The Singles Jukebox

Our highest-scoring song with ‘castle’ in the title ever! (The other song, like one-fourth of all songs ever released, is by Ed Sheeran.)

[Video]
[5.30]

Joshua Lu: A redhead Londoner singer/songwriter with a grandiose style and sweeping vocals — the obvious comparison is to Florence Welch, and for the most part, it’s a flattering one. Freya Ridings shares Florence’s ability to transmute sadness into galloping jams, sacrificing no lyrical intimacy in the process. But on “Castles,” she’s held back by her occasionally mushy-mouthed delivery and an instrumental that’s too dull to give this song the pathos it craves.
[5]

Iain Mew: Freya Ridings’s chart success was facilitated by “Lost Without You” being used on Love Island. The usual stock-in-trade for the show’s emotional couplings, uncouplings and departures is piano covers of well-known songs (among last week’s: “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), not in the super mopey cover mode but minimal enough to match recognisability to a bit of fresh starkness. “Lost Without You” wasn’t a cover but sounded familiar and striking enough to fit the model perfectly. “Castles” is not minimal, but gets to the same combination by a different route. The Bastille-style rolling wave of the chorus signals emotion without letting it dominate, leaving the striking newness to the lyrics. She gives the verses plenty of hints of darkness beyond a breakup — “Your love it seemed so harmless, I never noticed…” before the chorus promise to “build castles from the rubble of your love”. Taking the ideas of strength in adversity and living well as the best revenge and combining them to something preposterous and towering, it’s a brilliant and sharp enough image to lift the whole song.
[7]

Will Adams: In which Freya Ridings storms the Bastille to deploy a metaphor about rebuilding after a breakup, which might sound impactful had it not been done better (and more succinctly) decades ago by one Marsha, who said: “Oh tell me why do we build castles in the sky?”
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: If it were still the early ’00s, Freya Ridings would have a million-selling album by now — not quite as posh as Dido or Blunt, but close enough. Yet alas the David Grays have won, and you now have to be a gruff/rag and bone man to get even a fraction of the way there. But did Charlene Soraia go in vain? Not on this reckoning. Soaringly uneventful and satisfyingly unchallenging, it beds its way in with the radio-assisted persistence it aims for.
[7]

Stephen Eisermann: There’s something so satisfying about the tempo of this track and the way it plays with production throughout. Freya’s lyrics are charming, if a tad generic, but her powerful voice, the backing vocals, and the born-again production take this song from simply nice to pretty dang good.
[7]

Tim de Reuse: Thick, aggressively multi-tracked vocals that chant a triumphant chorus for over two minutes of a three-and-a-half minute tune over punchy drums and glamorous production — it sounds wonderful, but it’s one of those desserts you only need to take three bites of before you’re full, you know?
[6]

Alfred Soto: Kick drum often works as a chef’s kiss, and in a live setting this percussion and Ridings’ voice, which has Florence Welch’s cottony thickness, would probably get me hopping. But the uplift gets phony fast.
[4]

Kayla Beardslee: What would happen if you took one line from a Taylor Swift chorus, expanded it into an entire song, and layered Jess Glynne’s voice (and face, kind of) over it? If “Castles” is anything to go by, the result would not be particularly remarkable. The verses show some promise, melody and strong beat mixing together well, but there’s no nuance introduced to the sound when the chorus hits, just the same plodding drums and piano chords that get trotted out for most quasi-inspirational tunes like this.
[3]

Iris Xie: Aside from the “whoa-oh”s at 2:02, this pretty much sounds like a Jess Glynne song except with rockier instrumentals cutting the edges of Ridings’ vocals, like thumbs shredded on blunt cheese graters. It’s a lament packaged as serrations, shoved down to the bottom of a mediocre clearance bin and covered in flimsy plastic wrap. Even the imagery of “building castles from the rubble of your love” is just agreeably nice, suitable for when you sit alone at the airport bar, nursing an overpriced cocktail, secretly begging for your flight to leave on time. “Castles” lacks true bite and ugliness that makes a triumphant sentiment worth the agony of transformation.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: More than a little Florence, in vocal heft and non-enunciation. (By repetition number six, which is reached quickly, the hook starts to sound like “castles! fruddaribbadadalove!” On the bright side, music teachers now have a tongue-twister besides “Many Mumbling Mice.”) Also more than a little ABBA, specifically in the stately chorus ushered in by mopey verses; Google the lyrics without hearing the song, and you might mentally set them to drippy piano. And definitely more than a little — so infinitely much more than a little — fervent desire to please, from the piano breakdown, to the kick drum nagging like Navi, to the “Be My Baby” percussion interpolated twice, once way earlier than you’d expect or than would be most effective, as if the writers just couldn’t wait to drop it in. It’s all swelling and no pain.
[5]