The Singles Jukebox

It comes in a little plastic bear.

[Video][Website]
[7.36]

Claire Biddles: Sometimes songs align with our steps through life so perfectly that they feel made for us; articulating a particular heartbreak, ripping an unvoiced feeling from our chest, almost by chance soundtracking a moment to be remembered forever. They stay with us and weave themselves into our lives, to be replayed again and again and again, part of our archives of experience. It sounds like an obvious position to state, but all of my favourite songs are songs like this: I tend not to go all-in for a song that doesn’t go all-in for me. The blurb of every song I’ve ever given a [10] on here has likely been edited down from 6,000 self-indulgent words about a specific tragic romantic encounter with identifying details removed. I write fanfic about my own life. I struggle with objectivity. I’m a terrible critic. My enthusiasm for “There’s a Honey” is strange, then: I’ve played it on infinite repeat all year, but it doesn’t align to anything in particular, it just kind of crept in to my heart and buried itself there. The lyrics are cute — a laconic tease of a sort-of lover, glistening with irony within its sunny surroundings — but I’m not itching to shout any of them from the rooftops or get any of them tattooed on my arms or nodding earnestly thinking “yes, that’s it, that’s me”. The song doesn’t soundtrack a specific memory that I replay in my head for its duration, it just soundtracks whatever I’m doing while I’m listening to it — which again sounds unremarkable, but those who live in a perpetual state of emotional nostalgia will know what I mean. Maybe my deep, unconditional love for “There’s a Honey” is, then, an opportunity to be present — an encouraging sign that I can just like a song because it’s beautiful and effortless and sunny and meticulously crafted. But maybe really I’m just waiting for something to happen at the end of this flat, lifeless year — wondering if this time I’ll turn my head as the guitars drop before the middle eight and I’ll see someone across the street and they’ll look at me too and that will be the start of it, and I’ll remember this moment and this song’s part in it forever.
[10]

Hannah Jocelyn: I remember exactly when I started to love this song – it was 0:59, when the drums drop out and Heather Baron-Gracie sings the line “I will give you my body/but am I sure that you want me?” over a low, rumbling bass, before the same line repeats over that bombastic but spacious drum beat. It’s a very specific kind of feeling and phrasing to “give someone your body” and even more specific for “but am I sure that you want me?” After spending a semester in a Gender and Language class where the professor often insinuated that the language of [heterosexual, romantic] romance was inherently ‘male-coded’, I’ve come back to the song hearing it as an internal monologue from the other side’s point of view. There’s also the anxiety behind wanting a relationship to blossom; that would explain the double meaning behind “somebody I know I’m bad for,” a case where even if she did get into a relationship, she feels like she would fuck it up anyway. While the follow-up single “Television Romance” treads nearly the exact same melodic territory, the sensitive lyrics and polished arrangement are ultimately what keep me coming back to this one.
[9]

Micha Cavaseno: It’d be dishonest to not point to the traces of the Curse/Furs-esque shimmer glossing all over the record, or deny a certain similarity in songwriting between Heather Baron-Gracie and her labelmate Matty Healy. Except of course, whereas the latter’s heart on sleeve sloppiness seems so tragically heroic to the point of parody at times, “There’s a Honey” is a record that feels like two layers of terror and glory that ring next to each other in harmony in spite of failing the math. You can’t tell if the self-awareness and quips are at the expense or the sale of someone, and for the relative under-developments in the song, you get the feeling of a band who have the potential to really push past their influences and get to the heart of the matter.
[6]

Ryo Miyauchi: It’s too cosmically perfect for one half of 1975 to be involved with a new wave pop that divides the body from the mind. The music rightfully leans a lot more physical to go with what’s at exchange, but the moments where the body takes a backseat to give voice to the subconscious give “There’s a Honey” life.
[7]

Brad Shoup: If the Matty Healy connection hadn’t been disclosed, I still might’ve guessed this: this is music for anyone who thinks of their body as a jacket to be unzipped, hung up, and studied. They lean on their chorus — full of skip-jumps and bashed eighths, a sort of Carly Rae homage — heavily; for the bridge, Heather Baron-Gracie just floats to the ceiling and waits.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Trusting their guitars over their honeyed words, Pale Waves excel at that Cocteau Twins-indebted shimmer. And if Heather Baron-Gracie didn’t hurt so well it wouldn’t matter.
[7]

Rebecca A. Gowns: This song is like honey, immediately sweet with dreamy vocals and syrupy guitars. Yet it crystalizes all too easily: what sounds so wonderful and easy on the first listen feels increasingly stilted on each re-listen.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Thick, rigid plodding drums undermine the sleek, glittery guitar, the smooth, bunched bass and the airy, gossamer vocals. Tastes like Haribo cherries.
[7]

Iain Mew: It clicked for me once I realised that the nagging familiarity of the bubbly guitar riff was because it reminded me of the chorus melody from “Dancing On My Own.” Pale Waves stage a crisis of the uncertain future rather than the certain present, but they do it in a similar way, alone but trying to direct it all outwards, feeling constantly and intently enough to not have to really stop and think at once. 
[7]

Will Adams: Pale Waves are riding the same Lite Brite-rock wave that The 1975 and MUNA and The Aces and plenty others are on, but given how they’ve gothed up their surfboard, there’s certainly room for them too.
[7]

Eleanor Graham: An exact midpoint between the sticky-floor black of The 1975’s first album and the flamingo pink of their second. The lyrics lack Healy’s specificity, but that feels a conscious choice and a blessing. It’s classic pop songwriting, pretty and expansive and blank for your own meaning. And Heather Baron-Gracie’s plasticky faintly Mancunian dead-eyed fembot voice is an instrument in a way that Healy’s isn’t. The teenage insularity is written not so much into the words as into her cadence – if you don’t get “it’s not eas-ay/I wanna fee-el/something different for once” then you just don’t. But if you do, maybe you understand the degree to which it is about being alone and about being at a club in your hometown and about all the faces that mean nothing and the few that make your heart go oh, right, but you don’t care! You really don’t! That’s what this insistent, moody, shoulder-hunched jangle sounds like: the sugar-lightness of throwing away all the Caring, and the gratification of pulling it inside again a second later. Nursing your private, complex darkness like a drink in the eye of the storm, and dancing at the same time. The Pale Waves singles are wonderfully cohesive, three glittering Instagram-goth beacons in the depths of December, but this one feels like the fullest execution of their vision.
[8]