The Singles Jukebox

Narrowly edging out Cookiie Kawaii as being the shortest song we’ve ever covered…

[Video]
[4.14]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Cursed, terse, 17-year-old Gen-Z Tik Tok content just as teeth-rottingly sugary and ego-shatteringly destructive as Charli XCX or 100 gecs at their hyper-pop peaks. 
[8]

Jessica Doyle: Okay, “Teeth!” > “Let Go” > “SugarCrash!” And that I listened to “SugarCrash!” and ended up spending 45 minutes on ElyOtto’s Soundcloud page should tell you something in and of itself. I don’t know whether his apparent guilelessness is inadvertent, something he’s going to be embarrassed by when he’s 19, or carefully cultivated — based on the slight turn towards determination in the last verse of “SugarCrash!” I think it might be the latter, that he wants to stay the kind of person who puts multiple languages’ worth of loving greetings on said Soundcloud page, and saves his greatest venom for people who hurt his friends. In short: he’s creative, and adorable, and apparently sees no contradiction between the two. PROTECC. Or whatever the kids say these days.
[6]

Jeffrey Brister: There’s nothing particularly novel here (mostly just sounds like a dollar store Charli XCX track), and it’s over before anything has a chance to either settle or develop. It’s honestly barely a sketch, just a rough draft given a few frills and a mixdown so it wouldn’t feel too much like a tossed-off goof masquerading as a song.
[2]

Samson Savill de Jong: How can a song like this sound formulaic? All the tropes are here; blasted bass, distorted vocals, depressed lyrics, TikTok length. I’ve been in to, or at least admired, a lot of hyperpop because of the experimentation and boundary pushing, but this is already showing that no genre can escape its own cliches. If you don’t like any hyperpop, this’ll do nothing to convince you, and if you do, go and listen to that instead.
[1]

Thomas Inskeep: Chipmunk’d vocals and a happy hardcore drum pattern do not a song make. God, hyperpop sucks.
[0]

Scott Mildenhall: “SugarCrash!” as a song isn’t all that confusing — it has a relatively conventional structure and even a neat internal explanation for its brevity (nothing you can write being able to make you feel good is a great excuse for stopping halfway). As punctuation for even shorter videos of sudden happenings, though, it is baffling. Where is the juxtaposition, the change in mood, volume, pace? Unfortunately it seems The Youth of Today have finally run out of ideas, because “SugarCrash!” feels well out of place. Sorry TikTok, you’ve had your moment; time to take this song and your audience to an exciting new app called the radio.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: Sliding hi hats bring in bass lumps with ducking synths as a syrupy shriek dances on the sinking, waterlogged drums, the drake warbles hovering like dark rain clouds.
[3]

Austin Nguyen: “Bath” should really be “nap” — I, for one, have not taken a full-on relaxation bath since I was, like, 7, and I doubt students, high school or otherwise, are willing to go through the effort of getting the right temperature, filling the tub, and finding a (I don’t know) Lush bath bomb to put in when they could set the alarm clock on their phone, oversleep on the couch and feel equally fucked on time. It’s a small detail, but that’s all you have — the car alarm beeps, sword unsheathing on “cut my fucking brain in half,” random dog barks — in a song that runs under 1:20 and feels too burnt-out and “shitty” to actually crash or shatter or implode. Predictably, it’s the Shinji Ikari-certified verse that went viral on TikTok, but the short burst of hope at the end flashes by just as brightly.
[6]

Andrew Karpan: Juice WRLD in the key of 100 gecs, I buy it; a moody, melancholy yell into the living room, the sound effects evoke stuffy saturday mornings watching slashers. And at the end, there’s even hope, can a song this short even have a coda? It’s the sound of having the rest of your life ahead of you or maybe just the memory of that.
[7]

Alex Clifton: Genuinely had to look this up because I thought “wait, isn’t this just the entirety of that one 100 gecs song but a little different?” and no, this is an entirely different song. I hate the criticism of “all this new pop sounds the same,” but I can’t differentiate this from any of the other hyperpop songs I’ve heard. I’m definitely too old for this shit.
[2]

Aaron Bergstrom: I lost track, how many gecs are we up to now?
[4]

Katherine St Asaph: According to the artist, “this was originally a short soundfont test I made.” Back in my day people’s soundfont tests would be, like, redoing “Megalovania” with the Tetris Attack soundfont (note: does not actually exist, yet), and they would still produce more complete songs than this.
[3]

Alfred Soto: “A soundfont” it’s called.
[3]

Taylor Alatorre: Remember all those tiresome thinkpieces written about PC Music back in 2014? Remember when “thinkpiece” was a word people used? Well, now none of that matters and the genre that A. G. Cook birthed and SOPHIE transcended has been distilled into “I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare.” And that’s good! Every musical wave needs its Simple Plans and Good Charlottes so that its impact is remembered by people besides strung-out pop critics. For boundary-breaking and convention-flouting artists to exist, there have to be artists who treat the conventions like standardized test instructions. Many such songs are engineered for fleeting viral stardom, but it’s not too often that the algorithm spits out a genre exercise as guilelessly satisfying as “SugarCrash!”. My only complaint? It’s too long — shave off the first 20 seconds of stage-setting ambience and you’ve got a one minute perfect loop, which is the way this was meant to be consumed.
[8]