The Singles Jukebox

All hail the queen!

[Video][Website]
[6.43]

Scott Mildenhall: Lady Leshurr has an air of certainty of her own hilariousness that ever so slightly grates, but reading her talk of her distance from the grime scene brings home how she’s swimming against the tide. She’s a woman from Solihull — practically the moon to some Londoners — who’s only getting this kind of major label shot now after building a level of success it does not guarantee under her own steam. Whoever she’s actually talking to here (and that could be no-one in particular), it’s easy to take her side. This is funny, even more so for the reliable, subtle absurdity of a Wiley line like “I got a shop and we sell sports shoes”, and like some of the biggest hits to emerge from grime over the past few years, it is eminently accessible.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: The ephemeral nature of pop stardom has been a standard topic in pop music since basically forever, and if the great innovation of hip-hop was to turn it into a taunt, that too has been around for a while. Lady Leshurr’s doing nothing new here, but arguably she’s not trying to. The video and music are throwbacks to grime’s above-ground emergence in the early 2000s, full of cartoon brightness and hyped-up whoops. That’s part of the taunt, of course: the slight nostalgia of the production is another reference to the last time the song’s subject was any good. (The identity, if any, of said subject is a red herring; we can all think of someone who fits the bill.) What’s more immediately important is that the song marks Leshurr herself as having arrived, not just in getting a cosign from Wiley, who sounds a bit defensive about the whole thing, but in breaking a single that isn’t a mixtape freestyle.
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: The only tangible thing Leshurr lists that places her above the has-beens is how she now raps for money. But she didn’t even have to explain that, given how her charisma and voice speak for itself. Her whoops make her stand a head taller than others, above that brass, even above a half-there Wiley. And that energy is all she needs to show she’s living better than the rest of ’em. She throws the question around like take a good, hard look at yourself. Hopefully, the suckers get a clue where they went wrong before Leshurr calls out attennntion!
[8]

Will Adams: Lady Leshurr’s taunting gets a bit repetitious after a while, though she’s smart enough to add in enough wackiness (“You fell off, you have!”) to keep her afloat. The overcrowded production, meanwhile, puts a damper on the whole thing.
[5]

Gin Hart: This track sounds like Mattel MGA Entertainment (lol) mildly thugged out a camo-clad Bratz doll and set her loose, which I… don’t hate? I love that the premise is, like, MC hide-n-seek, and am charmed and furious that Lady committed to a dud like “You look like 86 years old” as a rap lyric. Whatever. It makes me feel like I’m in an off-brand inspirational dance crew movie. 
[5]

Cassy Gress: With a tempo this fast and a looping riff this dramatic, you need someone to do exactly what Wiley’s verse does: rapid-fire rhythm, with minimal pauses for reaction. Lady Leshurr is rapid-fire too, but she throws a lot more syncopation into the verses than Wiley does, and with a beat this fast, syncopation just gets muddled.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Boasting like we’re supposed to know who the hell she is, the lady soon earns it. Transcending the expected musical tropes are her and Wiley, the Gaye-Terrell of grime, spitting lines as if each was alone but lighting the fire as if they were eye to eye.
[7]