The Singles Jukebox

“Cadence, but not power” is my new favorite aesthetic.

[Video][Website]
[5.88]

Iain Mew: Have I talked about how much I love Gabrielle Leithaug’s voice? Go back to her breakthrough “Ring Meg” and its laughs and sunny melodic overflows — she sounds like Natasha Bedingfield, and she was really good at that. Every move since has taken that force and personality into darker and harder territory, but the results have got more spectacular. “5 Fine Frøkner” is musically ungainly sometimes, but it’s worth it for Gabrielle: her stretching out of unease before the storm, her rapid firing words, and above all the rush of her spitting out the harsh alliteration of the title phrase.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: A vocal ditty gives way to submerged Rihanna verses, then a stomping pop march. Solid, and not much more.
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: I complain a lot about songs getting too repetitive over their runtime. “5 Fine Frøkner” certainly doesn’t have that problem. It’s a hell of a fun-sounding song, and there are some great flourishes — I like the strange robochorus near the end. Gabrielle’s got an excellent alto voice that she uses to great effect, employing a bunch of nifty vocal tricks. The major flaw is that it feels a little too compositionally far-ranging — there’s enough interesting material in here that it easily could have been made into two separate songs without either feeling underwritten.
[7]

Micha Cavaseno: There are a lot of nice parts here, like a lot of strong bones ready to prop up a towering figure. But this song lacks the required ligaments.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The quiet verses glide into the powerhouse chorus like everyone involved thought “Latch” made a good template; even the melodies are similar.
[5]

Anthony Easton: The music underneath the vocals has a spiderweb delicacy until it collapses into the percussion-heavy dance beat. Her vocals float almost unrelated to the other sounds in the music, often off tune, sometimes speaking and sometimes singing. The handclaps are nice, though. 
[3]

Josh Winters: That 15 seconds of Gabrielle assembling with her robot clones in the dead of darkness is the most terrifying thing I’ve heard in ages. The sonic sledgehammering that both precedes and follows that moment is more than enough reason to sit through the brief suspense.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I like the half of the chorus given over to house, instead of the rippling EDM buccaneer beat. Maybe it’s because she has cadence but not power.
[5]