cactus

content warning: language, references to self-harm, abusive relationships, sex work

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “Bring Your Love” by Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter, “Baby Steps” by Olivia Dean, “Like a Prayer” by Josh Fawaz featuring our robot overlords, “Cinderella” by the late Mac Miller featuring Ty Dolla $ign, “Hit the Wall” by Gracie Abrams, “National Treasures” by Drake, “Baby” by Prospa and Murda Beatz, former #1 “drop dead” by Olivia Rodrigo (thanks to the three-song rule, more on her later), “Go” by The Chemical Brothers featuring Q-Tip, “Stateside” by PinkPantheress, carried to its chart success by a viral remix with Zara Larsson (and not so much the versions with Kylie Minogue, Groove Armada or, of course, Bladee).

As for our returns, let’s talk a little bit about the FIFA World Cup – sure, it was a disappointment this week against Argentina, and now seemingly a political incident, but that doesn’t stop songs from resurging and thankfully, I do have an episode that covers many of those songs. It was a fun episode to write back in July 2021 during the Euros, you can read about some of the football anthems here, though not all of them were covered. As for songs I already covered back then in that episode (or elsewhere), “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers is up to #42 (I’m counting it here), “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond is back at #35, “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” by Shakira and Freshlyground is up to #26 and “Vindaloo” by Fat Les is back at #20.

One that seems to have been adopted this year more than usual – or at least enough this time to chart again – is “Hey Jude” by The Beatles, back this week at #24 thanks to fans chanting the name of footballer Jude Bellingham. Originally written by Paul McCartney to console John Lennon’s son Julian over his mum and Lennon splitting, it can now console fans of the England football team over our loss to VARgentina. Now for that time every other episode where I go scouring through the Official Charts Company database! For “Hey Jude”, it’s decently simple, spending two weeks at #1 in 1968, dethroning the Bee Gees’ “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” and blocking “Those Were the Days” by Mary Hopkin which would soon get six weeks at #1 of its own. The original recording has returned a few times – 1976 when a re-release peaked at #12, 1988 when a reissue hit #52, 2010 when it reached as high as #40 and 2024 when it didn’t get even close to the higher reaches of the chart at #94. “Hey Jude” technically did make it back to the #1 spot in 2009 – for another two weeks no less – as one of the songs in Peter Kay’s Children in Need medley sung by the “Animated All-Stars” (essentially, Britain’s biggest cartoons). You’ll recognise more of the singers in that children’s song than in the song it took #1 away from: The X Factor finalists from that year’s season covering MJ’s “You are Not Alone”. Bob the Builder and co. also blocked Rihanna’s “Russian Roulette” from #1. Aside from that novelty, “Hey Jude” was covered – not long after release – by US soul singer Wilson Pickett, for a #16 peak in 1969 whilst Amen Corner’s “(If Paradise is) Half as Nice” was #1, and that’s all I can find from my decent but admittedly brief search – there could very well be more samples, remixes or other renditions of “Hey Jude” out there that have charted briefly in the UK.

Outside of football, we have one of the greatest UK #1s of the 1980s returning due to its artist sadly passing away on July 8th: “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler is back at #29. Jim Steinman wrote an over-the-top song elevated by part-dreamy, part-cheesy pop rock production, but it’s Tyler’s raspier conviction that sells the drama and gives the power ballad the weighty release. A massive song, one I remember hearing all my childhood, and a massive hit all the same: one of the best-selling singles of all time, one of the UK’s top favourite 80s songs, “Total Eclipse” hit #1 the year of release in 1983. Tyler knocked off a song also charting right now coincidentally, “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, from the top spot in her first week and blocked Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” from #1 in the second (interesting coincidence that both this and “Hey Jude” spent two weeks at #1). Though it soon left the chart, it would, like “Hey Jude”, return to the top 10 in other forms, with Tyler’s original recording only making brief returns in 2008 and 2010 (the highest it reached during this time was #57). In 1994, years before her Eurovision bid, English singer Nicki French released a dance cover of the song that peaked at #5 for three weeks in 1995 (during which, Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe” and Céline Dion’s “Think Twice” were #1). German DJ Jan Wayne released a trance rendition of “Total Eclipse” sung by Lena that peaked at #28 in 2003 (whilst Gareth Gates’ The Kumars-backed “Spirit in the Sky” cover was #1) and finally, the Glee cast got their hands on it for a #9 peak in 2010. Roll Deep’s “Good Times” was #1 that week and “Total Eclipse” hadn’t charted since that year to my knowledge in the main UK Singles Chart, and thankfully nor did David Guetta’s unfortunate remix last year. Oh, and “Nice to Each Other” by Olivia Dean is also back this week once again to #62, sure.

Then as for our notable gains, for songs already charting that is, we see boosts for “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #69, “MORNING DEW (DONK)” by Beyoncé off of the debut to #60 (wouldn’t mind this being a slow burn hit at all), “Sue me” by Audrey Hobert at #54, “Satisfy” by Calvin Harris and Jazzy at #43, “bloodstream” by Alyssa Grace at #36, “Blessings” by Calvin Harris and Clementine Douglas at #28, “Great Expectations” by SIENNA SPRIO at #22 and, unfortunately, “Movin’ to the Sun” by HUGEL, Imael Angel and Ultra Naté at #16, though there are some brief notable gains above in the next section.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with this year’s kind of pathetic FIFA World Cup anthem “Dai Dai” by Shakira and Burna Boy up to #5 for obvious reasons, “Talk to You” by ANOTR and 54 Ultra up to #4, “Three Lions” by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds up big to #3 (that won’t last) and, speaking of not lasting, “Wonderwall” by Oasis is at #2, for now, with “Rein Me In” at the very top. Now to sift through the new entries below…

New Entries

#68 – “misery.” – pupsies

Produced by Goetia and/or pupsies and Elujjin

With other songs titled “my femcel life” and “Instagram reels!”, I feel like I knew exactly what kind of young, five layers of irony scene revival artist we were getting with this one, as pupsies, who started making music when she was just 16 in 2023, gets a sleeper hit with “misery.”, a song from March that got so big that pupsies can no longer edit her own lyrics on Genius, much to her discontent. I used to be a bit of a connoisseur of this trend out of a morbid curiosity for people experiencing a nostalgia of that era and subculture much differently than mine, though I’ve moved on from that crop of artists as we got further from the pandemic. Spotify credits the production to “Goetia”, but Genius credits it to pupsies herself and a Kazakh producer Elujjin – maybe Goetia is their group name, who knows?

Either way, the song is well over two minutes which honestly surprised me. I figured we’d be dealing with a fast-paced one-and-done track but this is actually much more thought through than I expected or many might give credit, with a slower sprawl of chiptune synths and pleading delivery mixing small emo inflections into an Uffie-like speak-singing full of run-on sentences that, even with assumingly punching in or stringing together takes, leaves pupsies a little bit breathless and for a song like this, it’s great to hear those moments of exhaustion, with the bubbles of 8-bit melodies crawling over the song before a looming, basic and factorial drum pattern takes slow bites of whatever is left of pupsies’ energy, her vocal soon drowned out by everything else. She reminds me of 8485 but ridding much of the modern, cleaned-up pop and EDM influences that bring convention to the songs by embracing the rawer, MySpace-era bitpop, even down to awkwardly-mixed stock guitar riffs. The drop into a panicked scuttle of percussion in the pretty long second verse, before the guitars come in to push the song back into its place, and how that trade-off continues throughout the rest of the song, is one of the awkward genre-blending signatures of this kind of music that ends up as an amazing choice for a song about an unhealthy, seemingly abusive relationship, wherein pupsies is neglected outside of when her partner wants sex (“the kind where you are nice to me, but only in the evenings so I wish that I was dreaming” – some harrowing implications can be made there) and feels like their unconditional love for this person is getting overbearing and too much because he turns a blind eye to the passion and affection she shows him. The release that comes with the first acknowledgement that she’s left this guy, near the end of the manic of the second verse, really struck me and it hurts to hear the cycle return with the chorus, with the guitar taking up the space she now has to breathe.

