The Singles Jukebox

WARNING: PROFOUND SONG ALERT!!!11!!!1!! (Sorry Katherine.)

[Video][Website]
[3.25]

Will Rivitz: A music exec looked at the vapid, directionless, sub-mediocre societal critiques of Alessia Cara and decided, “I want this, but more.”
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: The last I heard from Sabrina Carpenter was “Seamless,” an aggressively wholesome ukelele ditty trapped inside an audiobook of a middle-school values textbook interrupted periodically by that “Daddy, your seatbelt!” ad. But she was in her early teens at the time, and as always, with age come pop ambitions that are less saccharine. The R&B affect comes from chameleonic songwriter Priscilla Renea, the beat from the Vanessa Hudgens and Miley Cyrus iterations of this, the breakdown directly from “Problem,” the college-application social commentary from the pop milieu Lorde and Alessia Cara and Daya inhabit. (Or, given that Renea also writes for Nashville, possibly Kacey Musgraves.) So it’s not surprising. But anything that simultaneously evokes “Womanizer” at its stompiest and gets a line about banks robbing the people into a Radio Disney track earns nothing less than a [7].
[8]

Alfred Soto: If Carpenter dispensed with the la-di-da approach and concentrated on singing these brain-dead rhymes, the garbled politics might play like a transcript of a young adult trying to synthesize news on aggregator sites and less like an expression of untrammeled cynicism. The fourth-rate Gwen Stefani beat helps not a whit.
[2]

Micha Cavaseno: Not to hold her non-musical career against her, but whenever family encounters resulted in me watching Girl Meets World, the unreasonably hectoring and stilted modern reboot in which Sabrina Carpenter played the next generation sidekick, I was struck by how determinedly all-knowing and fully realized that the ‘kids’ in the show were in contrast the kids one usually sees on TV elsewhere or just in real life. Yet at the same time, they were often flat, devoid of character and presented a lot of smirking and conspiring expressions about being in on jokes they never bothered to tell. “Thumbs” is undoubtedly going to seem ‘mature’ in contrast to notions of Carpenter’s career making her a ‘kid’s star’ with its showtunes vibes (mind you the ugly cheapness of the VST strings and vocal distortions are staggeringly poor professionalism), but the heart of the song reveals that same flatness. An endless list of ways in which society apparently undermines itself, concluded with a summary of “that’s just the way of the world.” There’s little insight of what she thinks of it, or how it makes her feel, or even a real indicator of how to not fall in the trap. Just a cynical smirk that takes value in seeing through things, but doing nothing in response.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: Painfully generic sub-Britney Radio Disney pop with some incredibly clumsy lyrics.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: The beat recalls how Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” bursts out of the gates and attacks you with unstoppable robotic precision, but this song thinks it’s clever. It’s not, it’s like being beaten around the head with a pillow with “MESSAGE TBC” written on it.
[4]

Will Adams: One of the lesser known singles from Jewel’s ironic pop phase was “Stand,” a thinly-veiled parody of a message song. Its obvious rhymes, bulleted “makes u think” imagery (“see the old lady with a gun”) and shoehorned romantic angle give away how little the lyrics have to say. “Thumbs” feels like a current iteration of this, swapping gentle R&B for an admittedly decent swung stomp. The only thing is that I’m terrified Sabrina Carpenter is playing it completely straight.
[3]

Iain Mew: Of all the 00s songs to take after, Sam Sparro with clumsier social commentary was not one I expected. 
[3]