicuously controlled, anathema to the spirit of reckless hedonism that made Melodrama so enthralling. [6]
Alfred Soto: She may have listened to Taylor Swift for how to organize the breathless recollection of an MDMA rush (including the awesomeness of that first cigarette), but the savviness — savvy because inevitable — with which it leaps towards melodrama recalls the “Green Light” era — but just enough. [6]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: My thesis since Melodrama at least has been that Lorde’s music is better the worse it is. She’s at her best on songs like this — her first-draft-ish lyrics spilling over the bars they belong in, her voice threatening to overwhelm Jim-E Stack’s threadbare production. Everything sounds cheap and ephemeral, regardless of whether it actually was; I thought that there was something wrong with the mix when I first heard the chorus, but as I’ve played this again and again that blown-out quality becomes more and more charming. Lorde has always been one of our most obviously pathetic singer-songwriters, and here she’s flailing and bewildered, drawing us into her world with a soothingly lived-in chaos. [9]
Leah Isobel: I have to put it to record that I do not particularly care for Melodrama — it’s too self-conscious, every gesture over-scrutinized and intellectualized into absolute lifelessness. It made perfect sense to me that Lorde would follow that album with Solar Power, a whispered “fuck you” to expectations and fans; in retrospect, that album might have done its job too well, because now Lorde simply can’t win. “What Was That” is a clear pander to the Melodrama audience of city-dwelling girls and evil gay guys, and yet the response has been remarkably muted, even annoyed. “How dare you give us what we want,” they say. “Give us what we don’t know we need!” It’s extra-funny because, to my ears, this is the best Lorde single since “Green Light.” The refined, concise dramatic structure here provides pop momentum without fuss, showing rather than telling us that Lorde Has Gotten Older. But the past has weight, and her performance — spiky, rhythmic, sleek — articulates that weight. She smartly underplays the line “I try to let whatever has to pass through me / Pass through,” before getting crushed by memories again: the intellect wiped out by the emotions it tries to contain. Lorde, straight-A pop student and Voice Of A Generation (eyeroll), finally allows herself the possibility of failure; I wouldn’t say she lets herself take it, but progress is progress. [7]
Al Varela: I feel as if Lorde’s music is very dependent on where she currently is in her life. Right now she’s finding herself reinvigorated after a rough period of self-doubt and body dysphoria, and you can hear a more spirited and excited person that wasn’t there during Solar Power. She’s excited to get back into making pop music, and it’s resulted in a pretty good song! Not a great one, admittedly. The production has momentum, but not the release of emotion that made the best of Melodrama so special. I kept waiting for the song to explode and it never does. It’s a good song at its core, but it needs a push to live up to its potential. Hopefully that can happen with subsequent singles. [7]
Jel Bugle: I think watching some plants grow in the garden would be much more fulfilling than taking MDMA in the garden, but don’t ask me, what do I know of exciting and famous lifestyles? I’m always here to give advice though. Anyway, this song is not that good, and it was just there, and I didn’t really like it that much [5]
Mark Sinker: I’ve somehow ended up consistently missing out on how Lorde actually sounds, the routine her of her — maybe because she arrived and has stayed so pre-festooned with discourse that I’m always “hmmm later for this, I’m sure it’s important but I’ll need to schedule a free day for it.” As a result, catching up quick is all sidetracking rabbit holes, like being distracted for an hour by the 2018 PowerPoint where she wrecked Hillary’s presidential bid (key page here, as I assume all but me already knew). Anyway, I like the way she sings “in the city”; it reminds me of my youth in the early ’80s, and so do these softly tapping synth-sounds. In fact the whole song ditto ditto kinda, though perhaps my friends’ youth more than mine maybe. And this makes me think of them and be sad about some of them. I will never be that age again and they will never be any age again. [7]