Ms. pupsies sticks to one melody throughout much of the song so when she deviates for her last resort of self-harming to prove that she cares in hope for just a spark of that being mutual, it makes a lot of sense that the song never reaches that energy again, spiralling and twinkling (with melodies that remind me of RPGs and fairytales) into a whisper, you could even say that it bleeds out for what remains of the song. At the end of the day, though we don’t get to cover a lot of it on the show, I’m a sucker for angsty indietronica and emo-pop, this fits that bill, covers a narrative realistically and with stakes whilst doing it, has a solid performance from its lead… it checks all the boxes for me. And given how online pupsies seems to be still, she could potentially see this review – if you do, and even if you don’t, amazing song, I hope it continues to rise and I may have to check out the rest of the discography after this episode is written because it’s 100% up my alley.

#67 – “Zone” – MK and Poppy Baskcomb

Produced by MK and Punctual

American DJ Marc Kinchen is back with another song, this time recruiting writer and singer Poppy Baskcomb for a song that, according to Erick Ycaza, “serves housey vibes […] made for dancing in clubs, at the gym, or even around your house this summer”. Wow, tell me what else is new. Released this May, the song has accrued enough momentum to chart and whilst it’s nothing we haven’t heard from MK, it’s got plenty of colour in its loud stabs and rubbery synth bass backing Baskcomb’s filtered, potentially pitch-shifted vocals that see her doing a bit of a bratty, repetitive sing-rap about being in the zone at a club. It does remind me, both content-wise (the lack of) and in its cute but minimal, bassy house knock, of MK’s previous hit with CHRYSTAL, “Dior”, but “Zone” has plenty more to stand out, including a series of alarm sirens in the build-up and drop alike, an incessantly catchy stutter to Baskcomb’s hook and an energy less complacent in staying in place than CHRYSTAL would, especially in the honestly great bridge that filters the mix in a liquid haze, peppers additional vocal riffs and melodic patterns and reaches a crisp, bass groove before the netty four-on-the-floors can sneak themselves back in. That final build is what completes the song for me and makes the rest worthwhile, though it’s far from MK’s worst in the first place and is quite fun, though I’d like to know who exactly out of MK, Baskcomb, Punctual and co-writer Theo Hutchcraft is the “lyrical assassin” claimed in the lyrics. Maybe the GZA went uncredited. Check out the MJ Cole remix for an eerier, barebones take and Tom Budin’s if you’re into royalty-free background music and off-beat wubs.

#65 – “FREAKED OUT” – Fat Papi and prodshushy

Produced by Owen Omen and/or shushy

…Okay, I’ll bite: what? Who are Fat Papi and prodshushy, exactly, and what are they freaked out by? Is Nile Rodgers involved? Released on viral independent label Broke Records and credited as being produced by “Owen Omen” (despite the co-lead artist literally including the abbreviation ”Prod” in their name – a potentially official SoundCloud upload says it is “(prod. shushy)” so maybe this was a distribution issue), “FREAKED OUT” was released in June and gathered viral traction thanks to the bob hairstyle on TikTok. Sure. So, according to Kieran Galpin of The Tab, a TikToker Jocelyn Meiere pairs videos of her, ahem, “cunty bob” to the song, inspiring a “legion of bob baddies” and racking up streams for the song. This all sounds like paid promo to me, to be completely honest, though with the speed that random songs can gain traction on there thanks to whatever meme or trend, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s organic. Fat Papi is a rapper and producer based in New Zealand and the song is pretty rote in terms of its alternative R&B vocal loop, fake snaps and melodic sing-rap flows about this woman who’s “the baddest in the world”. To be fair, there is some wit in how he raps “Every time we talk, baby, I get something new”, as if he’s appreciating their conversations when really, it’s just finding out different kinks she has since she’s “freaked out” and the main conceit of the song is essentially him pimping her out, with Fat Papi “[showing] her how to move [and] get that bag”, convincing her to shake her ass and film sex tapes with him to make cash and make her boyfriend (and ex-boyfriend) mad. There is a little sinister vibe to some of the pads, I don’t mind how the bouncier West Coast-influenced production drops into a trap beat and includes some great distorted yells at the back of the mix, but it doesn’t make that much of an impression outside of being cleanly produced. Fat Papi definitely doesn’t really have the charisma or slickness of, well, actual Fat Papis before him in rap, at least not enough to make for a convincing pimp. He sounds more like a sleazy Tory Lanez wannabe. And why would you want to be Tory Lanez?

#57 – “My Place” – Josh Baker and Poppy Baskcomb

Produced by Mark Ralph, Luca Cazal, Josh Baker

Already a “staple” in EDM producer and DJ Josh Baker’s sets, “My Place” with – making her second appearance on a dance hit this week – Poppy Baskcomb, who I assume we should now come to expect as a go-to dance vocalist, takes a “slightttt left turn” according to Lissy Lubeck (her emphasis, not mine). Said change seems to be embracing a more anthemic sound which is fair enough for the Summer and given I’ve liked his output thus far since he first charted, I had some hopes for this one. Sadly, it’s a little too conventional for me, feels like a little step back for Baker in terms of defining his sound as the muted keys on this one, its relaxed vibe that, with the addition of ATB guitar, could easily be pretty tropical, as well as the very typical, weightless build it has, all sound a little flat. Thankfully, the drop does bring with it some cheesy 80s electro synth riff that sounds like it wants to break out of the stock dance hit and go sit on some bassy funk grooves. Speaking of, Baskcomb’s vocal performance here is much better than in “Zone”, and we may as well compare them – most of the colour and atmosphere in “My Place” actually comes from her, at least to me, as she’s sleeker, emotive and almost seductive on this one, with her stray, echoed backing vocals and harmonic runs giving her the stylings of a more R&B-influenced house diva, which I hadn’t really thought would fit Baskcomb until this song. I do want to hear that version of this song that embraces those R&B and funk influences but I don’t think they jam the breezy pop of this one, it all falls nicely enough into place and I’m still interested to hear more from Josh Baker. I can see this sticking around for quite a while yet too – even if I’m not a fan, and I’m also terrible at predictions, I can sense hit potential in everything but the characterless cover art. I wouldn’t be mad either, it’s still solid.

#30 – “honeybee” – Olivia Rodrigo

Produced by Daniel Nigro

We get a fan favourite album cut from O-Rod’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, the ballad “honeybee”, which comes right after two big singles as the third track on the record. I’ve covered the album before in detail (so I will be a little briefer) but as for this one, the decision to have a slower ballad that early in the track listing actually struck me as really interesting, since the lovestruck anxiety of the previous singles almost loom over it during a full album listen. That’s despite Olivia calling it a “plain and simple” love song, as the serene strings and typical multi-tracked vocals from Olivia don’t seem to allow for much in the way of tension or uncertainty like its surrounding tracks, especially with the emphasis on innocence and one time even infantilisation. It’s a little bit of a lullaby, but when that lullaby’s chorus ends with “here’s to hoping” (a line O-Rod thinks encapsulates the entire album), the comfort is still up in the air and Olivia is desperate to let her partner know just how much she loves them, even in the quietest moments where she’s not explicitly showing her affection. With the slow progression, fake choir vocals and sugary sweet strings, it does seem like an attempt for a wedding song, one that becomes less cute the further the mental entrapment of this relationship is revealed across the album and one that already seems excessively devoted after having heard a more manic, youthful song like “drop dead” just a few minutes before – “honeybee” is the dreamlike reality many a teenage girl might make of a crush or a boyfriend, feeling adult in its presentation but still endearingly committed, a little obsessive (not derogatory), in the way those young, tingling feelings of wanting to be with someone all the time for all-time can sound like when expressed to someone who doesn’t feel how you feel about that person. It’s not exactly what I’d think of as the sleeper hit for this album, it’s not one of my most favourites (though nearly every track is great anyway), but I wouldn’t mind it sticking around at all. Here’s to hoping.

