The Singles Jukebox

Bon appetit?

[Video]
[5.17]

Will Adams: Oh, this one’s easy: the production weirdness — bells-and-whistles drum arrangement with occasional electro burps — recalls another food-related Pharrell work from 2006. The “leftovers” joke writes itself.
[5]

Micha Cavaseno: More memes. Bad Pharrell in 2017 sounding like reheated Sega Genesis music, in a bad way. Oh well, at least we managed to get a Takeoff verse this time.
[2]

Ryo Miyauchi: This would’ve been a better result had Pharrell channeled an earlier era of Neptunes where they operated with 80% negative space. His kitchen-sink funk not only flattens the cavernous, booming world of Migos, it doesn’t provide a lot of space for the rappers’ rhymes to get any emphasis.
[5]

Hannah Jocelyn: One of the most singularly unpleasant songs I’ve ever heard is Ron Brownz and Jim Jones’s “Pop Champagne,” a minor hit from 2008 with off key, arrhythmic auto tuned melodies and greasy, honestly nightmare-fueling horn samples. The beat for “Stir Fry” has a similar problem where the pieces barely hang together, like he took the stems from three beats that didn’t work and stitched them together. What makes it work is how laid back and natural Migos are over the otherwise bizarre beat, making the whistles and synth keyboards work for them by sheer force of will. I especially like Offset’s verse, speeding up and contorting the triplet flow into new forms. Best of all, the Auto-Tune is at least in the key of the song. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Faster beat than usual, triplets more triplet than usual, hook less promising than usual.
[6]

Julian Axelrod: Every time I think I’m suffering from Migos fatigue, they switch up their formula just enough to keep things interesting. Sure, the beat itself is nothing we haven’t seen before. (“Sounds like a leftover Pharrell beat from 2008” would be such a sick burn if it weren’t true.) But it’s a delight to hear these trap stalwarts making mincemeat out of an old-school Mohawks flip, and hearing them triplet-flow over such an iconic sample is a subtle middle finger at the 90s rap heads who curse their very existence. (Even when they’re not dissing Joe Budden, they’re dissing Joe Budden.) Recent problematic news aside, I’m fine with the Migos’s continued ascent as long as they keep getting weirder, funkier and more abstract.
[7]