The Singles Jukebox

Hotter than anything else today…

[Video][Website]
[5.78]

Katie Gill: I absolutely adore Lipa’s voice. The chorus is pure belt but the way she works around those low tones in the verses is seductive, refreshing, and just downright sexy. Lipa described her style as “dark pop” in a Guardian interview. I don’t really know what’s “dark” about this, but it’s a perfectly fine pop song that’s inoffensive enough to get mass radio airplay but distinctive enough that people actually talk about it.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: “Be the One” was an unexpected delight, so my expectations were high. For about 45 seconds this sounds like Sofi de la Torre, but Sofi lacks the boldness — or, frankly, budget — for an all-out anthem like this one. “Hotter Than Hell” isn’t as effortless as “Be the One”, but the production is more interesting, with sounds ranging from spontaneously huge drum fills to nearly atonal post-chorus vocal yelps. In fact, Dua’s powerful voice sounds instantly recognizable after only a few officially released songs. One hopes she finds more outlets for her idiosyncrasies in the future — think Shakira’s weirder excursions (“Empire”, “She-Wolf”) or Ellie Goulding’s more dramatic moments (“Figure 8,” “Guns and Horses”). Comparison points aside, she clearly possesses something; the trick is to harness it.
[8]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The steel-drum synth jabs and the percussion runs make up for a decent tropical house instrumental, but Dua’s voice injects the track with a hefty dose of stamina, a natural grit that’s rarely found in today’s young Pop. Her low-register verses are tantalizing, and when she soars for the chorus, it feels completely exultant. It’s nice to see such a talented upstart climbing up the ranks, and while “Hotter Than Hell” does not have the scorching dynamics of previous single “Last Dance“, this is definitely Song of the Summer material.
[7]

William John: This is the sort of thing that might’ve landed in Rihanna’s inbox as she sat in post-BBHMM, pre-ANTi purgatory. If indeed it did get lost or left behind in one of those Samsung diary rooms then that may have been a grave error, given how much the chorus sounds like a thunderstorm. The tropical house production touches are virtually quaint, but there’s a self-assuredness, underlined by Dua Lipa’s throaty vocal, that I thought missing from jittery previous single “Be the One“. A bit more radio play and this ought to be ready for take off.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Credit to the gulp that Dua Lipa inserts, intentionally or otherwise, at the end of each chorus — a ghost in a machine proud of its assembly line virtues.
[4]

Edward Okulicz: Dua Lipa’s lump-in-throat delivery of this song’s stream of obvious clichés doesn’t make me feel like she’s engulfed by a desire that will make her burn alive, but it does convince me that she could make a few cigarette-burn sized marks on her lover. Everyone copping their phrasing off Sia should take a listen to Lipa instead. The shuffly bounce of the track makes it sound like a promise rather than a threat, and it’s got a winning hook in the chorus.
[7]

Patrick St. Michel: Forceful voice and alright tension, but all those in-style tropical sounds take the edge off.
[5]

Peter Ryan: Lipa continues to circle the banger she’s capable of, but in spite of another subtly-textured powerhouse of a vocal I don’t think this is The One. It falls victim to one of the central cognitive dissonances of trop house, namely: why bother ripping off dancehall if your finished product is decidedly not danceable? The beat’s too deflated to prop up the song’s floor-filling designs, too smothered to provide the vital momentum demanded by Lipa’s prowling. When she joins forces with a producer that can match her she’ll be unstoppable; until then this is a marginal improvement.
[5]

Alex Ostroff: Tropical house is just what happens when you take dancehall and emphasize thumping four-on-the-floor kick drums instead of syncopation, right? Thereby rendering it significantly less danceable? Lipa’s voice is warm, but summer songs should be either light and breezy, or as dank and muggy as “Oh” and “Do It to It.” “Hotter Than Hell” wants to simultaneously sound like a dark, humid basement party and a giant open air stadium and a beach and it ends up just sounding like Radio 1.
[5]

Scott Mildenhall: Spring 2016: the tropical palette is now so embedded in the pop vernacular that it can serve as matter-of-fact backing, without a sniff of gimmick. The upshot of that is interesting — short story: if Hot Chip had released One Life Stand today it would be the multi-platinum hit it always should have been — but it isn’t the crux of how this sounds more like it’s trying to be a hit than “Be the One,” yet also less like an actual one. The rapturous, bellowing pop ambitions are great, but they’re offset by it being lyrically cumbersome.
[7]

A.J. Cohn: This track is tepid, lacking the sizzle of real sexual heat. The cut-and-paste steel drum line and faux-provocative lyrics don’t help either.
[2]

Iain Mew: The intensity level of the track’s tropical thump is more British summertime than infernal flames, but Dua Lipa wrings more urgency out of it than the words always deserve. And they’re at least not all obvious heaven/hell juxtapositions — “you probably still adore me with my hands around your neck,” is a striking way to set things up, deliberate flip of Arctic Monkeys’ “505” or not.
[6]

Brad Shoup: The way she lands on “hell” is quite braying; the stress she portrayed in “Be the One” just sounds like strain here. Canon tropical house is feinted at, but the rest stomps loud enough to present a real challenge to Lipa.
[5]

Gin Hart: I want to fistfight Dua Lipa (and writing team Tommy Baxter, Adam Midgely, and Gerard O’Connell) for underserving the prevailing metaphor here. Why invoke hell’s landscape as representative of your body if you’re too lazy to back it up? Aside from “you’re my manna from heaven,” the song is more idiom than myth. Call me a petty nerd, but do something else about your Hot-Topic-tortured sexuality. Older hells are cold, girl, in which case it doesn’t take much to be hotter, but it still takes more than you’ve given. 
[2]

Cassy Gress: I’m not in love with the hell metaphor, and “some sweet alcohol” is a weird phrase, but that squeaking, smoked alto is pretty great, and what’s even better is the play between the church organs and the vaguely Caribbean drum beat. It’s making me picture a late-night beach party, the only lights coming from a nearby church with its doors wide open.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: Exudes the kind of sturdy, understated confidence which is universally considered attractive, so liking it feels less like a matter of taste or opinion than sheer biological imperative. With a tension-and-release structure like that, I know I’m being manipulated, but when it’s tethered to such a compelling vocal presence, I’ll gladly go along for the ride.
[7]

Mo Kim: The hottest thing here is Dua Lipa’s voice, which evokes Sia in both inflection and evocative power; the track itself is too close to the onslaught of festival-ready EDM to ignite much interest, but it smolders with the same promise of its young star.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: If you can’t be a celebrity, be a mood. Such is the thinking behind this latest “dark pop”/”tropical”/vaguely alternative-positioned song, the kind that produces that cynical twinge of sensing I’m being marketed to, which I am. I don’t know quite how I feel about the slow melting-together of mainstream and indie-pop yet, or the playlistification of everything, and so I have no logical, defensible reason to feel that twinge. But top 40’s been genuinely darker than this for the past six years at least; I do get the sense Dua Lipa is talking about actual flesh-and-flesh sex, but that alone does not dark make. “Tropical” evokes, as it’s designed to, a memory cloud of stuff I don’t like: summer, music festivals, fast-fashion exoticism, and overdone trends. I hear no song beneath the descriptors, no personality beneath the vocal quirks, no added value over countless other vaguely alternative artists who aren’t getting promoted. But hey, it sounds good and will probably slot nicely alongside all the others of its kind. A low bar, cleared like hell.
[5]