The Singles Jukebox

If you’d just stop calling me from a blocked number, guys…

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[5.83]

Jibril Yassin: Props to Travis Scott for escaping Mike Dean’s dungeon and knowing not to get carried away on the track. Thugger’s 2015 collab with, ahem, Johnny X unwittingly set the stage for his show-stealing verse here, although Quavo comes very close to upending that by inventing new words on the fly and namedropping Macaulay Culkin. 
[9]

Ryo Miyauchi: Though it has a flash of classic love-struck Young Thug — “never will I cheat on you, never will I commit treason” — the heart of this alien serenade is Quavo. Travis emptily dials, Thug dances around words, but the Migos got business to settle. No heightened buzz of Auto-Tune can hit the emotions of his four bars about his fight-filled relationship.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: Catchy beat, boring verses, too much fucking Auto-Tune.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: “Pick up the phone/I know you’re home” — aah, so we know where this one sits on continuum both the needy and creepy axes of songs about phone calls. That position is good for the stars, but not so much for the track. The schlocky horror-movie drone over the last 30 seconds of the song is terrific, aand perfect, and I wish they’d made more use of it because the rest of the track feels rather samey, with Thug and Quavo in particular trying to rouse up some feeling, any feeling, out of a track that would be better for the “before” in this narrative than the present.
[5]

Iain Mew: The other day at work my desk phone rang, I picked it up and nothing happened. It just carried on ringing. This song’s slow hypnosis gets to the same feeling of disorientation amidst the familiar but also to the same lack of end result, just carrying on.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: Thugga exhales his lines like they’ve been triggered by a sample: push a key, and out comes Jeffery slurry. Fittingly, the synth burble underpinning the beat behaves in exactly the same way. (So does Travis Scott; he’s a guest so at home he becomes part of the drapery.) The hook, in contrast with the rest of the track, is legible and romantic, and suggests sympathy with something like Future’s “Turn On the Lights.” This, however, is a generation advanced from that song’s open-hearted vulnerability: “Pick Up the Phone” squelches its emotions into sound so warped and plaintive it might be a dial tone.
[7]