The Singles Jukebox

Caps lock are still on, as we log off to sleep…

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[3.86]

Alfred Soto: Every two weeks I luck into a song so amorphous that five consecutive plays won’t make it stick. Now it’s the Oscar-nominated actress’ turn. Last year BloodPop drew out half-convincing Biebertry from the world’s biggest YouTube star; here these two have a title conceit in search of a song that isn’t Weeknd hand-me-downs.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: there’s a direct line from “everything is embarrassing” and the rest of what used to be called “small pop” to blood diamonds making the most anodyne radio friendly version, a joyless song about joy, with an even more anonymous than usual hailee steinfeld. it just isn’t the line i would have drawn.
[4]

Will Adams: Michael Tucker pivoting to being a pop producer would bother me less if a) he lost that cynical, fake-deep registered trademark symbol; and b) he aspired to something more than a Greg Kurstin demo.
[4]

Alex Clifton: There are some really intriguing details in here: it’s strange to begin a love song with “never was a leader,” and the line “kept my heartbeat quiet” is quite a lovely line in isolation. It’s a song about growing in confidence with a partner, which is kind of a nice thing to hear. But Steinfeld sounds so detached in that overblown chorus: the way she delivers the title phrase — “gonna give it to you / in capital letters” — feels quieter than I want it to be. (Side note: capital letters are really only visible in text-based communication, so this feels less ~sexy~ and more like she’s just going to write several pages of screaming text messages.) Through no fault of Steinfeld’s, though, “Capital Letters” feels like a dancier version of “Love Me Like You Do” with BloodPop’s production, which in turn makes this entire song feel tired. Steinfeld really deserves better backing, but I guess she’s done what she can with what she was given.
[4]

Crystal Leww: I’m a known fan of Hailee Steinfeld, and I think that BloodPop has put out some really great productions over the last few years. However, there is something so wildly boring about the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, that they can turn interesting artists into wet mops. Nothing that it’s produced musically is even bad — it just loves to strip good artists of personality, which somehow feels worse.
[2]

John Seroff: Is “Beautiful People Get Married at Exorbitant Cost” a Spotify genre yet? Cheers to the music supervisor, I suppose; “Das Kapital Letters” nicely encapsulates the animus of the BDSM-by-way-of-The-Gap Fifty Shades, Yes It’s Still a Thing: as complex, memorable and lightly repellent as a cup of slightly-too-warm vanilla yogurt.
[3]

Claire Biddles: One of those magical pop songs that is average for the first sixteen listens before becoming glorious on the seventeenth, the nursery-rhyme swirl of “Capital Letters” benefits from infinite repeat. BloodPop’s production is expansive and glittery, and Hailee Steinfeld delivers her most convincing case for being a proper pop star, intriguingly for such a low-key vocal performance. Shame they missed out on formatting it as “CAPITAL LETTERS” though.
[7]