The Singles Jukebox

Electropop outfit (not pictured) continue to fall in our good graces…

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Will Adams: Kate Boy’s latest singles — “True Colours”; “Dopamin”; this — have inverted what we’ve come to expect from them. What was once electropop that shivered with potential energy and packed its sonic field with giant drums and octave-leaping arpeggios now sounds as if it’s been hollowed out, creating cavernous spaces for Kate Akhurst’s voice to reverberate. What remains is what they manage so well: confidence that is equal parts quiet and mysterious. Sonically, “Giants” may not seem to measure up, but the negative space created in this sonic shift is filled with that same potential.
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Alfred Soto: The twitchy beat is the kind that renders most questions moot, like, “What is she singing about?”
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Alex Clifton: The beat keeps pulling the rug out from under your feet — it stabilizes after a while, but I felt sea-sick for the first two minutes. I don’t mind feeling off-kilter, but this was a bit much for me.
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Vikram Joseph: The glitchy intro promises much more than this delivers; this is frustratingly mundane Scandi pop, like Fever Ray with all of the edges sanded down, or Robyn on heavy-duty mood stabilisers. This sort of thing gives alt-pop a bad name, and in these turbulent times we really can’t be having that.
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Katherine St Asaph: Five years ago, an alt-pop act emulating AlunaGeorge and Fever Ray would have been exhausting. In 2018, when the average alt-pop act has moved onto emulating the music from the speaker-rigged fake boulders, in a Sandals resort, that sounds fresh again. Some less-obvious influences, too — is that Peter Gabriel I kind of hear?
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Ian Mathers: If you put “Giants” on an endless loop, I’d be hard pressed at any given time to tell where exactly we were in the song. Right now, without looking, I’m not sure I could tell you what its running time is. Sometimes, that is exactly what you need.
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