The Singles Jukebox

It’s “Gone Solo” Tuesday! And we WOULD start with Zayn…

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Katie Gill: After the exceedingly generic “Pillowtalk,” I was hoping that Zayn’s new single would be something better. Surprising no one, it’s exceedingly generic. It’s like Zayn was trying for Justin Timberlake but ended up squarely Geri Halliwell (and that’s an insult to poor Geri — she at least can sound energetic if needed). I mean, what else can I say? It’s cookie cutter. Zayn’s taken what’s popular right now and shoved out a mediocre One Direction song with extra electronic beeps and airy backing vocals in place of good solid harmonies.
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Alfred Soto: The influences: Luke James, a Fisher Price version of The Weeknd, gobs  of Justin Timberlake, the last a new millennium model for GED programs  in post-boy-band education. The One Directioner’s debut presents a guy  who want to convince listeners that he likes sex, and from the way he sings the title hook as “like my wood” why not. The world could use a Fisher Price version of The Weeknd, believe me.
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Tim de Reuse: If someone had told me in 2014 that one of the members of One Direction would split off and morph into a half-baked electropop act that makes production nods towards more interesting genres but stops short of anything that could make an impression, I’d have probably said something like “A superstar who was pulled into the global spotlight when he was still a teenager will have trouble establishing a coherent identity of his own when he tries to strike out solo in his early twenties? I guess it’s as likely an outcome as any! Hey, on an unrelated note, that Daft Punk album from last year really brought palm-muted guitars back into vogue, didn’t it?” 
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A.J. Cohn: Back in his 1D days Zayn sang the wonderfully cheesy “I Would,” about a boy pining after a girl a little too cool for him (she has a boyfriend with 27 tattoos!). Now Zayn is the boy with 27 or so tattoos, and in “Like I Would” he pines for a girl who has left him. The track is cool, hard, and angular, totally missing the tender messy vulnerability that made its predecessor so stupidly charming.
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Scott Mildenhall: It’s not clear if the shifts in modality here are intentional or just clumsy writing. Do, would, could, do — either he’s existing in a time warp or he’s making a hash of a Beverley Knight impression. The former does work, because the bubbling chorus and the ominous build towards it bring both futurism and a sense of occasion — the kind of thing that might be good for a debut single, perhaps. Lithe, pulsing and even intelligible; this is, happily, everything “Pillowtalk” is not.
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Cassy Gress: Why couldn’t this have been Zayn’s lead single, instead of that warmed-over 1D bucket of lube? He’s so much more electrified here, and “he won’t love you like I do” is almost euphoric. 
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Crystal Leww: Zayn’s debut album is, unfortunately, a fight to get through. Neither he nor his team was brave or imaginative enough to try to create a definitive style for him. It’s sad, too, because Zayn has mentioned before that he himself loves R&B music, but instead of trying to create a definitive sound grounded in that style, his team gave him an album full of trendchasing stabs at relevance. “Like I Would” is not the worst of The Weeknd-biting tracks on Mind of Mine, but as 2016 has gone on, it’s become very clear that even the more uptempo Weeknd tracks like “Can’t Feel My Face” have fallen so quickly out of favor with pop music. This sounds dated already, and Zayn’s only on his second album single.
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Jer Fairall: For whatever else can be said about him, Justin Timberlake’s solo career has displayed a clear knowledge of the relationship between music, lyric, and personality; looking to JT as a template, it is precisely the failure to understand this relationship where so many wannabe boy-band ex-pats stumble. As commissioned production jobs go, “Like I Would” has the chilly spaciousness of the cutting edge of 6 or 7 years ago, but Zayn’s anonymous vocal could be Karaoke-ing along to just about anything. This is hackwork. 
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Thomas Inskeep: The chorus throbs like the mildest version of “Love to Love You Baby” imaginable, but the verses prove yet again (like the awful “Pillowtalk”) that Zayn, at a minimum, requires some tempo.