Julian Axelrod: Before I listened to this song, all I knew about Sleep Token was that they were a prog metal band who wore Slipknot masks and worshipped a fake deity called Sleep. So imagine my shock, disgust and delight when I discovered they sound exactly like Bastille. Bad song, great bit. [3]
Nortey Dowuona: What a grand design, that perfectly weighed sword hanging above Damocles’s head. It should’ve been a badly mangled one, a weak wooden frame, an unbalanced blade. But it was a normal, acceptable sword swinging above his head. He was probably of weak temperament, one used to flattery and persuasion, subtlety and finesse, not the ham-handed, blunt violence that truly acquires power. But finesse is a firm string in the right hand, in one used to wielding power across the throat during the navy hours, not in the bright amber light of battle. Any war one can wage with finesse is bound to crumble into a morass of heavy handed symbolism, crashing and heaving but breaking the shields and piercing the armor a soft croon cannot. Maybe Damocles won’t hit you back because he knows he will never reach high enough to grasp the sword, seize power, menace his own courtiers with its tip. But Sleep Token are not so cowardly. [8]
Ian Mathers: Reading fans talk about Sleep Token and their music and how important it is to them is truly moving. There are clearly a lot of people out there for whom this band means a lot. That’s great! On the other hand: what the fuck is this shit. [3]
Jel Bugle: This starts of sounding like a lot like Imagine Dragons or Alex Warren. It does get going a bit, but there is no tech death flair here, no gurgle core dynamics, no proper blistering guitar solo, not even a hint of a blast beat! Maybe I’m the problem, and I’m just old, and this is just new and different. Sure it can be metal, that’s fine. Perhaps there is some deep meaning, some kind of codex to unlocking Sleep Token? [3]
Harlan Talib Ockey: Originally considered just saying “look at my lawyer heavy metal, dawg, I’m going to jail”, but then thought it wouldn’t be fair to judge this solely by whether it rocks. Unfortunately, it’s too stone-faced and well-mannered to be successful as a pop ballad either. [2]
Claire Davidson: Hoping for a well-produced rock song in the 2020s feels about as fruitful as wishing on a star, so I was skeptical, to say the least, upon noticing that a song by an actual metal act had appeared on this month’s docket. Rest assured, while “Damocles” is primarily a piano ballad, when the guitars are eventually integrated into the mix, they reliably sound terrible, a sludge of formless noise lacking any real texture, body, or dynamics. I’ll admit to being momentarily impressed by some of the song’s lyrical turns of phrase, if only because, speaking as an American, the question “Who will I be when the empire falls?” feels more pertinent with each passing day. Still, I can only give Sleep Token so much credit in that realm, because outside of a few marginally inventive metaphors, “Damocles” is a mostly standard narrative of questioning one’s own strength, not helped by the second verse that sees the narrator making flimsy excuses for not truly pushing themself. (“I can’t always be killing the game!”) Really, the entire affair feels decidedly risk-averse, from the notably prim pianowork to the morose restraint from the vocalist known as Vessel, all qualities that are hardly warranted by a song supposedly so preoccupied with existential questions. [4]
Mark Sinker: Back when I was growing up people couldn’t really sing — this was the excitement and freedom of rock! And later for a while it was exciting to discover and enjoy that many people could sing (and always could, but we hadn’t been paying attention). And now for a fair time being able to sing has stopped meaning much at all: you have to listen for other things once more. Here for example you can listen for a world-record bid in mixed metaphor. [3]
