The Singles Jukebox

Not an (Italian) Britney cover…

[Video]
[6.00]

Scott Mildenhall: Rock is back! And it sounds like “Blinding Lights” (but angrier). If that song became the well from which all music was hence drawn, worse things would have happened but, on the same grounds, “Mi Fai Impazzire” grates after barely a few bursts of its initially arresting hook. If you glide, you can glide forever; if you rage, you might burn out.
[5]

Andrew Karpan: A joyously melodramatic Italian rap record that’s held together by a riff whose pure Joy Division vibes could get this played in dive bars all over Bushwick and the Lower East Side — there are nothing if not new worlds for Sfera Ebbasta to conquer. In the single cut with the incredibly young but seemingly likeminded BLANCO, Ebbasta accomplishes something that transcends earlier efforts to pair him with more A&R’d collaborators like, umm, Quavo. At least these guys sound like they’re jumping up and down and — you know what — I am too. 
[7]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Blink-182, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Juice WRLD, and Bad Bunny all come to mind, but BLANCO and Sefra Ebbasta sound like none of them exactly. “Mi Fai Impazzire” is a tourbillon of rotating pop, rock, and hip-hop influences, coming together to create something not quite new but still entirely foreign. 
[7]

Ian Mathers: Every country gets the YUNGBLUD they deserve. Sometimes two of them! Italy sticks theirs into slightly more synthpop environs, but it doesn’t help much.
[3]

Mark Sinker: Turns out my brain is entirely infected, when it comes to the inner verbal rhythms of Italian rap-adjacent pop, by the claustrophic moods and modes of TV shows like Gomorrah and Suburra: Blood of Rome: every single passion is a flashpoint for self-destructive violence. The cookie-cutter romantic yearning of the rock-pop stretches seems like it should dominate and even mitigate — except it doesn’t.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: The stinging guitar opens up and Sfera’s electrified and pinned voice careen across speeding ’80s rock drums and cumulus synths. BLANCO’s soft, plastique voice slices through the mix, soaring high into the wall as the synths and bass fly off.
[6]

Alfred Soto: They must’ve listened to the right New Order albums for that guitar line. Or the wrong ones. “Mi Fai Impazzire” amiably places several decades of Europop into a blender: nothing here but blank thudding pleasure.
[7]