Conclusion

content warning: references to sex and drugs

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “Human Nature” by the late Michael Jackson, “The Visitor” by SIENNA SPIRO (three-song-rule-switcheroo), “Babydoll” by Dominic Fike (what a stark contrast between the quality of those two), “Just the Way You Are” by Milky (propped up by remixes by Mall Grab and David Guetta), “DAISIES” by Justin Bieber, “Nice to Each Other” by Olivia Dean and finally, “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone (again).

As for our returns, let’s start with rockers Journey’s classic “Don’t Stop Believin’” back at #27. The original recording has landed over 100 weeks on the chart overall, though this is its first time in the top 40 since 2010, as part of a chart run that actually saw it peak at #6 for two weeks, right next to a cover of it by the cast of Glee (which itself charted into 2011 and peaked at #2). “Replay” by Iyaz was #1 at that point but when the Glee cover peaked, “Fireflies” by Owl City overtook. The original song originally only peaked at #62 in 1982 and started returning after downloads were introduced, first in 2007 and for much longer in 2009. Journey’s recording hit the top 50 again in 2013 and has been an occasional bottom-feeder again on the chart since 2024, this being its first week in the top 75 in 13 years. I was honestly a little surprised that no other covers charted, at least to my knowledge and scavenge of the Official Charts Company database.

We have another classic return with Swedish singer Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own”, appearing this week at #43. The song has spent much less time on the charts, debuting and peaking at #8 in 2010 (whilst a World Cup song, coincidentally, was #1 with James Corden and Dizzee Rascal’s bizarre “Shout” / Shout for England collaboration) and left the same year, only briefly returning in 2015. Unlike Journey, Robyn has a #1 so it’s not her highest-charting single but is one of her most iconic and oft-covered, most famously in a dire ballad rendition by Calum Scott that out-peaked the original in 2016, only pipped from the top spot at #2 by Major Lazer’s “Cold Water” featuring Justin Bieber and MØ. Another #1 that year was Drake’s “One Dance” featuring Wizkid and British singer Kyla, which spent an entire 15 weeks at the top, blocking off many a competitor and probably too many now-iconic songs to list here. Whilst “One Dance” has taken a life onto itself, it would be nothing if not for its sample of the Crazy Cousinz mix of Kyla’s “Do You Mind” which returns this week at #58. The original peaked at #48 in 2009, the same week “The Fear” by Lily Allen debuted at #1, and was Kyla’s biggest hit until Drake came along – she would get another top 40 in 2022 when ArrDee sampled the same track for “Hello Mate”, peaking at #37 (“Afraid to Feel” by LF SYSTEM was #1 that week).

Outside of the classics, “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars is back at #70, “Baby Steps” by Olivia Dean at #57 again and thanks to the album releases, Madonna (more on her later) takes “Bring Your Love” with Sabrina Carpenter back to #63 and SIENNA SPIRO (more on her later too) revives “Die on this Hill” to #19, neither new peaks. As for our notable gains for songs already on the chart, we only have a scattering, with boosts for “The Fate of Ophelia” by Taylor Swift at #50 (wonder if the wedding had anything to do with that), “Movin’ to the Sun” by HUGEL, Imael Angel and Ultra Naté at #22, “Three Lions” by Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds at #21 of course, “Dai Dai” by Shakira and Burna Boy at #13 and “Wonderwall” by Oasis at #11 as it becomes the England football fans’ unofficial anthem (joy).

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley up to #5, followed by “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson at #4, “hate that i made you love me” by Ariana Grande at #3 and the top two still occupied by Olivia Rodrigo’s “stupid song” at #2 and of course, the now record-breaking reign for “Rein Me In” at #1. Now to cover a trio of new songs debuting below, starting with… the least new.

New Entries

#66 – “MORNING DEW (DONK)” – Beyoncé

Produced by Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams

Seemingly out of nowhere, to celebrate the 4th of July weekend and, of course more importantly, the 20th anniversary of her album B’Day, Beyoncé replaced a new single “MORNING DEW (DONK)”, though “new” may be generous as the song had been leaked for years, originally being developed alongside songwriter extraordinaires The-Dream and Pharrell Williams for her 2013 self-titled record. I hadn’t heard this leak before so I can hopefully judge it with fairness: how does it shape up now it’s finished for release? Well, it hasn’t aged badly across the past decade at all – partly because Pharrell’s production can be evergreen, partly because of the guitar and strings reminiscent of Bey’s 2000s work, the style of which is now back in season, and mostly because it’s the exact kind of song that Bey and Pharrell could make today. Her slower drawl in the first verse sets the scene with some lightly comic moments you almost don’t notice are funny until after the first listen because of just how dripping with laidback confidence the deliveries are, but really follow a great rhythm where a cheesy punchline ends each half of the verse. Sure, the “donk-i-donk” refrain – and the vocal loop in the intro she seems to be interpolating – could sound like a sillier mood killer, but the song is littered with scratchy vocal fragments Pharrell is so fond of and has a clinky lounge feel to the drums that really would be the only thing that ages the track, as melodically it’s still top-notch. What’s interesting to me is that according to writer Ant Clemons, he reworked the song with Ari Lennox in 2022 and you can definitely hear the second verse in Lennox’s voice, but like she said on the deleted Instagram post Clemons made, Beyoncé sounds beautiful on here and though you can understand why she passed on it at the time – this was the first era where Bey had the confident artistic identity she has now that could deny songs that can be sung by anyone else – it’s not a bad leftover at all.

#38 – “Danceteria” – Madonna

Produced by Andrew Watt, Cirkut, Madonna and Stuart Price

Madonna’s latest album, CONFESSIONS II, is framed (mostly rightfully) as a sequel to her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor and indeed consists primarily of house songs that would have sounded futuristic a couple decades prior, though by the second half, parts of Madonna’s career, particularly her mellower 90s downtempo and R&B output, shows up too and outside of how seamless the sequencing is (a tribute to the original’s DJ set structure), the album doesn’t present anything all too special. The songs themselves don’t strike me as completely safe, especially with the limitations of working around Madonna’s vocal and having to transition in the album context, but as an overall experience, it’s a little disappointing to see Madonna not willing to reinvent herself as she so often did, especially since her last album (though nearly a decade away at this point) was at least more ambitious. Also, why the Hell is Feid on there? My favourite tracks were “Good for the Soul”, “Love Sensation”, “Fragile”, “Betrayal”, “L.E.S. Girl” and, fortunately enough, “Danceteria”.

Transitioning right from “Bring Your Love”, this track is named after a club Madonna got some of her first stints singing in, being a mostly autobiographical track that universalises her need for freedom and performance in the choruses whilst keeping to mostly spoken verses that go into much more depth, name-dropping friends, DJs, plenty early associates that helped plant the seeds for her career. This is a brilliant way to craft a personal narrative, in this case taken from when she was hungry and looking for a big break, to a motivational dance song without losing any of the real history that feeds into it, with Madonna acknowledging pretty ugly sides of those early moments too, ones that seem a little ridiculous and definitely wouldn’t pass today but are all part of the Madonna self-image. She emphasises in the chorus, “Everyone here is a work of art”: art and creation as a whole come with downsides and the flaws that build narratives and a lot of art would be lost without the negative experiences or traits of its authors. I love the half-rapped “Vogue”-esque bridge full of famous name-drops – from David Byrne and Nile Rodgers to hip-hop pioneers like Fab 5 Freddy. The famous “Apache” drum loop being used for a bar to lead into a disco guitar riff, connecting genres in just a few seconds, is an amazing attention to detail and I like how the pay-off is an honestly sort of obnoxious synth loop in the final drop that barely feeds into the next track, “Read My Lips” with… sigh, Feid. The transition isn’t rough on the album but I like how it stands out as its own single, especially since it’s about the start of her journey as an artist and the conclusion is the blaring, overwhelming moment that fame must have felt like once she got there. I don’t imagine this lasts after the excitement of the album week, but it’s definitely a highlight on the album.

