The Singles Jukebox

Russian girl group readies for the winter…

[Video][Website]
[7.20]

Will Adams: Never did I feel as seen in 2017 as when Serebro fully pivoted to a sound that time forgot but I remembered: Soul Solution remixes, wistful trance, yearning guitar hooks. There are other examples, but “Proydet” is the most urgent. There’s resolve in the trio’s homophony, but the deep bass and spacious pads belie their tentativeness as they turn their gaze upward to an uncertain future.
[10]

Jonathan Bradley: Something about the shorn economy of trance music, the unidirectional determination of its thump combined with its commerce-minded hedonistic imperative, can turn it into a very lonely music. It’s not simple dancefloor melancholy, but a kind of psychic loneliness, a generated fugue state that wrenches the unreachable caverns of one’s own mind out on to the dancefloor and turns them into physical space. When the party’s going right, this effect is a liberating and dissociative one, even as it carries obscured within it that abyss. “Proydet” is icy like electro — a style more apt to embrace its darker impulses — and its lurking bass and echoing guitar figure is frozen and solitary. Serebro still want us to dance, and their production has an upmarket sheen, a façade of luxury reassuring us nothing actually is all that wrong. I wonder what it would be like if that were to fall away.
[6]

Iain Mew: “Proydet” sounds like both a UK #5 trance hit from 2000, probably with a soft focus video on a beach, and a classy if slightly wooden girl group ballad from, well, Eurovision circa 2007. The mixture works well enough to elevate it above either, and make me wonder why these sounds aren’t tried out more often.
[7]

Katherine St Asaph: Yearning Euro-trance that stops just short of rote house or “Clocks,” as not to break the spell.
[7]

Ian Mathers: The nicely pulsing beat and sweeping synths are foundational, sure, but it’s in that sad-ass guitar lick that the backing for “Proydet” really comes together. Once that all locks in, all our singers need to do is give the right shading of ache to their voices and neither over nor underplay their surroundings, and these three nail it.
[7]

Alfred Soto: With its fat sequencer and faint ripple of a guitar line, “Proydet” is melancholic for a dance and a girl group tune. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe could’ve been written it for Eighth Wonder in 1987.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Like all good trance-pop tracks, this sounds like a missive from the ring of a slowly rotating planet. The guitar pings recall the downtempo acoustic craze of a few years ago. But those songs feinted at singer-songwriter realness, and thus tried to offer some warmth. Even Serebro’s promises drift like January breath.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Chilly. A solid drumbeat cartwheels along as a soft guitar crinkles above, as the heaving sea bass lifts the smooth harmonizations of Serebro.
[7]

Ryo Miyauchi: The hands-in-pockets dance beat provides nothing close to a redemptive hook, and neither does the song’s post-breakup narrative. “Proydet” instead chips at that slight emptiness of a partially recovered heart. Serebro sings a clouded optimism, though it’s mostly naïveté talking for the sake of security.
[6]

Julian Baldsing: “Proydet” is the long walk back home from the club you slunk out of early after discovering that the boy who you knew wasn’t really into you is, in fact, not really into you — during which you soothe your freshly-battered ego with the completely sound reasoning that you can do far better in terms of potential partners because you would never be as inconsiderate about another person’s feelings as he was, but also while checking your phone just in case he sends a message wondering where you went.
[8]