Pivoting to the Mariah Jukebox…

[Video]
[6.56]

Vikram Joseph: A tapestry of cut-up vocal samples forms a brittle backdrop for Mariah The Scientist’s resigned sigh of a break-up ballad; they float just out of focus, a fragmented memory reel that evades tangibility. We’re guided through the dark by the guttural, hollowed-out lower-end throb and Mariah’s vocal melodies, which are easily good enough to fill the empty space the production creates. “2 You” is slight in time and volume, but absolutely not in emotional amplitude.
[8]

Edward Okulicz: “2 You” sounds classy and a little bit eerie, with a typically strong performance from Mariah, but it also feels unfinished. The chopped-up, distorted vocals that make for the main hook make for an interesting tension, and the song on top is pretty good, but when you take out the intro and outro, it’s really only 2 minutes’ worth of song stretched to 3 minutes. I mean, it’s a nice effect, but it’s not that nice.
[6]

Dorian Sinclair: The layered, echoing vocals that make up the majority of “2 You”‘s production are very cool, and the ways the drum and bass drop in and out to accompany them are well considered. There’s a sense of evolution as the song goes, which I always appreciate. But ultimately it feels a little unresolved — certainly this is not the kind of song where a big climax is called for, but something is missing, leaving it feeling like a sketch rather than a minimal-but-fully-realized work.
[6]

Oliver Maier: Mariah and co. are working very hard to make sure that this doesn’t sound like standard contemporary R&B fare, and I applaud that, but almost every choice they make instead feels misguided. The stuttering vocal loop sounds dashed-off and amateurish, like someone’s first-ever crack at sampling. When the rest of the beat enters underneath it’s just a mess, every element kicking against the others, Mariah’s melodies evoking a little doo-wop but still sounding like placeholders. The limp outro is inexplicable even before you realise it’s almost a minute long. There’s experimentation all over this but zero refinement.
[2]

Alfred Soto: I see no problem with admiring a song for its gimmickry; pop music depends on gimmickry. Mariah’s plush vocals and inhabited performance (I love her enunciation of “no-brainer”) sustains interest past the cut-up hook running beneath “2 You.” Think Tinashe thinking like Amerie.
[7]

Juana Giaimo: Mariah the Scientist’s voice is pleasant, strong and has good fluidity, and I’m always down for vocal samples that are so chopped up and manipulated that you barely recognize them as vocals anymore. Here, they act both as a calming backup melody and as a really fast beat, especially because the actual beat comes in after 40 seconds into the song. This would have been an [8] if it was longer — the beat at the end made me think something exciting was coming, but it just ended.
[7]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: There’s a moment at the end, after the mourning, the polyrhythms, where it’s just the sampled vocals and a drum kit. It’s a moment of release that feels earned by Mariah’s sadness and disappointment, each production choice perfectly attuned to the emotional beats of the song. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Both this and “Reminders” are such complex admixtures of hurt and hurting, you could imagine both being about the same person or events, considered at different times. It’s worth noting that Mariah doesn’t make the “our song” bit the whole gist of the song, and yet “whenever they play our song / don’t know why I feel ashamed / don’t know why I don’t belong” carries more punch than another recent Jukebox entry that dwells on it for much greater length. And when I say I don’t care how much or what kind of vocal processing is used so much as whether it actually adds something to the song, “2 You” is a great example of the kind of thing I mean.
[8]

Austin Nguyen: There’s a New Yorker piece subtitled “the uncanny allure of our unlived lives” I’ve been revisiting recently under existential duress. The article, as you expect, contemplates the what-if’s of life that multiply with each choice you make, the number of which has only increased in the modern age as technology proliferates (i.e., you couldn’t have been an influencer before now) and “historic events” stack upon each other. It lays out life like a disorienting 5-D chess diagram when you take into account and extrapolate all of its potential: the places you would have lived, jobs you would have taken, and of course, the lovers you would have kissed. You don’t have to think about any of this to understand how painful it is to seal yourself off from the hope of being with someone. Mariah the Scientist probably didn’t in her prosaic grievances (“Look at what we made. Sure was beautiful.”), which are more likely to be a caption to that Jesus Camp girl meme than anything else. But to me, blurred out in the constant passing of that neon-strobe vocoder (the closest one I’ve heard to a “Backseat” synth) are all the futures, romantic and otherwise, you could’ve had collapsing into each other, as if you were walking through the mirrors of an Infinity Room, each dot of LED a possibility in your life until, all of a sudden, an entire network of stars disappears–a sector of the room now left dark, rippling timelines twisted into empty air. Then, the aftermath. “But whenever they play our song / Don’t know why I feel ashamed”–floaters of false light in the periphery. “2AM in the parking garage, it’s clearly a no-brainer”–residual heat from burnt-out stars brushed off. All the refractions from that first turning point–a glance, a graze–narrowed into a truth that feels both claustrophobic and emptying. If you will, a limbo: “Don’t know why I don’t belong.”
[7]