Alfred Soto: A dude who sings, “I know these chords are boring” is asking for it, I know, but in a song that stitches together several purple metaphors and the latest psychobabble, the line comes across as a plea, i.e. “Please excuse these dull piano lines and my mush-mouthed vocals.” Give a man a mask and he’ll play the sleuth. [4]
Taylor Alatorre: I wanted to do a Sleep Token review that was mainly about the music and not the anonymity, but how does one do that when the song is built around lines like “I can’t always be killing the game” and “Who will I be when the empire falls”? Aside from some gymnastic drum fills toward the end, “Damocles” doesn’t really scan as “falling empire” music, even within the narrow context of the alt-metal hype machine. It’s more obviously an effort to sustain and grow that empire through the use of piano recital sentimentalism and chords that even Vessel admits are “boring.” They claw back their genre-warping ambitions in order to get the seriousness of the message across: behind the masks and the ARGs and the clickbait mythology, they really do feel just like we do, man. It works, in the sense that I’m kind enough to believe them. But Bring Me the Horizon, their more taste-agnostic predecessors in genre-warping Britmetal, have shown that you don’t necessarily have to claw back anything to make that message heard. [5]
Will Adams: There’s irony in a song that invokes the Greek mythological figure who is one thread from losing everything as a metaphor for the precarity of the music industry playing it this safe. The pretty piano arpeggios, middle-of-the-road metal drops and anonymous frontman Vessel’s weepy performance suggest less the peril of an empire falling than, say, a tepid album review. [5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A musical anti-meme; despite this being, at worst, the second-biggest song in the world right now, I’ve not been able to retain a single fact about the experience of listening to it. There are guitars, unless there are ukeleles or pianos. There is a man singing — I am almost certain he does not rap. He sounds like Hozier but is likely not to be Hozier. You could get married to it, possibly. It is 186 seconds long. It is recorded sound. What are we talking about, anyways? [3]
Claire Davidson: I thought we had left this kind of song in the 2010s, but no, it appears there is an endless market for music that attempts to approximate bombast through the use of thunderous percussion and overwrought choral vocals. Worse still, in the case of Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” that approach is in service of lyrics that, despite evoking a love that’s supposedly transcendent, employ the most basic religious metaphors possible and still manage to garble that throughline. (I’d hazard a guess that the line “You got me kissin’ the ground of your sanctuary” is meant to refer to oral sex, but that would be far too erotic for a song this neutered.) That iconography is appropriate in a slanted way, because the grayscale grandeur of “Ordinary” would sound more at home on a Christian rock station than anything resembling a Top 40 playlist. I can hardly think of a more damning criticism. [4]
Scott Mildenhall: Inactive; drags on. (And if that seems dismissive, this could have just said “Dozier.”) [5]
Jel Bugle: No fair, you can’t wear a kick-me sign like this. “Ordinary,” indeed. Is this a powerful voice? It’s the kind of singing I just can’t stand, a sort of theatre school, boo-hoo but I am strong, I’m marching up that hill in the rain! I’m fixing your car! I’ve done the dishes! I’ve trodden on a Lego brick, but I won’t let it show! [4]
Taylor Alatorre: Alex Warren is the sin-eater who was ritually assigned to take on the worst qualities of Imagine Dragons in order that they might finally have a 6/10 album. [1]
Nortey Dowuona: To be frank, if you told me this dude was black, I would’ve have believed you. I hear it. Then I’d hear him sing “breathe and take my breath away,” and I’d immediately peg him as a Hozier wannabe (whom I’d have also thought was black if I’d ever seen him). I’d keep listening, hearing the limp way his voice sings the last chorus, and think, “Why did you tell me this dude was black? What kind of racial essentialism do you subscribe to?” We’d then get into a misbegotten argument about the influence of the blues on English, Irish and Scottish music and forget about the song entirely. After we’d both gotten home, I’d look Alex Warren up and find out he’s actually American and Catholic. That must have been why it sounded like that. Huh. (The song is fine.) [5]
