The Singles Jukebox

You mean the Red Scare girl DIDN’T pivot to country?

[Video]
[5.33]

Andrew Karpan: A thrilling expression of the current state of cowboy country, in the form of a square dance about leaving gentrified Austin to find the real thing in LA. A tale as old as time.
[6]

Will Adams: A great setup — a couple plans to blow this town for LA but he gets cold feet; spurning ensues — completely fumbled. Between the underbaked narrative (there’s barely a second verse to flesh out the story!) and anodyne stomp-clap backing, it’s hard to get engaged. Or maybe it’s that the main melody kind of sounds like “DotA.”
[4]

Jeffrey Brister: Nothing here really sticks: a C&W preset backing track, complete with persistent stomp-clap rhythm; lyrics made entirely of country cliche, paired with a vocal performance that gasps every one of them like a revelation; the fantasy that this is the woman who walked out in “Fool Hearted Memory” and thinking he shouldn’t be beating himself up over losing someone so unremarkable; an overall vibe that someone listened to “you should be sorry” then stripped out anything that made it distinctive. The only reason this isn’t lower is because it has a basic sense of craft and professionalism, that cold sleekness one expects from pop music. That’s probably the faintest praise I’ve ever typed out.
[4]

Ian Mathers: “Austin” is most definitely pop, but it feels a lot more country than most of the pop-country we get here. The elements I can trace that make me feel that way have occurred in songs I’ve deeply disliked; the steady, stomping beat, the timbre of the acoustic guitar and other instrumentation, the vocal delivery, the lyrics. And yet here they all coincide in a way that makes me feel like I suddenly get what others see in a genre I mostly can’t stand. Even just the contrast between the ache in her voice on the chorus and the brusqueness of “I loved you; how tragic” is knocking me out a little. “Austin” is so good that I’ll probably cut the next couple lesser examples of the form a little more slack.
[10]

Alfred Soto: Beyoncé got shit for playing with the holy Ark of the country tradition. Here’s a better example of 1-900-HEE-HAW. 
[2]

Oliver Maier: PRO: the hook sounds a bit like “All I Ever Wanted”. CON: the rest of it doesn’t sound like much at all. PRO(?): Dasha is a funny name for a country musician.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: A pivot toward country as it swallows up the massive gap in streaming that rap left behind is a savvy and novel move, since Dasha’s album Dirty Blonde had no actual hits nor any mentions except by yours truly. The holding place for “Austin” is What Happens Now, a completely forgotten album from February of this year that can now gather whatever halfhearted extra streams that trickle back from this song. But Dasha herself is a mystery: a bold but anodyne voice that holds the heavy guitar lick at bay. Lyrics like “hell of a bluff, you had me believing/how many months did you plan on leaving?” are cutting enough but don’t stick deeply or produce an interest in the voice that carries them.
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: For such a hard-to-screw-up premise, the narrative is surprisingly wobbly — if she doesn’t know where the guy went or why, how does she know he’s in Austin at all, much less whether he’ll still be planted there four decades from now? Dasha could have wrung some pathos out of the scenario by zeroing in on the most maddening aspects of being ghosted: the nagging uncertainties and never-to-be-answered questions brought to the fore. Instead she tramples on whatever relatability she built up elsewhere by strutting cockily into the end of the chorus, going for the rhetorical kill shot at point-blank range, and missing.
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: The backstory is ambiguous, frustratingly so — if she’s going back to LA, what was she doing in Austin, and why is she talking about it like it’s her dead-end childhood town? (When was the last time Austin qualified as a dead-end town? It barely even qualifies for Keep Austin Weird anymore.) Why is the ex in the mix, even as an excuse — is she a rebound? The other woman? If his shit was never packed, presumably he’d be coming home at some point to get it? (Whose home is this, even?) But wondering what the fuck even happened here, accidental or not, at least makes sense for a song about wondering what the fuck even happened here. And despite not being originally country — her older stuff approaches The Fame — Dasha takes to the genre with enough Kelsea Ballerini-ish pluck to sell whatever the fuck that is.
[7]

Iain Mew: The strings are the most exciting musical element of “Austin”. They also form a promise that it doesn’t deliver on: there is no accelerating intensity, and the only part of the song where the music gets to run away has already happened when the strings come in. The chorus ends with what could work as a kicker, but the song peters to a stop with “did your ex find out?” sung with no emotion in any direction. The saving grace is that the musical choices could not be any more thematically appropriate: a song about a confusing anticlimax, structured as a confusing anticlimax.
[6]

Alex Clifton: The chorus is great, but the chorus is the only part of the song that has any meat to it. At the very least this needs some kind of bridge to prevent the entire thing from sounding so samey. It’s a shame, because with a little more finessing, this could’ve been something neat. I feel so old bemoaning the “TikTokification of music,” but that’s what “Austin” is: the snippets that sound excellent will end up going viral, but there’s nothing else of substance. Maybe her next song will have more than a Dasha inspiration (sorry). 
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Something uncanny valley about this – the handclaps are too quantized, the guitar parts too clean in the mix, Dasha’s rhymes a little too perfectly posed. Pristine country pop about leaving and cowardice is a long and beautiful tradition, and I’m not begrudging anyone who tries to invert “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” in gender/sentiment/compass direction. But “Austin” lacks a certain aplomb — the confidence in one’s messy choices that would give this the lived-in quality that it so desperately is missing. It sounds like a flight, not a road trip.
[4]

Joshua Lu: There’s a legitimate sense of spite and bile in the lyrics, with a would-be empowering perspective of a woman determined to move on regardless of whatever’s stopping her lover from committing. Dasha’s flat delivery belies the premise, though; the song frowns instead of sneers, and the impact is lost.
[4]

Mark Sinker: Dasha’s rage is focused and pure and justified, though she very much cannot make this guy seem like a worthwhile proposition: His boots that stopped working are those blobby red cartoon ones that MSCHF put out into the world last year, and then his Cybertruck broke down on some easily traversed dirt road really not far out of town. Ka-clippety-clop ka-clippety-clop, and the disgusted mockery boomerangs back (as she well knows) at her. And that’s reality. 
[8]

Isabel Cole: Bings to life the starry-eyed exuberance of planning an escape just long enough to make it feel like she lost something real. Closing the moment of revelation with “Your shit was never packed” is a devastating touch, nicely paid off later as she wonders, “How many months were you planning on leaving?” It’s not just their dream she has to say goodbye to; it’s the illusion of the person she thought she knew, the man who played along without ever intending to follow through, a betrayal worse than mere cold feet. In the chorus, playing the hitch in her voice for all it’s worth, she runs through options she knows she’ll never get closure on, one after the other like signs on the highway. By the end, I believe her that she’ll forget him, but—crucially for the song to work—I also believe she hasn’t yet.
[8]