The Singles Jukebox

From a cyborg to the sidebar…

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[7.67]

Michael Hong: Love is intertwined with pain for yeule because that’s all they’ve ever seemed to know — when they open with the exploratory first line, it’s an attempt to see the marks as an intense measure of love rather than a domineering act of violence. Its glitchiness doubles with their confusion, yeule hanging to the titular bites as a reminder of love even when they shriek in pain with every reading. There’s desperation in the knowing impermanence of their lover’s attention, yeule switching back and forth between “could have loved” and “could have killed.” It spirals into darkness, any ending of separation unknown to them.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: It’s grounded in heavy, well-defined things: a tune about getting hurt over fuzzy synths and a four-on-the-floor chorus. It blooms in the details: the willingness to push its glitchy percussion past the realm of scratchy ambience and into the realm of foreground clutter, and the chutzpah to make a digitally altered voice really wail up in frequency ranges more often associated with mosquitoes. The sonic distress makes quietly violent lyrics cut deep and imbues the sing-song opening with new levels of horror on each listen.
[9]

Ady Thapliyal: Nightcore is a genre that isn’t respected enough in the annals of pop history — while it didn’t receive radio play or top the charts, it did soundtrack countless YouTube AMVs and Newgrounds animations. “Bites on My Neck” sounds like it could soundtrack one hell of a Flash game, but only if we cut around all the dull, waiting-for-the-chorus bits.  
[6]

Scott Mildenhall: At nearly five minutes in length and with multiple diversions from its memorable elements, this could do with a lot of refining. When it soars, it lingers; when it dawdles, it bores. Being more conventional might seem less interesting, but often the reverse is true.
[6]

Ian Mathers: “Bites on My Neck” is too much its own fully formed thing to just fall into lazy/easy x meets y formulation, but before listening to it I’m not sure I appreciated enough how (for example) Alice Glass and PinkPantheress are clearly part of the same galaxy. Or maybe, given the cyborg concerns of Glitch Princess, the same network node. And yet there’s a messy corporeality here from the title on down, and bruising as much emotional as anything else. The things one can do with bare hands, and the feeling (not always accurate, but queasily compelling) of immolation as emotional revelation. “I’ve seen it all / I’m in the dark” they sing, perhaps summing up the way the human condition is never quite post-.
[9]

Leah Isobel: Over and over, yeule asks, “How to feel?” The shifts into and out of the refrain are an answer: feel everything.
[8]