#32 – “Great Expectation” – SIENNA SPIRO

Produced by Omer Fedi

Singer-songwriter SIENNA SPIRO, whose music has never warranted the all-caps name, released her debut album Visitor, home to exactly one great song (“Die on this Hill”) and a lot of regressive, middling ballads that reek of messaging that at best is conservative, if not unavoidably insecure and arguably self-loathing. Now, if any of that was delivered with the soul and intention of “Die on this Hill”, we’d have a good, albeit slow album, but the 10 tracks here add up to 33 minutes of mostly dire material with shaky performances and little in the way of musical variation outside of piano ballads and throwback pop-soul we’ve all heard well enough of at this point.

For such a new artist, Visitor is completely stuck in the past – or at least trying to revisit one Ms. SPIRO wasn’t a part of. Hell, “He’s Not My Baby, I’m His”, a hopefully semi-sarcastic ode to abusive older partners, is played about as straight as possible and ends up being at least a little transgressive, has a smokier, upbeat instrumental – she might be less likeable going in this direction but it’s at least interesting. “Great Expectation” is more of the same crop the singles grew from. A sombre post-breakup track, SPIRO does bring more depth to her loneliness, with the added history in the second verse of losing people frequently since she was young – and her response to cling on as long as possible – adding a little subtext that her devotion probably has the unwanted opposite effect. This is one of the more developed tracks on the album, with the initially piano-led ballad effectively building up a dejected drum pattern and some string swells, even guitar riffs, in the back emphasising a greater drama that is either missing on other tracks or reliant entirely on SPIRO’s overselling. It’s a happy mixture here, even it still doesn’t bring much in the way of imagery or stand-out moments. It’s a perfectly fine, syrupy song that fits in just fine in the tracklisting, doing a little more to set itself apart as a single but not exactly experimenting.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to body dysmorphia, drugs, mental illness and sex with YOUR dad

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “PASSENGER” by Alex Warren (boy, that was quick), “Shabang” by Drake, “GIRLS” by The Kid LAROI, “NOBLE” by F3miii, “Doors” by Noah Kahan, “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars and the oldies: “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac and “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls, which will probably be back next week for no reason in particular.

As for our returns, “DAISIES” by Justin Bieber is back at #71 and two recent debuts get second winds with “Sue me” by Audrey Hobert at #64 and “Willing and Able” by Noah Kahan at #70. Outside of those, our notable gains include “Kingdom of Fear” by Cameron Whitcomb at #63, “bloodstream” by Alyssa Grace at #49, “Orbiter” by Noah Kahan at #46, “Hit the Wall” by Gracie Abrams at #41 (more on her later), “RMB (Ring My Bell)” by Aitch at #40 (why?!), “Movin’ to the Sun” by HUGEL, Imael Angel and Ultra Naté at #31 (WHY?!), “Aperture” by Harry Styles at #22 and, to cap off our mixed bag, Prospa and Cloonee get their first top 10 hit with “Free Your Mind” at #10.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “hate that i made you love me” by Ariana Grande up to #5, followed by Harry Styles’ “American Girls” up to #4 and a stagnant top three: “Billie Jean” by the late King of Pop Michael Jackson at #3, “stupid song” by Olivia Rodrigo at #2 and of course, “Rein Me In”, so let’s quickly get to our quintet of new songs.

New Entries

#75 – “The Time of My Life” – Benson Boone

Produced by Jason Evigan

No, don’t worry, he did not learn the wrong lessons from “Mystical Magical” – this is not a cover or interpolation of the Dirty Dancing classic, it’s a song about how he – partly genuinely, partly in a bitter kiss-off – is just so sad his ex-girlfriend isn’t here to see how successful and fun his life is. It really could be anyone who he’s lost, it doesn’t specify ex-girlfriend, but the bridge mentioning “years of passion”, addressing the person as “dear” and the chorus hinting towards a bachelor lifestyle where every day’s a party and every night’s a nightmare (his lyrics, not mine), it all circles back to that interpretation. I am a bit surprised it debuted this low, maybe it’s not resonated with my fellow Booneroids as much as his previous singles?

Produced and written with veteran Jason Evigan among other co-writers like Jack LaFrantz, the song is a huge ball of nothing, though I should specify it’s not a yarn ball, it doesn’t feel weightless and delicate, just a moody, stagnant ball of bluesy regret that can barely move in either direction, with the drums – although they sound great, especially against the twinkled acoustics and smokier moments of electric guitar – ending up a little mechanical with the compression  and restraint from Benson Boone in the verses, leading to a bit of an unwarranted explosion where the belt could have just been kept for a different song. It would probably be a better song if it stuck into that warm, uncomfortable bitterness instead of selling the glam rock drama, but it’s not that worse off for it either, just sucks out some of the human impact, leads it a little dry and confused. Still okay, though, not far from Boone’s usual territory but I can understand why Booners wouldn’t pick this one up.

#57 – “Wink Wink” – Charli xcx

Produced by A.G. Cook and Finn Keane

Another week, another barely-two-minutes single from Charli xcx’s upcoming album Music, Fashion, Film and whilst so far, I’ve not been the slightest compelled by the lyrical approach or basic song construction with a dodgy, half-trying rock pivot, this song appears to have been in the works since 2025 at least when a demo leaked so there might be more to this one, which takes its name from the knowing wink Charli gives when promising she won’t be as rebellious (a “bad girl”) as she has for much of her life and career, with the conceit being that the song itself is teasingly sarcastic and hints towards not only this not being a permanent change, but one she doesn’t need to make, regardless of what… Rostam Batmanglij thinks (he’s name-dropped in the second verse as having said she dresses “like a slut”, which is probably a half-compliment given the song’s tone).

Like the previous songs, there is a silliness to this, especially with Charli’s spoken gags in the verses and her barely-there delivery of the so-called promises in the hook. The whole bit about jumping on trampolines commando and having sex with the listener’s dad leading into the one sung word being “trousers”, all over these washed-out reversed guitars, reminds me of Uffie, particularly one of my favourite songs of hers, “Ricky”, wherein she goes on an outro rant about Cadillacs and Michael Jackson’s music video monkeys over dated new wave production, a moment of lackadaisical, eye-roll half-comedy that reflects an attitude of bloghouse acts that strung together irony with an almost childlike poptimism that allowed for a clearly limited act like Uffie, limitations which Charli plays within in “Wink Wink”, especially in that chorus where the afterthought multi-tracking involves a emptier high-register failing to coat the static of her blank, detached vocal. I don’t know, I do like this song, it feels more focused and trying to be an actual song rather than a statement or, let’s be honest, Tweet, like “SS26” ended up practically being. I do hope these all string together in some form with the full album release because as singles, there’s just too little to these, this one especially could be great with a bridge but the songs are purposefully kept at a minimum here. Whilst I can respect that as an artistic decision, it does leave me a little disappointed with every single that the possible transgressions and insights aren’t being developed upon. Of course, you could argue that’s the true insight but I just want a full song, God damn it. We’re not exactly in a shortage of those, however…

#50 – “Lost Boys” – Phoebe Bridgers

Produced by Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, Jack Antonoff and Phoebe Bridgers

Indie rock darling Phoebe Bridgers, off of the success of the boygenius group, has largely been quiet after all the GRAMMY Award success and this has made its way into her music, as her first solo album since 2020, Lost Weekend, has been promoted with no-phone tours and darker, minimal artwork that echoes the exasperation from this very song (her first solo track to hit the UK charts), “The machine is killing me”. Though reserved, that doesn’t mean she’s entirely solo – Bridgers is surrounded by not only a dream team of producers with Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska and even Jack Antonoff but the song was co-written with comedian Bo Burnham and indie legend Alex G and her boygenius bandmates, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, provide backing vocals alongside Caroline Shaw.

