The Singles Jukebox

Last name Diamandis, but no relation to Marina…

[Video]
[5.13]

Taylor Alatorre: By now, every major underground genre from the past 40 years has its own stereotyped and pornified reboot scene fermenting in some corner of the Soundcloudiverse. Yet it’s the very ubiquity of this phenomenon that makes this song’s hit status even less explicable. True, there’s something slightly novel in hearing the words “hit it from the back” chirped out over a spare post-punk rhythm, but is the primary audience even aware that this is novelty when most of them couldn’t define what “post-punk” is? What comes across in the production is a sense of blithe, unbothered coolness, eliding such concerns about authenticity by simply not registering them as concerns. It streamlines the ’80s darkwave sound without ever feeling that pesky postmodern urge to comment or build upon it, placing a hard limit on ambition in order to ward off any potentially embarrassing aesthetic clashes. This is the safe choice, entirely appropriate for a tune that ratifies the dominant sexual mores of its time while pretending to chafe against them.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Post-punk, machine-translated into electroclash trash, machine-translated into e-boy scumbaggery. Indie sleaze for people whose conception of that term doesn’t come from the original 2000s stuff, nor from accurate nostalgia for it (Meet Me in the Bathroom, are.na), but from TikTok or at best the Aesthetics Wiki. This is not good; I am not good for enjoying it. Extra point for the second-best ass-related quip by a person named Artem(i/a)s.
[7]

Will Rivitz: The hook shoulders an immense amount of weight here, the only believably nonchalant and dead-eyed bit of an otherwise purely unremarkable Shein-quality aestheticization of post-punk featuring a true nothingburger of a verse more indebted to G-Eazy’s vocal stylings than traditional financial literacy typically recommends. I couldn’t tell you exactly which bit of this song tends to get clipped on TikTok, but given the 25 seconds of genuinely compelling material provided by the chorus among two more minutes of dreck I can hazard a guess.
[6]

Mark Sinker: A 21st-century William Empson devoting a whole book (348 pages) to the present-day implications of the phrase “from the back”.
[9]

Iain Mew: “I’ll hit it from the back just so you don’t get attached” is so miserable that my enjoyment hinges on how knowing much that is the point. Two minutes of frenzied blankness never really deliver an answer.
[4]

TA Inskeep: This is why AI must be stopped.
[1]

Alfred Soto: In some places music writers will remark on how this or that song sounds “AI-generated” as if it were a bad thing. “I like the way you kiss me” is what might happen if you and I had access to a couple keyboards and a decent engineer and — presto! Out spills this mild electrothrob. The bloodlessness is the point.
[5]

Rachel Saywitz: Sounds like any hedge fund manager’s / self-starter CEO’s / crypto bro’s / man whose Bumble profile says “I am a strong, athletic man looking for a woman who can keep up with me haha ;) NO ONE NIGHT STANDS”’s idea of sex. “I’ll hit it from the back / Just so you don’t get attached”? Man, fuck off! 
[3]

Ian Mathers: Every microgeneration gets the vaguely self-loathing/plausibly deniably “sensitive” fuckboy it deserves, I guess. At least there’s some pace here and a certain earworm-y quality.
[7]

Andrew Karpan: Dark pop seemingly taking after Belarusian TikTokers Covid-hipsters Molchat Doma? I’m seated, but itchy. 
[7]

Leah Isobel: Laura Les and Alice Glass are filing a class-action lawsuit as we speak.
[2]

Nortey Dowuona: Toby Daintree is such a vapor. The only thing I could at first dig up was an empty SoundCloud page and a 2024 album from Artemas that has him as the only other producer. And his work seemingly alongside Kevin White, producer of five Bazzi hits and this little gem, has made this record an unlikely hit. As for Artemas, he apparently can do a v good mimic of Billie Eilish, but so could Tate McRae.
[5]

Isabel Cole: Not a lot happens in this song, but all of it sounds awesome; the track is every bit intoxicating and urgent as the feelings described. 
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Back in the depths of the early stages of the pandemic, I was cooped up in a ludicrously priced, despondently boring Bay Area suburb living with three other people. To some purpose — to kill time? to find some kind of connection with the outside world? to feel joy? — we would sit around watching music videos on YouTube for hours on end. No matter where we started — pop punk, Ys-era Joanna Newsom, 90s R&B — we would somehow end up at MGMT’s “Little Dark Age”, a seemingly innocuous track that has somehow become, to a certain slice of a generation, a bigger deal than the three MGMT songs that the rest of the world knows. At the time, I took it to be a quirk of the algorithm, that capricious beast that tech writers have spilled gallons upon gallons of ink over the past decade or so. Now, though, we see chickens come home to roost — a worldwide hit that’s essentially just a sped-up, horny edit of “Little Dark Age.” Kind of bangs, though.
[6]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Molchat Doma cosplayer regurgitates Wattpad dross.
[2]