The Singles Jukebox

Kuiper Belt then?

[Video][Website]
[4.88]

Crystal Leww: Future’s Auto-Tuned emotions have been deeply affecting to me in the past, but this does very little. This is a love song, so it’s just a little bit weird that there’s three people on this. As a duet this might work, but Mr. Hudson is crowding. Like seriously dude, can’t you see that you’re the third wheel here?
[4]

Iain Mew: For the cold depths of space, this gets awfully crowded. I predict a case of Kessler syndrome triggered by the collision of orbiting hook singers.
[3]

Brad Shoup: That tinny lowing! It sounds like someone’s stretching a pulled muscle for four minutes. It’s a love song that starts with an epic humblebrag and concludes by fussing over mistakes, a shitty gift he tries to return in the final line. It’s a song about Ciara that makes Miley the cardboard-cutout duet partner. It’s an Owl City slow jam.
[2]

Alfred Soto: With a reference to the cold depths of space that works for a voice that sounds broadcast from Io, and a dialogue between two performers whose well-matched tonalities acknowledge the distance between a histrionic Englishman and a rapper adept at subsuming his tendency to bathos behind electronics, this track limns the definitions of real and true. The weakest link is its realest element: the castaway known as Miley Cyrus, cast as the feminine support to which bathos and electronics aren’t immune.
[6]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: “With all the mistakes I’ve made, you’re still listening.” Future closes out his last verse with this lyric, Cyrus harmonising alongside him, and the direct connection to each artist’s audiences is something that can’t go un-noted. Cyrus has spent the last year in Thinkpiece Nirvana following a turbulently odd sprouting — if you visit this or any website regularly, you will know all about it. Meanwhile, Future has settled into his role as melancholy turn-up merchant, his vocal roboticisms turning him to Tyrell Corp–standard: more human than human. Before this, there were transitional periods spent as Meathead in Da Connect and as an Atlanta street goon, then time spent rapping and slurring and caterwauling and hooting his way through mixtape after mixtape. “Real and True” is an end credits-styled tearjerker, less victory lap for both artists than a sweet grace note to lovers and fans and family for patience: we’ve made it, and you’re still here with us. Mike WiLL’s gooiest piano lines and belting from a cosmically-minded Mr. Hudson (taking his destined place as the Rap Game Mick Hucknall) help make “Real and True” as unsubtle as the Grand Canyon. You may feel slightly nauseated by balladry this full-on and who can blame you? I was. But I also felt my heart proudly swell twice its natural size.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Pitched low and soft, with that piano almost polite and, even Miley, in a career of material and musical excess, becomes as modest as she has been in years. The whole thing is slightly old fashioned: the radio reference maybe, or the Jimi Hendrix cite, or that it could be an almost Taylor Swiftian love story. 
[8]

David Turner: Miley Cyrus was on the Disney Channel. Mr. Hudson worked with the 21st Century Black Walt Disney. So maybe it’s no surprise that Future continues to push further into Disney movie soundtrack music. I love “Feeling I Get,” “Long Time Coming,” or, really, any song where Future gets all emotional, which certainly happens here. But this needs Elton John, not Future, and certainly no Cyrus or Hudson. 
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: Mike WiLL Made It, Mr. Hudson ruined it.
[4]