It’s really a stacked first impression and the song interestingly doesn’t lean that far into the idea of post-fame shutting down, more hinting towards her isolation and industry disillusionment (“I pretended it was make believe”) through lines that otherwise solidly fit into the character she’s writing about. Bridgers uses the Peter Pan trope of the boy who never grows up and transposes that innocent imagery of boyhood onto a delusional, reckless man who doesn’t take care of himself, trying to portray a successful and carefree image of masculinity that either fails to cover up their conformity or leads to them driving straight into it. After verses of this perspective’s imagery and the somewhat unrelated hook that these lost boys end up attracted to her, we get a bridge that humanises the brief, ephemeral moment of two people in bed who shut off their brains to the worries of the future, making the first line of the chorus, “lost boys […] never go home”, strike as more bittersweet than anything. Both verses carry brilliant recollections of these “Lost Boys”, the first a self-contained moving image and the second a retelling of an interaction that ends by drifting from her silent first impression of “You told me you wish you were dead but I don’t believe that” to a moment long after where she re-thinks on said event, as if the passage of time makes as little of an impact possible on how she’s communicating these flashbacks.

To be on-the-nose, it’s a bit of a lost song, with moments that zip by too quickly like Jack Antonoff’s vocoder intro (which sounds like it’s in Caroline Shaw’s signature too, wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where her backing vocals and arrangement credit comes from), the brief flashes of electric guitar in the left channel of the second verse, and the pre-chorus taking no time to reflect on herself before swiftly shifting the perspective away from her, to moments that linger, like the wistful, meandering acoustics over weightless drumming and certain vocal inflections that stretch out ideas she doesn’t want to fully acknowledge apply to her (compare the “impaaaaatient” to the fumbling conversational “But not… scared”, both in the first verse), including the chorus that has Bridgers murmuring in an elongated whispered harmony that the lost boys find her, despite the chorus starting as a quick distraction from her tumultuous attempt at self-reflection, “the machine” looming over even when things start to click into place. That’s all to say that this is a wonderfully constructed song with a myriad of personal touches that, although free to interpretation, seem to me like they all stem from an unwillingness to confront the reasons why the lost boys are attracted to her, the motives behind what they say and do, who’s truly “lost”, sensing that the moment she starts to think too deeply, it’ll risk the domestic impression of comfort and leave her on an endless trail between the rims of conformity not dissimilar to the somewhat vintage imagery she concocts up of the “Lost Boys”.

This is a really amazing song, on the level you cautiously expect from this star-studded of a team, and whilst I do think the fade-out is disappointing like I always do, you can see why thematically it would work and I would hold out hope that the album gives us a different mix of that outro anyway. Time will tell, but for now, I absolutely recommend this if you haven’t already heard it, brilliant songwriting and the sonic execution fits it perfectly, what a lead single.

#39 – “Look at My Life” – Gracie Abrams

Produced by Gracie Abrams, Aaron Dessner and Dan Nigro

It’s kind of difficult to relate to a song about how miserable your life is when you name-drop your tour photographer in the pre-chorus. Okay, I know that’s part of the messaging – you may not be able to tell that she’s suffering because of her wealth and public image, as sung bluntly in the chorus, but she’s… not into that stereotypical LA culture of pills, “the big shots and the Barbies”. Like with the last single “Hit the Wall”, I’m never going to criticise or question the sincerity of what appears to be a genuine expression of mental health issues, however there is a point where that becomes art pushed by a label and J.J. Abrams’ daughter into a series of products free for public consumption and review, and given the album is going to release under the name Daughter from Hell, a separation of Abrams the person from this narrative seems far from intended and it really poisons a song like this with the exhausted questioning of “what do you have to lose?”. Succumbing to Hollywood culture, especially if that’s all you’ve been made to know since your upbringing, is interesting to discuss in music, plenty of my favourite pop and rap music hedges on the unhealthy hedonism it brings, and I never bought into the idea of “nepo babies” not being able to make good music (everyone has connections, that’s why they’re on the charts). When your entire song is about Hollywood being a nightmare and the bridge fleetingly references moving across the country for self-reflection, it begs the question to me – an outsider – why the song needed to be made, and it’s not like the sonics of it all are helping because this dead-eyed alt-pop is telling of the lack of conviction behind this song (and really much of Gracie’s output).

Talking to The New York Times, Abrams mentioned how quickly her social battery runs dry compared to others and you can hear it in this constant flash of bored synth that can barely be called a “flash” as much as just the keyboard cat on antidepressants. A sprinkle of synths against compressed, flatly-mixed vocals in the chorus and barely-present drums leads to the song having basically no voice outside of the literal voice of Gracie Abrams, front-and-centre with a pathetic attempt at pulse that couldn’t revive the flubbery void of “melody” behind Gracie to save its life. In that way, the song is arguably not a failure at expressing its conceit, but with how much Gracie still appears to try and sell this content, her vocal loud, multi-tracked and not lacking in heart, she’s failed by the non-effort at capturing any of the dourest or even sinister moments of the lifestyle she’s sucked into or the organic instinct to drive far away from it. It’s kind of painful to me, honestly, to see phoned-in producers leaving half-baked but evidently passionate ideas to rust away – I don’t know exactly the level of artistic direction and input everyone in the room would have had on these songs but more time to reflect on what actually needs to be said would probably lead to a more vivid idea of how these songs should sound because right now… well, they don’t really sound like anything.

#27 – “My Body isn’t Ready” – sombr

Produced by Tony Berg and sombr

Unlike our boy Reggie, sombr’s body is not ready. The indie pop singer has never interested me with his songs about his awful relationships with women but maybe a more self-reflective approach could work well for me. The track is about body dysmorphia, exploring how those physical insecurities damage his self-esteem and, resultingly, how he interacts with other people and presents himself, particularly within relationships with a chorus that mostly appears to be addressed to a partner (or even his own audience) about how despite a romantic connection, he feels too insecure in himself to start a relationship, as confirmed by the somewhat literal video (that, to me, undermines the power of the song by playing the teenage romance angle up). Part of why the video’s literal approach doesn’t fully work for the song is because I interpreted the song as addressing the self as well as the prospective partner, with the chorus’ “I like you, but my body isn’t ready” envisioning a sombr that he wants to see the potential of, one he already could have personified in the first verse (“I am scared of the light, I don’t want you to go”).

We still have plenty of sombr’s melodrama, starting off with the most dramatic elongated harmony he could think of before dropping into a meek, post-Britpop-esque crawl with slightly more eager and involved drums against the typical acoustics and piano, which I think was a great decision for a song that emphasises small, silent anxieties, some of which seem to wrap around sombr’s (clunkier) lead vocal through ghostly stretches that crowd the mix, though to me, I don’t think the effect it has is alienation or overwhelming as much as it makes the song easier to not pay attention to. A difficult sensation to describe, but with sombr’s distinct tone submersed into a compressed chorus, as well as the second verse going back into sombr’s wheelhouse of being paranoid of the intentions of women that I just find a little distractingly immature, it’s like the song’s core expression is easy to push aside, especially with the maximalist but not quite theatrical approach, and I think that actually strengthens the song by adding a subtext of how the “masculine” way of dealing with these kinds of insecurities is often to ignore it or see it as below them. It’s probably not intentional but since that isn’t explicitly covered in the song, it’s easy to fill in certain elements of how it resonates with the knowledge of prior male artists and expectations of masculinity, and I think sombr is an interesting enough artist to know how to reflect that, even if I basically don’t like him at all, outside of this song. It’s a step in… a direction, I don’t know if it’ll be the right one, but I prefer this.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to generative AI

Rundown

As always, before the reviews, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “PINKY UP” by KATSEYE, “I Want You Back” by The Jackson 5, “DAISIES” by Justin Bieber and “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac. What an odd batch of songs.

