The Singles Jukebox

That wallpaper tho…

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[6.75]Claire Biddles: I love Vince Staples, but the standout here is A$AP’s spooky vocals that echo like a haunting through each layer of the track.
[7]

Alfred Soto: As tough and wiry as the best tracks on Summertime ’06, and it says something about their aesthetics that Staples and A$AP meld into a voice at once hectoring and ruminative, conscious of quasi-fame, aware of the costs.
[8]

Ryo Miyauchi: Vince doesn’t give you time to breathe but neither does the pop game. Bars are rushed out like his time to talk is nearly up, with tragic scenes like “blow my dome to paint the kitchen” wheezing by. He always thrived on limited time since his 75-second-song days of the Shyne Coldchain series. DJ Dahi’s metallic clangs up the quality of his music, but it’s still the same old Vince.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Sounds like an early Kanye production, while Vince raps until it sounds like he’s gonna run outta breath.
[5]

Anthony Easton: Is it still a cappella if the singing is talking? The coda to this is so lonely, so tired, and so bleak, that the formal choices to strip it of everything but exhausted bad feeling is haunting.
[7]

Will Adams: “Prima Donna” flies by quickly, with Vince Staples efficiently knocking out verses punctuated by A$AP’s vocoder-smeared hook. But suddenly, after the outro fades into the sunset, Staples reveals one final verse. Now he’s exhausted, repeating “I just wanna live forever” with diminishing confidence. It’s a bleak shift, but one that’s just as impactful with each listen.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Gets in and out quickly, two verses, a spooked and distorted hook and a genuinely bleak spoken coda. The latter fills it out emotionally as a piece but it’s the beat that ramps up the tension so effectively, and as much as I like the closing, I miss the rest, which sounds like an introduction to something big and powerful, and taken as a whole I feel like it’s a conclusion lacking a climax. Still, it takes a good effort to comprehensively outshine A$AP Rocky like this, so I’m impressed anyway.
[7]

Will Rivitz: Of all the young rappers riding DJ Dahi’s dystopian chrome-production wave, Vince Staples has done an impressive job filling the void K-Dot left behind when he hooked up with Flying Lotus’ posse. He’s remarkably poised and self-reflective given that he’s still in his early 20s, and the existential crisis barely contained by his braggadocio sounds that much better over a beat straight out of Kanye West’s post-Yeezus minimalism. I’m not sure whether it’s appropriate to tout him as the Next Big Thing or whether he’s become The Big Thing yet, but this one’s a good’un nonetheless.
[7]