Mark Sinker: The Narnia books are easy-read allegory, of course. Everyone knows this: a family of normie English kids escapes boring real-world war-time sojourn for magical adventures — except the Christ-Lion is there too! You don’t escape Him so easily! For Alex, the adventure is you: yes YOU’RE the ordinary, you’re the MARVELLOUS IN THE ORDINARY! The intensities in Narnia are when the author loses control and his schoolgirls shed their uniforms to gambol with fauns and satyrs and the Greek God of Intoxication. And here too religious love-song transport can turn faintly kinkster-horny, St Teresa-style: you’re my sculptor! I’m the clay on your knife! I’m the drunken grape on your vine! Except when Alex gazes out through the wide-open back of the wardrobe, all he sees gazing back is his own silly little face, to be super-mean about it. You don’t escape the quotidian so easily! He’s the ordinary, he’s the ordinary in the ordinary… [4]
Ian Mathers: Normally either I’ve already heard the songs we cover here or have never heard of them. “Ordinary” is an outlier: the only thing I know about it is that every single music-loving person I know who’s said anything about it appears to range from mild distaste at its success to outright loathing. This is Pop FlavourMush (now available in a tube!), and Alex Warren is a transcendentally tepid example of the form. I can’t even be mad about it. I’d have to care to do that. [0]
Alfred Soto: I heard this song in 2014 when the Lumineers made clap-happy massed-vocal pop. I heard it in 2006 when Daniel Powter briefly terrorized a badly frightened people. [1]
Aaron Bergstrom: According to the paper of record, Warren personally coined the term “Hype House,” so he has far greater crimes to answer for than making unremarkable wedding music. [3]
Katherine St. Asaph: Alex Warren is basically the Gen Z equivalent of the millennial ambition psycho — for more on why, please refer to my April Stereogum column — but despite his constant calculations of how he can best achieve synergy between musicality and metrics, I believe “Ordinary” is probably sincere. Warren was born in 2000, meaning that this stuff was last in the zeitgeist during his formative tweenage years. Before he was socialized by influencers, he was raised on Christian worship music, and the only thing that fans of the genre like more than worship music is pop music that sounds plausibly like it. I have no doubt “Ordinary” is exactly the kind of song Warren enjoys making. And the harp — though it’s not actually a harp — is nice too. [5]
Leah Isobel: Look, it’s not that I have any particular objections to heterosexuality. Get married, make mushy songs, reinforce gender roles, whatever! What irritates me is the facade of transgression built around a song that is traditional and conservative to its core. (I don’t mean in the political sense, though I don’t not mean that.) The lyrics’ sanitized nods toward drug use, sacrilege, and femdom could be fun without the twinkly harps or the gospel choir. I mean, they’re fun as is, but the sonic choices and Alex Warren’s rather wet performance seem calibrated to defuse the interesting possibilities those ideas imply. Everything here is boxed and ordered just so, designed to reintegrate the messiness and confusion of actual love into a perfect and sanitized love-image: a hypernormal song for the hypernormalization age. It’s possible I’m just being a big hater, and I don’t begrudge anyone for whom this song does actually work. If this helps some family make it through another day without burning down their neighborhood, I guess that’s alright. But at the same time… shouldn’t we all be burning down our neighborhoods? Shouldn’t the social order change? [3]
Will Adams: To misquote Sade, this is an ordinary love. [3]
Thanks for sticking with us during the Great Outage of 2025! Luckily, after we’d been gone for a while, we happened to see a billboard advertising some repairs….
