Somehow our first time around with these…

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[6.44]

Katherine St Asaph: Chromatics’ last album, Night Drive, was Drive four years earlier, title and nocturnal drift and vague melancholy and all. Thanks to that newfound context and signal boost, it’s hard not to associate the film with the soundscape “Kill for Love” carves. The crucial, gorgeous difference are Ruth Radelet’s vocals, barely processed and stranded in the mix and small and tentative like a real human being.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: There’s no “Rippin Kittin” glamor in the titular metaphor; the death infecting this tune can’t be murder. The song exists in the past tense: “I drank the water and it felt all right/I took a pill almost every night.” “Kill for Love” sounds like an elegy, the blurry remnants of something that used to exist but is now no more corporeal than the muted decaying burr of the tune’s fainthearted synths.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Aural Hipstamatic; naïfcore wallpaper. Those placebo-Sumner guitar spangles are nice, but it’s important to remember that “effortless” can also be pejorative.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: They’re quite good at atmospherics. But it is 2011. There is no excuse for this rhythm section.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: “Kill For Love” is a lovable cascade of sounds, only with a drum machine programmed by someone who hadn’t heard the rest of the song. Which makes this song sound like a gliding, blissful bit of post-goth synth-pop that doesn’t know what speed it wants to go at, but has probably picked the wrong one.
[6]

Hazel Robinson: I go through month-long periods of being totally obsessed with Night Drive so can’t claim to be unbiased with regards to Chromatics but there is something immensely alluring about this. Their characteristic tenderness is out in full force, the gentle thrum of the synth soothing off even the naffness of the eponymous chorus line. Flat-voiced indie girl vocals are extremely hit-and-miss for me but Chromatics have an understanding of the warmth needed to bring the song together rather than as discombobulated, standoffish elements.
[8]

Iain Mew: Numbing sadness mostly conveyed through numbingly slow music and numbingly disinterested vocals. Difficult to say whether the occasional trebly sound explosions are a good thing for livening it up or a bad thing for spoiling the mood. 
[5]

Zach Lyon: Chromatics already flexed their Bruce when they covered “I’m On Fire,” but this is the one that has me convinced they understand his music innately. At least an era of it, anyway. It’s in the way their words are peppered with his the-personal-is-generational statements in Darkness on the Edge of Town, going so far as to almost borrow a line from its title track (“Everybody’s got a secret, son…”), all filtered through true Millennial frustration. It’s in the atmosphere that descends from his mid-80s work, that sonic melancholy that was always in conflict with his voice. They do well.
[7]

Sally O’Rourke: “Kill for Love” is a gorgeous-sounding song, all crystalline synths and echoing drums, a gauzy dream world tempting you to get lost in forever. Then Ruth Radalet’s weary, unvarnished vocals cut through the haze, exposing the numbness and loneliness that keeps her tethered down far below that swirling fantasy. So often this desperation to feel anything gets a stark acoustic treatment to reflect the bleak emptiness inside, but Chromatics’ lustrous arrangement underlines that true depression is knowing the whole world’s a glamorous party to which you haven’t been invited, at which you can only look through the window but can’t open the door.
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