The Singles Jukebox

Surely someone in the Auntie Anne’s dynasty is also an aspiring musician…

[Video]
[4.80]

Grace Robins-Somerville: It’s getting hard for me to keep track of the bearded Top 40 country singer guys—your Lukes and Zachs and Bryans and such. It wasn’t familiar with either of these artists before hearing this song, so the first thing I thought was that they’re just making up people, and the second was a half-assed attempt to come up with a joke about how Koe Wetzel is a nepo baby because he must be the heir to the Wetzel’s Pretzels fortune. As for Jessie Murph, the fried, spindly baby-voice thing has been unbearable for years. But maybe in a month or two I’ll hear this song on the radio at Cook Out while I’m stoned on a weeknight and be charmed by it, who knows. 
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: This seemingly innocuous song has produced a serious contender for stupidest beef of the year (and yet somehow not the stupidest beef in Koe Wetzel’s career). Wetzel, a Texan country artist, released a duet with Murph, a TikTok-grown pop artist and Wetzel’s labelmate on Columbia Records. For this, the two artists (but mostly Murph) received an amount of online hate that was startling even by easily offended country music fan standards. Why this song, and not, say, Florida Georgia Line collaborating with Bebe Rexha or Morgan Wallen collaborating with Post Malone or Koe Wetzel collaborating with Diplo and Kodak Black (o what a nexus of awfulness)? These cancellable sins, apparently: the duet wasn’t supposed to be a duet (source: trust me bro), the duet is too pop (you don’t write a song with Amy Allen if you’re not making pop), Murph’s voice is too scratchy (I actually like how she blows “indie girl voice” out into the red), or that old classic, “there’s just something I don’t like about her.” The sheer whininess of it all makes me like this more. Good news for shit people, though: there’s a solo version out. This release, a standard tactic that record labels use to juice their streaming playcounts and pander to radio programmers who’re terrified of pop or rap verses in their rotation, is being taken as a capitulation by the haters and even by the artists. “I don’t have to deal with Koe Wetzel fans calling me a rat anymore,” Murph said. When fans go low, they go high, I guess.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: amy allen miss challenge – failed
[7]

Ian Mathers: I’m sorry, I’m just too hung up on the way that none of the songwriters here appear to have any idea what “the high road” means, idiomatically. Or if it’s supposed to be ironic/sarcastic, someone forgot to tell the performers.
[3]

Will Adams: I enjoy the joke: dude claims to be taking the high road but is in fact just drowning his sorrows in bourbon. But neither Wetzel nor Murph lean into the humor enough, playing it dead serious and dead boring. There’s really nothing else besides those distracting flat notes.
[5]

Alfred Soto: The rake at my karaoke bar who brings a different young woman every visit loves singing “Drinkin’ Problem” and other solid contemporary country. I can see him singing the male part here, down to the self-effacing manner in which he’ll run his fingers through his wan mullet. “I don’t need a ticket to your shit show” is not a thing the gentlemen he poses as would say, though.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: Whatever his outlaw inclinations, Koe Wetzel has a whole lotta nothing to say and no good way to say it. I don’t mind country mining alt rock for inspiration, because alt rock has soundtracked the boonies for the past couple decades; there’s no point pretending this is an artificial — or novel — intrusion. But if a country artist is going to sell me Staind crossed with Daughtry, I’d like some narrative, some feeling, something more than weed references to tell me why their particular story is worth heeding. Jessie Murph, to her credit, has some vocal fry and she extracts a lot of personality from that creaky voice. She doesn’t have any more material to work with than Wetzel, so all that personality is left to sit and stew but, for the duration of her verse, “High Road” finds an extra dimension.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: That watery early 2000s guitar tone as homing beacon for the kind of subterranean post-industrial sickness that can only be properly transcribed at a 6th-grade level — otherwise known as the key signature of Madden NFL 2003 — still has its disciples. Koe Wetzel uses it here only as a garnish, not wanting to disturb his staid country duet in which, surprise, both sides are at fault and the title infrastructure doesn’t actually exist. I wish he had gone with his instincts and let the post-grunge infection spread a little more, at least to give Jessie Murph a stronger platform for her acidic put-downs.
[5]

Kristen S. Hé: Wetzel’s warm baritone and Murph’s Bhad Bhabie-Taryn Manning squawk: oil and water, but probably more memorable for it?
[4]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Post Malone and Morgan Wallen have more chemistry than this. These two have taken a perfectly good emo revival guitar tone and done some slam poetry bullshit over it, junking the track up with mixed metaphors and remedial melodrama. 
[3]