Will Adams: Chappell’s ear for giant pop hooks and predilection for the theatrical allow her to go all in on a concept. We’re doing a country song? We’re doing a fucking country song. That means banjo and fiddle and a na-na-na breakdown and cowboy interjections and a tasteful drawl, all at a tempo suitable for an internet-friendly line dance. In another artist’s hands, “The Giver” would seem like a lark, or even a cynical cash-in on country’s recent surge in popularity. In Chappell’s, it’s another example of her commitment to the bit, an elaborate costume where every detail matters. [7]
Aaron Bergstrom: Nobody commits to a bit like Chappell Roan. “The Giver” feels like she went to Spirit Halloween looking for a Shania Twain costume, but all they had was a knockoff labelled “Singing Farm Woman.” She’s gonna make it work, though. [7]
Joshua Lu: The country styling of “The Giver” is the first indicator that Chappell Roan is aiming for something new, but the attitude is what really marks this song as a departure from her previous work. Gone is the desperation of her biggest bangers; here rises Confident Dom Chappell instead, happy to provide a good lay without worrying about anything else. Her assuredness, though, gives way to a remarkably weak chorus that starts with half-assed vocals before hitting a career-low lyric of “take it like a taker.” The soaring hook of “I get the job done!” provides a bump of genuine mirth, but it’s not enough to lift up so much dead weight. [5]
Al Varela: Unlike other pop artists who try their hand at making country music, you can tell Chappell Roan grew up with the genre. This is admittedly a very pop flavor of country music: the ’90s Shania Twain type that’s as much about catchy hooks and big personalities as fiddle and twang. Still, Chappell is having a ton of fun with the fantastic fiddle arrangement and cowgirl flaunting, and they give a Southern edge to her uncontested ability to pleasure women better than any dipshit cowboy ever could. Any debates or discourse you could have about this song mean nothing when you’re having too much fun shouting along, “I get the job done!” [9]
Alfred Soto: Of course she channels Shania Twain, but she sounds more like Shania Twain than Shania Twain has, maybe ever. Those power chords and that fiddle chase each other silly around the room while Chappell Roan, making like a rhinestone cowboy, cares not a whit when her voice cracks. She, as she notes, gets the job done. [7]
Mark Sinker: Turning ad copy into a metaphor for whatever you like, I guess. Fine if you’re in the right emotional space, but sadly the job I need doing right now is bookshelves going up throughout my not-very-new flat. The arrangement says she’ll do this swiftly and tidily, and the song-title says it will be relatively inexpensive. [5]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Self-assured to the point of laziness, which isn’t a bad thing; her previous work reached extreme highs and lows on the strength of her charisma and effort, while this coasts along to a pleasantly trifling status. If “The Giver” was someone’s favorite Chappell Roan song I’d be perplexed, but it is exactly what it sets out to be — a ’90s arena country track, an unabashedly goofy use of fiddle riffs and corny jokes, a jock jam for one of the least jock-ish fanbases in the world. [7]
Taylor Alatorre: “The Giver” could’ve misfired by aiming for one-to-one correspondence with Shania-Lange maximalism, a mode neither Chappell nor Nigro were built for. They instead go for a “local bar band covering Shania” vibe, and it’s a better fit for this kind of heartland ambivalence — campy in its staging, charmingly messy in practice, and guardedly sincere at its heart. Chappell uses country pop as the canvas for her punchlines, not as the punchline in itself, which some (including myself) might have feared. Of the two songs she specifically cites, I don’t hear the breezy reminiscing of “Chattahoochee,” but I do hear “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” one of the ur-texts of the “lifted truck” masculinity she’s prodding at. The fiddle part is a bit too high-pitched and needling for my taste, with its self-conscious rusticity placing the song in a constant tug-of-war between the honky tonk and the Target checkout line. What matters more, though, is the impulse to use a traditional instrument as an emblem of rebellion, something common to both Chappell and Big & Rich even if their respective “rebellions” are on two different planets. [7]
Katherine St. Asaph: I’ve already written about this in [REDACTED], so I’m going to hand off this review to my partner: “It sounds like it’s interpolating ‘Centerfold‘ by the J. Geils Band — which is a dad-rock coded song about seeing a centerfold and getting really horny, and this is also a really horny dad-rock coded song, so maybe there’s a linkage there.” [7]