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Madeleine Lee: I wish I’d turned this off after the second “what’s up” 10 seconds in like my instinct told me to, because that beat drop is so good that I stopped minding how mundane everything else is and now I’m stuck with this dirtbag.
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Brad Shoup: He’s marshaled those raspy backing vocals like ghosts against his own haunting. All this gothic woundlicking floats over a brittle gallop, not unlike Jason Derulo’s “Cheyenne.”
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Katherine St Asaph: “This is probably gonna sound wrong — promise it won’t last long.” Yeah, that sounded wrong all right. (Thinkpiece: All the songs by girls asking guys to love them harder, put in work, try; all the songs by guys bragging about their indifferent-yet-prolific sexual un-prowess.) I have little investment in Zayn as a boy bander and even less as a sex symbol — it’s like he thought AJ MacLean’s career misstep was pandering too little to future OMG! 10 Weirdest Boyband Hairstyles slideshows. He clearly finds no missteps in Justin Timberlake’s career, as he attacks the prechorus like his childhood aspiration was to be one of the backup baris on “Cry Me a River.” That’s Zayn’s first trick; trick two is beginning every single with lung-splitting oversinging, and trick three is sounding like everyone else sounding like The Weeknd. It’s a hard thing: build your persona on that male affliction of caring as little as possible, while still somehow generating charisma. The only emotion Zayn manages is in that lavishly sighed he, which can’t be intentional. Even the porny lines — how predictably shocking! — sound lust-free. Yet somehow I don’t hate, even like, an album and artist I find utterly unconvincing. It’s probably that I haven’t gotten sick of this particular sound yet. For others I guess it’s the hair.
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Patrick St. Michel: Still not sold on this Zayn solo thing, but this is at least tip-toeing in the right direction. It actually snaps and bounces along when it isn’t swirling around all boring like. 
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Taylor Alatorre: I wasn’t a big fan of Purpose when it came out, and I still think at least half of its tracks are disposable fluff, but the inexplicable/inevitable rise of Zayn has made me realize how many basic things that album gets right. For one, most all of Purpose‘s tracks, even the flat-out faceplants, sound primed and ready to take on the world, whereas this one doesn’t even sound capable of taking over a department store. I get the sense that I’m supposed to be impressed by all the ricocheting bleep bloops, but the self-consciously “dark” atmosphere, aided by the wearisome background vocals, eats away at any morsels of enjoyment. And here’s the thing: Zayn’s voice just isn’t made for the dark, no matter how hard he tries. It’s fitting that his “would” sounds so much like “wood,” because that’s the word that comes to mind when I hear him struggling to extend his range: wooden. Balsa, to be precise. He could maybe fill in for Joe Jonas in DNCE if need be, but he’s no Weeknd. The lesson here is that we need to stop taking our easily hateable Canadian male pop stars for granted, because we could always have it worse.
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Gin Hart: Picture this: Our Marble Princeling Zayn Malik had a party that made him sad. The lads weren’t there. Everybody smoked all his weed and left, and now it’s 3AM. He can’t sleep. Open tabs: The Mirror, Perrie’s insta, feud receipts, smooch receipts, some OT5 fanfic (your fave), and Justin Timberlake’s 2013 SNL performance with all the lasers. Inputs swirl in the haze of two hours of sobriety as he rummages for a pen to scrawl Know it’s late but I’m so wired/Saw your face and got inspired next to a loose sketch of himself in his future laser suit. A single tear gets caught in the lashes of his right eye. Orange, he thinks, yeah, and proceeds to pen this closed loop of petulant desire, this plea for heart-relevance. Zayn wants her/them/us to know what it feels like to be without him. We should admire that mind! The way he knows our collective body! He feels as inspired as any pop superstar born in ’93 who recently cancelled his membership to a monolith can feel. You miss me, he cries, but I’m still here.
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