It’s time to perpend on “Time to Pretend.” What fun!

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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: It was a matter of time before someone sampled the iconic hook from MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” but the way that it’s done for this throwaway Macy’s commercial of a song is truly, utterly terrible. Did no one find the irony of a song called “Lasting Lover” sampling a song whose most iconic line is “This is our decision to live fast and die young”? 
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: A great sample elevates the song around it by recontextualizing the original work, bending it and playing with listener expectations to create a whole greater than its parts. A good sample at very least does something tuneful or interesting, working as a key building block of a song even if there’s not anything particularly clever in its use. The sample on “Lasting Lover” does none of that! It sounds like Sigala accidentally dragged in a clip from MGMT to a Logic project and couldn’t take it out! It does nothing at all except make me sad.
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Tim de Reuse: James Arthur’s voice is a carbon-copy of every other dramatic English boy that’s made it big in the last few years; the instrumental is passable synthwork that isn’t stylized enough to evoke any era in particular. Maybe they included that sample just so we’d have something to remember it by.
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Thomas Inskeep: How much of the sound of James Arthur’s voice here is bad processing, and how much is just his bad voice? It’s impossible to tell on this bottom-of-the-barrel 2015-esque EDM/pop record that desperately wishes it was a Chainsmokers song.
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Juana Giaimo: I understand they tried to make this song less generic and boring by adding a sample of a band that was considered cool ten years ago, but it literally sounds like they pasted it in the track without even considering whether it fits well.
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Nortey Dowuona: The synth sample tries to set a better song on track, but is erased by the flat, pumping drums, ghostly river synths and coffee ground bass. Then it disappears under hopping bee synths as James sings rustily all over the place and lies on each side of the mix. The one-step up-drop falls atop James’s head and he continues to stumble around into a lagoon of synth gurgles; he looks drunk, drowned and just ready to grab his guitar again on some Jewel as “Intuition” business.
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Alfred Soto: The arrangement for the verses has a decent lope, as much a mirage as a Donald Trump lead in same-day voting, say. Then the singing starts and this is hell.
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Will Adams: The interpolation whacking you over the head with its aggressive badness in the first five seconds is endearing in an “aw, they tried” kind of way. But that’s all there is of note. The “Time to Pretend” riff takes ninety seconds to reappear, as if it too is embarrassed of its inclusion in the proceedings. This now makes six Sigala songs titled “love” set to dull chirp-house we’ve covered here. What is there left to say besides, “What is there to say?”
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Scott Mildenhall: Bruce Fielder awakes to hear that Alistair Darling has announced a scrappage scheme: “Bangers for Cash.” Simply trade in an old song and get £2000 in return. The radio segues into MGMT, just as it had the year before; the same song he’d had on his iPod for at least a couple more. “I wish I had an old song knocking around,” he thinks, before heading off to school. Within a few months, he’s passed his GCSEs, and is soon moving on to college and university, all the while inhabited by an indelible riff and a pair of obsidian eyebrows, forever ringing to the tune of four whole monkeys. So driven, he applies himself all the way to that degree in Commercial Music, and onward he goes: making music, making money in the prime of his life. Yet those notes keep pulling him back. Those synths have atomised; those brows have imprinted. They are his now. One day, “Time to Pretend” comes on and leaves him perplexed. “My song!” There is no Proustian rush, only rage at such larceny. He’d been working on “Lasting Lover” for years, and now it was condemned to the scrapheap. But at least that meant two grand was coming his way. He looked up the scrappage scheme and found only an old news report — wait, what happened to Alistair Darling? Years had passed, and it seemed that the tune could not be replayed, and the cash no more repaid: everything must run its course. Hollow, Bruce looked closer at the fossilised article. Nowhere did it even mention songs. “After all this time,” he rued, “I should have been making cars.”
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