Jel Bugle: Already decided that I’m not really a Chappell fan. This is a perfectly fine pop song that sounds a bit country-ish — I quite enjoyed the squeaky fiddle. A lot of things sound country-tinged; it’s gonna age badly. [5]
Ian Mathers: I don’t think I love this a little less than “Good Luck, Babe!” or the first album because of the country trappings (they sound fine here). And it sure as hell isn’t the implied shots at us menfolk — as is usually the case, I’m sighing not because they’re unfair, I’m sighing because they’re… pretty fucking on target, and I wish more of my peers who feel unfairly targeted would actually do something to make them less accurate. It’s just that “The Giver” isn’t specifically setting me on fire like a bunch of her other songs. But I wouldn’t rate it lower than any song on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, though, so I won’t here either. [8]
Jeffrey Brister: I’m totally fine with my stamina being insulted if the soundtrack is this good. [10]
Claire Davidson: It’s a credit to Chappell Roan’s pop wizardry that the chorus of “The Giver” was stuck in my head just a few days after she performed it on Saturday Night Live, long before it was widely streamable. I was reluctant to embrace the track upon its official release, thinking that the lumbering bass-and-guitar groove clashed with the more high-pitched combination of fiddles and Roan’s vocals that emerges on the chorus. But while I do still think those critiques apply, there’s so much to love here that I can hardly complain. The song’s lyrics could have easily fallen victim to gimmicks—to which country music is no stranger—but Roan’s cheeky references to the masculine posturing present in a certain stripe of bro-country are delivered with a confidence subtle enough to straddle the line between silly and convincing. I do wish Roan had included the spoken-word interlude she performed on SNL—”Only a woman knows how to treat a woman right!”—on the official track, but given that this is being shipped to country radio, I can understand not wanting to push too many buttons for an ultimately conservative crowd. No matter—I’m sure all the right country boys will be scandalized by the fact that a song with this anthemic a chorus is actually an ode to lesbian sex. [8]
Alex Clifton: If “The Giver” had been released with no fanfare, this would easily be an [8]. To be clear, it’s a good song: it’s fun and flirty, it’s cool to see Chappell Roan try a country mode, and god knows the radio doesn’t have enough songs about cunnilingus. However, Roan played her hand a bit early with “The Giver,” debuting the song on SNL back in November. It would’ve made sense to roll out a studio recording shortly after that, but instead we had to wait until March. There was also a month-long advertising campaign involving billboards teasing the song. (Can you properly tease a song that’s already had a full-band performance?) I know not everyone watches SNL, and I’m sure there were many folks in the mainstream who said, “oooh, new Chappell Roan!”, totally unaware it had already been performed. But as someone who’s avidly following Roan’s career, the release felt anti-climactic. It’s not terrifically different from the live version, and it’s missing the awesome spoken-word bridge. Roan may be holding that back specifically for live performances, but if that’s the case, it would’ve been fun for her to debut it during later shows, rather than debuting it only to withhold it on the studio release. [6]
Andrew Karpan: Perhaps the rollout was too much. Perhaps billboards on the highways of major U.S. cities to announce a three-minute song about hooking up in bar bathrooms create an expectation that is hard for anyone to fulfill, even with the last four decades of systemized pop rock radio programming at her fingertips. But maybe the everyday loudness is the point: a kind of figuratively and literal giving, a recasting of familiar language that fits deliberately into the larger, expansive Chappell project. [7]
Nortey Dowuona: Giving is a practice that requires finesse. You have to be careful that you’re not too domineering, trying to levy your power over the other person to assuage your own insecurity, or too patronizing, trying to chide them into praise to assuage your own insecurity. Being secure in oneself is part of being a giver, cuz a giver will give just enough, even a little more, but never too much or too little. In fact, the way Chappell sings it provides the listener that sense of relief, gratitude and pleasure. Even the nananas surrounding the little lines from Dan Nigro and Wes Hightower (he of Neal McCoy “Mouth” fame). sound assured, confident and knowing. After all, she doesn’t need a map, she’s no quitter, she gets the job done. (And can unclog a mean toilet too! Even fix the leaks!) [7]
You will have noticed that the site has been down for an extended period. We are working on fixing it and hope to be back with you and talking about new pop songs very soon! Thank you for bearing with us.
*Update 17 April* We will return with new songs in May.