As for our returns, some songs that only briefly left have quickly returned to the bottom, such as “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars at #73, “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone at #72, “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls at #71 and “Kingdom of Fear” by Cameron Whitcomb at #68. There is also a really plentiful set of notable gains, not all that exciting however, especially with Josh Fawaz’s “Like a Prayer” at #63, then “12 to 12” by sombr at #60, “Beauty and a Beat” by Justin Bieber featuring Nicki Minaj at #57, “Satisfy” by Calbvin Harris and Jazzy at #56, “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers at #54 (one of those weeks), “The Fate of Ophelia” by Taylor Swift at #53, “Baby” by Prospa and Murda Beatz at #52, “Die with a Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars at #49, “Nice to Each Other” by Olivia Dean at #46, “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield at #45, “Stateside” by PinkPantheress at #44, “Be Her” by Ella Langley at #43, “Golden” by “HUNTR/X” (the voices of EJAE, AUDREY NUNA and REI AMI) from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack at #42, “NOBLE” by F3miii at #41, “FEVER DREAM” by Alex Warren at #35, “On the Floor” by Jennifer Lopez featuring Pitbull at #32, “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” by RAYE at #30, “The One that Got Away” by Katy Perry at #28, “Blessings” by Calvin Harris and Clementine Douglas at #25, “Ordinary” by Alex Warren at #22, “Cinderella” by Mac Miller featuring Ty Dolla $ign at #21, “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles at #20, “Dai Dai” by Shakira and Burna Boy at #19, “Boston” by STELLA LEFTY at #18, “Talk to You” by ANOTR and 54 Ultra at #16, “Material Lover” by SIENNA SPIRO at #15, “On 2Nite” by Silva Bumpa at #14, “Free Your Mind” by Prospa and Cloonee at #12, “Man I Need” by Olivia Dean at #11 and finally, “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley finally in the top 10 at #9. Langley’s first top 10 is a good way to close an otherwise mostly dire list of gains and returns that, given how slow this week was, probably takes up half of this episode. Oh, and “Wonderwall” by Oasis is back again at #33 because we are a fallen nation.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with an O-Rod double: “drop dead” by Olivia Rodrigo at #5 and “the cure” at #4, followed by “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson at #3, “stupid song” again by O-Rod at #2 and of course, “Rein Me In” at #1. Speaking of the number one, apologies for the terrible segue, that’s the amount of new entries we have this week so let’s swiftly move along this fraction of the usual weekly reviews.

New Entries

#59 – “Movin’ to the Sun” – HUGEL, Imael Angel and Ultra Naté

Produced by HUGEL and Late Nine

On the day of writing, 26th June 2026, French DJ and producer HUGEL released his debut album, containing a bizarre array of guest features, including people HUGEL says he looked up to when he was younger. David Guetta and French Montana appear on the track and the names do get a little more obscure as the track listing goes on, apart from Tokischa, but the album starts with an intro from Snoop Dogg and continues to have a three-track run listing Big Sean, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Scott Storch and of course, Ultra Naté, mostly known for her dance classic “Free” (which HUGEL remixed last year), who hadn’t charted a new song since 2005. I’ve yet to hear the album – trust me, I am interested – but it did make me scratch my head a little to see so many big names in US rap on a house album, especially someone who’s not as widely known worldwide like HUGEL. He has charted before in the UK – “I Adore You” with Topic, Arash and Dalcolm peaked at #69 in 2024, he has a song below the top 75 this week too – and has racked up hundreds of millions of streams, so it’s not unfeasible, especially since… well, we are still talking about Snoop Dogg and Big Sean.

Speaking of, “Movin’ to the Sun”, even if it’s not great, comes right after the Big Sean track so probably sounds like “Stairway to Heaven” in comparison. The track was made in collaboration with UK deep house producer and self-proclaimed “Reiki Master” who blends her music with “energy healing” and “chakra alignment”, according to her dodgy Spotify bio. “Movin’ to the Sun” appears to be some kind of remix of her own song “I’m Moving to the Sun” which was released in April but was greyed-out on Spotify – I don’t know when, but presumably after the release of the HUGEL version. Honestly, there are only so many dead links and AI slop cover arts I can handle when looking through this nonsense before I start wanting to move to the Sun myself. A reupload of what I think is the original contains some vocals that ache of being an AI imitation of a house diva (not just a throwaway snide remark, it actually does share similarities to AI vocals) – or are just so processed that they sound strained and robotic, which would make no sense for what are clearly emotive and at times, rapid, percussive vocal stabs. it’s not a natural fit at all, it’s mixed with shitty artifacts and has about as impactful of a drop as throwing a pebble into a plastic bag. So, how’s HUGEL’s version? Thankfully, his Afro-house style of percussion and relaxing synths contorting into the bassier passages add a lot of flavour to the track, with what sounds like Ultra Naté having re-recorded most of the vocal parts, though the processing still leaves it all quite fuzzy and unnatural. That series of repetitive vocal chops that makes up both the build and drop leaves too much empty space once the beat actually kicks in, isn’t mixed consistently throughout and is lacking in any kind of dynamic switch-up. It’s closer to an exhausted woodpecker going at the same two trees for two and a half minutes than it is the smoother Afro-house hits we’ve seen on the chart thus far. Not a fan at all.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to sex, racism, mental illness

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “Baby Steps” by Olivia Dean, “Dance No More” by Harry Styles, “White Keys” by Dominic Fike, “Die on This Hill” by SIENNA SPIRO and finally (I mean, finally) “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls and “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone. Knowing this chart, these will be re-entries next week.

As for said returns, thanks to World Cup fever (more of that later), Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” featuring Freshlyground, which originally peaked at #21 in 2010 whilst B.o.B.’s “Airplanes” featuring Hayley Williams was #1, is back at #37. “Waka Waka” did return a few times across 2011 and 2012 but it’s been a while, much unlike the (unfortunately) evergreen former #1 “Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home)” by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and the Lightning Seeds back once again at #35. Outside of football, Olivia Dean’s “Nice to Each Other” is back again at #56 then we have a notable gain for “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles at #29, whose former #1 “Aperture” also returns to #25. “American Girls” is up to #12 as well, I guess it’s just his week.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “drop dead” by Olivia Rodrigo up to #5, followed  by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean at #4 with “Rein Me In”, but O-Rod returns with “the cure” at #3 and the brand new entry “stupid song” at #2 – more on that later, but for now, let’s deal with the frankly unimpressive new entries below it.

New Entries

#74 – “No Scotland No Party” – Nick Morgan

Produced by Mark Morrow

Sigh, I’ll bite: who the Hell is Nick Morgan and what’s the deal with Scotland? So, today in fact as of this writing, Scotland are playing Morocco in the FIFA World Cup, and you can read about their chances in this article by BBC Scotland’s chief sports correspondent, Tom English. He’s got some nerve, I would personally change my name before applying for that job in particular. Nick Morgan on the other hand is a postman turned singer who – for what it’s worth – seems like he gets the job done at weddings, christenings and birthdays. According to the reviews on his own website, of course. I’m not a football fan but this is actually pretty charming. Morgan released the song in 2024 for the Euros and went viral in Argentina because he not only name-drops the country in a cute little acknowledgement that Scotland’s team isn’t that good, but based the melody off of Rodrigo Bueno’s 2001 song about Argentine player Diego Maradona and the team’s 1986 win against – of course, this is probably where the common ground comes from – England… in Mexico, of course! 2026’s World Cup, wherein Scotland is playing games in Mexico again, seems like a great resurgence opportunity for the folk romp, which fits sincere lyrics about Scotland’s ups and downs in international football somewhat clumsily into the original melody but with enough of a grin and drinking-song group vocal to work. Morgan has updated the song too with a reissue and as much as I don’t care much for jaunty national sport pride, I get why one would and this does the job much better than a slog like “Three Lions”. Morgan’s got spirit.

#52 – “Come Over” – BTS

Produced by Cirkut, Ammo and SUGA

Well, BTS are back, much quicker than I expected after ARIRANG released this year but K-pop comebacks are so frequent that they basically have a separate definition to a “comeback” in the West. With that said, there’s probably not a new album attached to this, as it was released as a loosie to accompany “Festa”, an annual fan festival to celebrate the boys’ anniversary, and had previously been on a deluxe reissue of ARIRANG. Though a breakup song about wanting to get back with said partner, you can definitely tell how this is “for the fans” in a way and appropriate for the Festa – with “I’m lost, can I come over?” doubling a little, especially with the themes of ARIRANG about worldwide fame being pretty isolating, as a message to fans, even those who may have grown from them or jumped off the train, to have some place in their heart for them, and the implementation of a lot of Korean in the chorus as well as verses from SUGA and j-hope do highlight at least a surface-level attempt to keep in connection with older, day-one fans. The song itself is pretty basic and with a super-compressed intro chorus, heavily-processed vocals, it pretty much sets itself out immediately as a stadium-ready song for the fans to chant in arenas, especially since instrumentally it’s pretty basic until the oddly disco-adjacent guitars and keys sprinkle in obnoxiously in the post-chorus. Otherwise, we’re mostly stuck with bass and claps, including for RM’s verse, which ends with him admitting, stutteringly, that he hates metaphors. Though basic, it doesn’t strike me as a standard song, definitely still as confrontational and with vocal manipulation to the degree of certain tracks on ARIRANG, and the back-and-forth structure is still satisfying. Maybe for fans of BTS, this reminds them of older songs but for someone who only recently started appreciating them outside of their hits, it seems lacking in impact and probably better left as a bonus track.

