The Singles Jukebox

Tall and tan and young and kind of okay..

[Video]
[4.67]

Dorian Sinclair: The thing is, if you’re going to lean so heavily on “The Girl from Ipanema” — a song people have been riffing on for nigh on fifty years — you really need a fresh take to justify the choice. I think there’s a strong idea here, and Anitta has been very open about the personal motivations at play, but musically it just feels like the throwback-to-innovation ratio is a little too heavily slanted toward the former.
[5]

Juana Giaimo: Anitta used to have a lot personality — like a lot — that didn’t consist in saying every two words that she is from Rio. The backing vocals are fun, should have been louder though.
[4]

Ian Mathers: Y’ever notice nobody just covers songs anymore? [/Andy Rooney]
[3]

Mark Sinker: Pretty comfortable here as a self-confessed Anglo know-nothing being fingerwagged for getting some of my image of Rio from Astrud Gilberto — I mean, yes of course Anitta knows more about modern favela womanhood than I do (or ever will) and has every right to re-set any such picture to suit her honest lived experience — or even just to suit whatever brash mini-swerve her career (her “persona”) currently requires. The teasing is mostly affectionate — but the ghost of the earlier does most of the early work and everything Anitta brings just cycles round after its first introduction, seeming smaller than it thinks it is.
[4]

Oliver Maier: The sample flip is a cute idea but not every timeless Latin song is destined for contemporary greatness. The whimsical melody of the original doesn’t really land in this context, and the insipid lyrics don’t help matters.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: The lilting synths and tacky guitars lie behind Anitta’s soft croon, slinking between the heavy bass and scratching percussion and papery snares and alighting into our ears, chuckling and piecing together the little bits of the memories she scrapbooks into a movie lookbook that entrances us all so much we forget we lost our hotel keys and we are now in Brasilia.
[8]

Thomas Inskeep: What I love about Anitta’s first major dip into English-language songcraft is that it’s not what you’d expect: considering its title, and being based around an interpolation of “The Girl from Ipanema,” you might well expect a stereotypical Brazilian postcard. But with lines like “Hot girls, where I’m from we don’t look like models” and “Yeah, the streets have raised me, I’m favela,” Anitta shows that she’s not interested in that. (And be sure to check out the song’s video for some glorious body diversity.) Musically, this is a summer breeze, pleasant but a bit wispy, but its lyrics get it over and make it much more fierce.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Pursuing the Ariana Grande market has diluted Anitta’s force: if this unprepossessing Latinized shuffle becomes a hit, I’m Camila Cabello. I hope it does for the sake of hearing “babies having babies like it doesn’t matter” on the radio.
[5]

Austin Nguyen: I can’t help but think of this as a TikTok response POV to “24 / 7 / 365” that at least revamps Surfaces’ summer fling with, uh, actual beachside raunchiness and trap-beat variation. The bar is low — and the illegitimate brother plot line comes from left field — but hey, it’s cleared.
[2]