The Singles Jukebox

Should have gone with “Bearded Barley”…

[Video]
[4.79]

Ian Mathers: Huh, that’s a neat title, wonder what made them pick such a specific image. Sounds pretty good so far — wait, does this chorus seem fam — OH FUCK OFF
[4]

Al Varela: Ripping off “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer wholesale is one thing, but turning it into yet another limp disco pop beat by way of Doja Cat? We’re just out of ideas, aren’t we?
[2]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I was not surprised that she could do an obnoxious banger; that she could also nail the other half of the Doja Cat biathlon with “Say So”-core streambait was less expected. This is a mode that nearly every pop star from what seems like every corner of the globe has tried over the past half-decade, but “Moonlit Floor” is in the upper echelon. The Sixpence None the Richer interpolation helps, but Lisa is what makes this work, taking Jessie Reyez’s endearingly Francophilic lyric and lending it her own elastic charm. She stretches across styles and registers smoothly, sounding perfectly at ease through it all.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Jessie Reyez is a passionate, open-hearted balladeer who takes great goofy swings that often stray into corniness — hence her connection with Eminem. But unlike him, there’s a buoyancy in her voice. Her voice cannot help but appear here, especially in the delivery. A Reyez keen appears in the first lines of the second verse, which would feel electric and striking in her voice but sounds flat in LISA’s. The composition by Rykeyz is plush but otherwise anodyne; the bassline is smooth and bubbly but leaves little impression. A shame that Reyez hasn’t been up to anything much recently.
[4]

Will Adams: If I didn’t know better, I would’ve assumed Bruno also had a hand in this steady drip of light corn syrup. The Sixpence interpolation turns the “milky twilight” into a “Paris twilight” but doesn’t develop the concept beyond a stray “bonjour, bébé” and a flimsy “French boy got me trippin'” hook.
[4]

Mark Sinker: Don’t want to bag on Paris (it’s the first place I ever ate Vietnamese jellyfish ravioli!), but is it really still the world destination for exciting hot youth romance? Is it even that in France anymore? When groups have paused for solo projects in the past, it has usually unveiled a glimpse of who’s freeloading the collective, in which ways and when. Nothing really wrong with anything here, but it all seems a bit rote, as Lisa slips too professionally from this caressing delivery to that one.
[6]

Andrew Karpan: One of the objectively most pleasant of her solo singles I’ve heard so far; the soft, discount Dua Lipa disco beat becomes a space for a kind of objective, indiscernible yearning, a wanting to be that fits her register like a velvet glove. 
[8]

Alfred Soto: In this wave of acts with passing resemblances to Sabrina Carpenter’s combination of the coy and the crass, LISA is a bit of alright, though the mix’s gleam is like a fresh pair of teeth.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: Either the nu-disco formalism is designed to be forgettable, or it just seems that way when set against one of the holy relics of ’90s pop-rock. The interpolation does no damage to the source, but it manages to be overly literal while also, perhaps inevitably, missing the point. The lilt of Leigh Nash’s delivery has been starched and pressed, and the localized details and realized childhood dreams of the original — broken tree house, father’s map — are supplanted by a romance of frictionless globe-hopping that turns a potentially juicy tabloid headline into another tired national stereotype. Maybe France deserves it after being one of the chief purveyors of Orientalism back in the day, but an extended riff on the abstract concept of tongue kissing, set to a do-no-harm melody, is the kind of revanche they’ll gladly accept.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: You know something’s gone wrong when your single is less sexy than the version by a Christian pop band.
[3]

Jel Bugle: The thing I like about K-pop is the dynamism you get from the group performance, the interplay of voices and styles. On their own, the Blackpink ladies are struggling — get the band back together! This is an okay cover of “Kiss Me,” not spectacular. Could it be better? Probably not. Feel like Lisa’s solo gig is a raw deal. 
[5]

Kayla Beardslee: I know Halloween already passed, but it’s hard to think of anything more terrifying to this music writer than having to find something new to say about a song that is both “everything is Say So” and “everything is lazy interpolations.” I mean, I can’t keep doing this! Can I just make my score “n/a” and be done with it?? (But for the record, I loved “New Woman,” and I’m absolutely savoring how leaving YG has immediately paid off for all the Blackpink girls.)
[4]

Dave Moore: Crass, lazy, annoying. LISA has arrived.
[7]

TA Inskeep: Really didn’t need a semi-cover of Sixpence None the Richer in 2024.
[3]