#42 – “RMB (Ring My Bell)” – Aitch

Produced by Bou

Double sigh. Our story starts in 1979 with the release of Anita Ward’s debut single, “Ring My Bell”, a flirty-not-quite song penned by Frederick Knight that is most recognisable by the decaying tone on each bar, acting as a bit of a bell in itself, as well as high-register vocals from Ward that have long been mired by accusations of being innuendous or, even worse, fucking annoying. Now, maybe it’s because I couldn’t hear “Ring My Bell” in a 70s-80s discotheque and instead was introduced to the song by Just Dance for the Wii, but I don’t exactly like this song, especially not in its original eight minutes. Sure, there’s a hypnotic element to it thanks to its chimes but that tone gets cheaper and more ridiculous the more it loops and I’ve never found the lyrics particularly charming in any way – too childish to be sensual with an instrumental too tight to be playful. Regardless, the listening public sent it to #1 for two weeks in 1979, knocking Blondie’s “Sunday Girl” off the top and reining “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” by Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army in as well, though they would get four weeks of their own right after. Apart from a brief one-week #99-peaking 1990 remix, Ward has not charted again but deviations of this song have popped up. New Zealand singer Collette covered it in 1989 for a #93 peak and then Will Smith himself took a crack at it – “Ring My Bell” by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince featuring Zhané peaked at #53 in 1991, whilst comedian Vic Reeves’ cover of “Dizzy” with The Wonder Stuff, just as much of a novelty, was at #1. The Underdog Project’s “Summer Jam” sampled it in 2001 with a #92 peak. Other acts such as Mariah Carey and Jme have sampled it since but not in charting tracks, as far as the OCC database is concerned and as much as I could authorise myself. As recently as last year, similar – if not identical – sounds were used in JADE’s “Unconditional” which peaked at #51. Really, I’m surprised that tone isn’t implemented more extensively into pop music – my personal favourite use is in “Pineapple Slice” by Tove Lo and SG Lewis.

For now, of course! Because skip forward to 2026, Aitch and drum and bass producer Bou have found their hands on the song, following it going slightly viral on TikTok due to some nonsense about it manifesting good luck and wealth because of an “abundance frequency” that gives you positive energy and can attract good fortune, hence why it’s supposedly banned in casinos. I don’t think I even need to tell you why or how none of that is true, but clearly Aitch believes it as he aims for a hit with his redundantly-titled remix “RMB (Ring My Bell)”. I do not think there’s much to this that isn’t straightforward but at least Aitch isn’t rage-baiting, just doing a sincerely horny flip of a classic track like an MC should, with a newer house beat but mostly faithful rendition of the sample that is probably sapping royalties from Aitch’s bank account in droves. This is stupid but it’s not dead on arrival on paper, grotesquely obvious sample flips can be respectful in their intentions, especially if the song’s already a disco or synth-funk track as the glamour, sleaze and party atmosphere is built into those songs. It makes a straightforward version like this a little lazy, especially when ridding the song of subtext by playing so far into it, it explicitly becomes the text, but also just easy to make and, for me, difficult to care about disliking. Of course I think it sucks, I don’t like “Ring My Bell” and this is that song, shorter with slightly updated production and Aitch, but for what it is, as painful as the idea may be to some of you, it could probably work. It probably already does in nightclubs across the country.

#28 – “Dai Dai” – Shakira and Burna Boy

Produced by Shakira and AC

I do like Shakira – and Burna Boy for that matter – but we just get the worst luck with how the only time Shakira charts nowadays, it’s some soulless corporate companion piece and I understand the wealthy transaction that comes with lending your public image and talent, not that this song showcases any, to existing institutions and media phenomena but the late-career tethering of herself to low-effort soundtrack bullshit is just a little sad, even if expected for legacy acts. If the songs had more to them or highlighted aspects of Shakira that we liked in the first place, it wouldn’t be a problem, but instead we just Ed Sheeran co-writes on robotic Afrobeats instrumentals and it almost sounds like she’s making a point that we shouldn’t care about whatever she’s promoting. Does she?

The FIFA World Cup kicked off on the 11th in Mexico with an extravagant opening ceremony featuring Shakira, J Balvin and protests from hundreds of citizens, including “200 hooded individuals” according to the BBC. Of course, FIFA would rather you be in a hood than a Shakira cosplay, because they seemingly want to take action against tribute acts who use “World Cup imagery” in their performances. Intellectual property, as we know, is the most important law to enforce. At least it started off in Mexico, I don’t think the current US administration would have any problem with hooded individuals. FIFA put out an official World Cup soundtrack with basically all the slop Cirkut and Pink Slip could string together with whoever took the cheque, went on a Zoom call and recorded some vocals, from the Rolling Stones to Stormzy to Jelly Roll to Daddy Yankee to LISA of BLACKPINK to Diplo to Shaggy to fucking French Montana (whose country of Morocco is playing Scotland today, there we go, more free promo, FIFA clearly needs it).

“Dai Dai”, despite having Shakira, responsible (allegedly, kind of, not really) for possibly the most iconic World Cup anthem, is more of the same low-effort crap. Burna Boy could not be more on autopilot, though he has a tough job backing up vocals from Shakira that do not sound professionally recorded and are just placed on this plastic replication of what executives think Afrobeats sound like with enough processing to neuter the animals she soundtracked in Zootopia. There are a few slippery moments where inflections don’t hit quite the right impact, with the wet Auto-Tuned vocal flubbering out – statically – on a predictable tropical house guitar and stiff drums that are most interesting when replaced with rote fake claps. What is most confusing to me is all the boring self-empowerment talk that apparently deserves a full runtime when it would be a lot more fun if she was just naming countries and players the whole time like they do in the bridge with what sounds like a children’s choir. The staccato chorus seems to harp on the past a little – Genius and official sources say the line is “you’ve been this brave all along”, I’ve been hearing “you’ve been disgraced”, which would line up about as well with the whole “struggled since birth, now time to prove everyone wrong” conceit – and frankly just isn’t what I would want to return to if I were a football fan. “This time for Africa” is at least a defining international statement, however vague, but “Dai, dai, ikou, dale, allez, let's go” sounds like throwing in the words to Google Translate and not being confident about which one to use. It could not be less urgent and I think with a World Cup anthem, that’s a big mistake. I understand it has to be unifying but it’s the excitement and devotion of the fans ideally that this corporation wants to pretend is the unifying reason behind the industry and the event. This song sounds like the mask slipping.

#22 – “ICONIC BY MISTAKE” – LE SSERAFIM, ILLIT and KATSEYE

Produced by Sean Cook, McKay Stevens and dyvahh

Is there such a thing as too many (Sean) cooks when none of those cooks have a signature dish? When I saw this credit show up on the chart, I just sighed (triple sigh) because for as anonymous as K-pop group members can be – particularly to someone who is not into this genre – at least part of my understanding was that they function in large part as groups first… okay, marketing first, but groups a strong second, and the chemistry on screen, stage and in studio is part of why you would follow a group like these three. There are a total of 15 (+1) members of these groups together and K-pop songs are already cramped as is fitting even four members in sometimes, especially in the fast-paced, bait-and-switch song structure synonymous with them but that we honestly don’t get much of anymore from K-pop hits in the UK except for the dying remants of BLACKPINK and, well, KATSEYE. So how do we fit 15 girls in less than three minutes? Well, before hearing, let’s hear what the press has to say.

