The Singles Jukebox

Our own Hannah begins the D&B t.A.T.u revival…

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[7.25]Hannah Jocelyn: This gem was co-produced by Mike Spencer, whose maximalist EDM work graced Rudimental and Ellie Goulding’s best music in the early 2010s. “Off-World”, which TWST wrote with Lauren Aquilina and Marcus Anderson, brings that sound back to life with headier lyrics. The vocal sound is SO bright it’s almost fatiguing, but that adds to the song’s urgency; Chloe Davis will break through time, space, and the capabilities of de-essers to be their true self. Aquilina’s previous song “Empathy” was about the perils of lacking emotional boundaries, but here, dissolving boundaries is a path to romantic transcendence: “Wanna float, wanna fly, wanna try to ascend this skin/Wanna feel what you feel, but I can’t feel anything.” I have a whole playlist of songs that attempt to verbalize that need for all-consuming intimacy, and in those songs it often ends up toxic. Davis is aware of this, which is why “I wanna give you it all” comes with the necessary caveat “…without giving myself away.” Still, the most prominent queer art of the last quarter-century depicts this ache for a reason, whether it’s Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye using their bodies as performance art, Neo and Trinity becoming The One in Matrix Resurrections, or everything involving Steven Universe. As “Off-World” careens into its drops, TWST approximates what that bliss must feel like.
[9]

Aaron Bergstrom: A warm-hearted, techno-utopian update on “All The Things She Said,” which unfortunately means it isn’t quite as good.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: “All the Things She Said” deconstructed into its three elements. One: The hook — well, one of them. Two: Ethereal yearning, and the desire to escape into the fantasy worlds and heightened emotional reality found in saturated pastorals, cities at night, dark chromed spaceships, or whatever other AMV aesthetic you personally want to get isekai’d into. Three: The frantic, obsessive pace of that yearning, which takes physical form here as a drum-and-bass break (probably the next sound to bubble back up to mainstream offline pop).
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The Expanse AMV-type beat
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Jackie Powell: It’s been awfully hard to figure out why “Off-World” sounds so familiar. Is it similar to a video game theme? Or is this more like the theme to the French animated series Code Lyoko that ran on Cartoon Network for a few years in the 2000s? Sonically, not exactly. But what links them all is how they fit together as science fiction, with world-hopping. TWST explained that “Off-World” is about “a cyborg girl who descends upon Earth, yearning to break free” who finds liberation in another place. TWST is best in the pre-chorus; the yearning and the struggle are there. But I question the potency of the chorus. Where is that conflict? Where’s the payoff? It seems a little monotonous compared to the rest of this three and a half minute journey. The percussive elements in that hook, however, are exhilarating. Well done, Mike Spencer.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: An epic about a cyborg girl descending upon earth and trying to find liberation, personal freedom, and authenticity sounds amazing, but it shouldn’t take TWST’s long statement about the track for me to understand the story. The musical experience of “Off-World” doesn’t speak for itself, and despite how pretty it sounds, the track’s immense ambitions are let down by the hook’s flatness.
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Taylor Alatorre: How do I justify not slapping an automatic [10] on what is essentially Springsteenian cyberpunk? In part it’s that “Off-World” suffers from its own success. The pre-chorus is substantially more stirring and anthemic than the chorus, which leads to the latter feeling like a deflation of energies, or an artificial limit on the possibilities the song wants to conjure. Songs about escape, whether from the “swamps of Jersey” or from the burdens of meatspace, are more dependent than usual on structure and momentum, on both mapping out a compelling journey and ensuring the destination lives up to expectations. But if “Off-World” falls a bit short in its goal of ferrying us to a frictionless utopia, that cliché about the journey and the destination isn’t wrong here. “Meet me at the borderline” — most of us are there already, but TWST knows how to make it sound like an undiscovered country.
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Will Adams: There’s a point at which desire transcends the bounds of a standard crush, when the promise of being with someone seems so out of reach it becomes science fiction. They exist in a whole other world, you think. How could I ever meet them there? This is what that feels like: swirling synths that conjure the cosmic chasm separating you from them, but a breakneck d&b pulse that launches you into that open space. “Off-World” embodies the feeling of reaching out your hand, unsure whether your fingertips will ever meet theirs.
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Frank Falisi: The pre-chorus is the most sci-fi of all song parts, tipping into the transformation that comes next but unfolding with what came before still rattling in the air. A lot of pop invokes sci-fi imagery, but to treat the parts of a pop song as linguistic elements might suggest actual future-facing strategies of realizing a speculative electronic. In the meantime, comics-brained love-borgs promising the kiss of a world beyond this bad rock is a sweet time fizz.
[6]

David Moore: A lovely take on one of my absolute favorite tropes in pop music: escaping the burden of society, and maybe corporeality altogether, in outer space! My personal standard-bearer is t.A.T.u.’s “Cosmos,” which is to say I’m missing another dollop of melodrama, and I have minor quibbles with the words tilting more toward metaphor than they need to — can I get one reference to a spaceship or something? But that’s probably just a taste issue.
[7]

Kayla Beardslee: <pstyle=”margin: 0px;=”” font-stretch:=”” normal;=”” font-size:=”” 14px;=”” line-height:=”” font-family:=”” “helvetica=”” neue”;”=””>Pop music is escapism, and hyperpop is pop music taken to the extreme, so why not interpret hyperpop to mean escapism so extreme that it creates an entirely new world?</pstyle=”margin:>
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Alfred Soto: Drum ‘n’ bass skitters! I run lukewarm on ’em, but when the track has a solid hook and okay lyrics they function like a laugh track in a pretty good sitcom.
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Micha Cavaseno: The last couple years have had drum & bass-style breaks wreak their revenge on pop in both the mainstream and the sub-stream (oh my god all the precious kids making “breakcore”), and it’s reminded me of the worst aspects of the genre: unimaginative chopping of the same two or three loops. “Off-World” is a delightful whispy yearning little piece of leydrift, and I can’t imagine it without that little baby’s first junglism flourish. But I wish it had something that would make it feel properly unearthly. Of course, it’s just that I don’t know what I’d want that makes the sense of an unknown future so tantalizing, and that’s what I’d hope this song could’ve gotten.
[6]

Ian Mathers: I know I’ve heard the drum break that gets used in the chorus many times over the years, but it absolutely works for me every time. The sci-fi stuff only sorta coheres, but I’m a sucker for that too.
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Brad Shoup: Look, Mike Spencer did “Feel the Love”. He will see heaven. I dunno that the venerable breaks contribute anything to the sci-fi metaphor–maybe they make things cyberpunk–but I still love ’em. Everything that happens between the verses is exquisite: the long bass notes that are practically detonated, TWST’s perfectly urgent adult-alternative chorus (I’m hearing… Paula Cole?), and even the title itself. Just a really evocative thing to sigh.
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Nortey Dowuona: thank u Chloe Davis.
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