The Singles Jukebox

Has she ever pouted her lips and called you…

[Video]
[6.57]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: “Pookie” sounds like a made up word for children, but Nakamura imbues it with so much lust and longing you might not even notice. The rest is mesmerising, trance-like music for sweaty, tipsy late nights when you’ve already found a partner and are ready to dance until you forget what daylight looks like.  
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Aya Nakamura slowly, cautiously builds a smooth, circling track of bass trains with little cargo of drippy drums and slivers of synths and percussion dropped back on each carriage roof.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The bass, cookie jar lid percussion, and Aya Nakamura’s faint reggaeton vocal melody combine into a dance track of serious groove proportions. You want a late summer jam? Go for it. 
[8]

Josh Buck: Having Aya Nakumara’s hypnotically gorgeous voice grace this disappointingly generic hip-hop track is like hanging custom gold embroidered velour curtains in the living room of a frat house. 
[5]

Iain Mew: “Blah blah blah” comes with not so much venom as total lack of consideration — “Pookie” is the attitude of “Djadja” caught and rattling around in a small dark room. 
[7]

Edward Okulicz: The beat is fantastic, minimal but never boring, and on headphones you really feel like it surrounds you, like someone’s bashing on a small receptacle that you’re inside, because you’re suddenly somehow three inches tall. But despite the plush imperiousness of Nakamura’s voice, it doesn’t move me and I ran out of interest about a third of the way through. Her hair in the video is very nice though.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Bursts with so much imperial-period Rihanna energy, specifically circa “Bitch Better Have My Money,” that I suspect even someone who’d never heard of Nakamura before this would correctly identify this as a hit. I imagine there’s even more of that lost in translation — it took an embarrassingly long time to find out that “pookie,” in French, means a snitch — but what does come across is more than potent enough. (The less said about the Lil Pump remix that is the reason we’re only covering this now, the better.)
[7]