In this article – with “words by Hidzir Junaini” – from Bandwagon, that was a one-minute read yet still has a timer at the header (that doesn’t disappear when you scroll down and actively fills up a meter of how much you’ve read – why even make an article at this point? Just make a TikTok), we learn one valuable thing – they’re all managed by HYBE – and the rest is the kind of nothing press release that we train ChatGPT on, which is being generous. I’m torn between hoping someone involved at least realises the irony of three HYBE groups apparently exploring the idea – “at its core” – that “true influence cannot be manufactured”, and hoping that’s not the case because that means Scooter Braun knows we’re stupid. I’m a good sport, Junaini asks me to like the post at the bottom so I gave him a heart. Sadly, I can’t do the same for the good robots at The Chosun Daily who translated Osen’s article about the song and gave what are framed as direct quotes but really just sound like what Junaini said because press releases are as regurgitory as a caring mother pigeon. We do find out the song has so-called “unconventional sounds” – okay, enough stalling, what are those sounds?

Well, I’ll give it this: a glitchy, siren of a synth is a way to start a song and the industrial drums, though now not that uncommon in K-pop apings of rap and hyperpop, go pretty hard, it’s an easy lay-up for a song like this, especially with that chirpy 8-bit synth flair in the final moments of the chorus, I think that’s a great touch. The problem is at heart, this is a KATSEYE song, fully in English and dedicated to Internet haters. I’ll put it straight: I don’t care. The music industry is difficult, social media is difficult, I do not envy performers, but it’s always a hard sell to make a song about Internet trolls and hate comments, especially if going for the approach of “oh, it doesn’t hurt me, the hate gives me more legitimacy” like these guys. Unlike KATSEYE’s last attempt at this, “Internet Girl”, there’s not an attempt to humanise any of these 15 girls, who are given lyrics purposefully devoid of any meaning to both 1.) appear ironic and 2.) take the brunt of the Internet mockery this song is about, prompting more and giving producers and HYBE some kind of excuse to make a song like this again. I would be playing into the hand of Scooter Braun to start picking apart asinine lyrics or their unconfident deliveries so I’ll leave it at that. LE SSERAFIM and ILLIT seem okay from what little I’ve heard but this song teeters closer into the trend of KATSEYE’s PR chaos than it does K-pop and I simply don’t buy into that.

#2 – “stupid song” – Olivia Rodrigo

Produced by Daniel Nigro

After her first two records showed promise and ultimately weren’t for me, Olivia Rodrigo – or, as I have for some reason called her on this show, O-Rod – has finally convinced me with you look pretty sad for a girl so in love, which obviously debuts at #1 on the albums chart this week. I reviewed the pre-release singles on here pretty beamingly so I was expecting a step up in general but even without that drastic a change in her sound or method of constructing songs – a lot of the album is re-treading territory in more ambitious ways that line up with newfound experiences, moulding a loose narrative through taking slight unexpected swings and reel you back in with a slightly humorous but crucially human sensibility, grounding even the ballads and lovestruck tracks in a very real sense of dread, enforced by lyrical nods or vocal effects all throughout that sound hollow and obsessed. It was kind of a lay-up for me already to enjoy a dreamy pop rock album but the lightly conceptual throughline of O-Rod’s deepest insecurities being personified into a complicated relationship that acts variably as a crutch, obsession, comfort and fear of inadequacy is really what ties it together for me as a great pop album, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we get tons more songs from the album debut in the coming months as fans switch their favourites. Nearly every track has a replayability that isn’t quite “spot the clues and piece out the narrative” as it is you’ll resonate with different details on relistens and that can make the song, a lot of which are purposefully unassuming, and for existing fans, most of Rodrigo’s signatures are still there, for better or worse, and have been more tastefully implemented or in the case of some tracks, kind of avoided (I already briefly touched on how “the cure” deviated from her wordier songwriting a few weeks back). My favourite tracks were “begged”, “cigarette smoke”, “expectations”, “maggots for brains”, “my way” and “u + me = <3”, but O-Rod is pushing this as the single with a music video and I can understand why.

Firstly, it’s a very easy song to make a music video for, it already has a lot of specific imagery – Hell, it was filmed in Manhattan and the first line is “New York City’s never looked so blue”. Secondly, it seems like a more natural follow-up to – and if I’m being honest, derivative of – the lead single “drop dead”, with a similar thematic conceit of being infatuated with a partner to an unhealthy extent stemming in part from a lack of self-worth and catching Olivia in an ephemeral, childlike wonder that probably won’t last. I do like “stupid song”, though considering it comes after “drop dead”, which as the opener encompasses this territory with a little tighter narrative structure you can more effectively follow in the way the song progresses between verses, it does seem a little unnecessary in an album context, at least at first to me. There being little remnant of the uncertainty from that song, replaced mostly with a heart-racing feeling that emotionally blocks out everyone else from her sight with still small signs of the ongoing mental dependency (mostly in the verses, with lines about other people doing drugs, her missing meals and an album-defining lyric in “They say that honest love is a cage that makes you feel free”), furthers the delusion of this part of the album and earns its spot on the track listing for, much like how the whole album adds refining touches to her sound, perfecting and encapsulating a working formula (though, of course, not a cure). With more empty space the listener is left with along the pianos – in the first verse especially – the breathier vocals can be exhausted without having an overbearing feel that muddies the messaging, and the run-on sentence of the chorus leads perfectly into the song’s hard shift into (not very hard) rock after an intro of balladry, with the hyperbole and deifying relationship taken up to unhealthy levels. I love the delayed backing vocal “When I dream of you” that attacks the song from an unsuspected corner, doesn’t sound great and keeps you aware of this train, despite constantly moving, still has edges of it tearing off into the wind. It’s a great song, not at all stupid in its writing even if it wants to embody a head empty of anything more or less than utter adoration, and I hope it can grab that #1 sometime even if it was not its week this time around.

Conclusion

content warning: references to sex, parental abuse and mental illness

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to a decent chuck of long-lasting hits, mostly top 10s and even including an array of chart-toppers, those being “Opalite” by Taylor Swift, “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter and “End of Beginning” by Djo. Our other losses are “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars, Disco Lines’ remix of “No Broke Boys” with Tinashe, “back to friends” by sombr and “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae.

As for our returns, welcome back to “Die on this Hill” by SIENNA SPIRO at #74, “GIRLS” by The Kid LAROI at #64 (it was included in an Amazon Prime series, having previously peaked at #47 in 2024, when Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” was #1) and “Baby Steps” by Olivia Dean back at #50 after peaking at #30 only a few weeks ago. Songs already on the chart gaining this week include “The Visitor” by SIENNA SPIRO at #55, “Orbiter” by Noah Kahan at #48, “On 2nite” by Silva Bumpa off of the debut to #32 and “Cinderella” by the late Mac Miller featuring Ty Dolla $ign at #27 but, really, there isn’t much here outside of our debuts.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “Billie Jean” by the late King of Pop Michael Jackson still at #5, followed by “the cure” by Olivia Rodrigo down to #4 (surely rebounding up next week with the album) and “hate that i made you love me” by Ariana Grande down to #3 after the debut at the top last week, with “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean sticking to the runner-up spot again as Taylor takes the #1, which we’ll talk about soon after these other new entries.

New Entries

#71 – “Sue me” – Audrey Hobert

Produced by Ricky Gourmet

Audrey Hobert knows what she’s doing… according to Rolling Stone. Headlines aside, she must do because after co-writing Gracie Abrams’ #1 hit “That’s So True”, Audrey Hobert, the sister of Malcolm Todd and his range of indie pop mediocrity, has landed a solo hit with “Sue me”, a single from her 2025 album Who’s the Clown?, where it comes right after a song titled “I like to touch people”, completing a quite worrying sentence.

Hobert, like a few of her contemporaries, looks back to a sleazy new rave sound with slabs of electro synth that echo down onto already massive drums, with some percs and panicked fills that rest on the synth bass in a way that seems slightly scared or uncomfortable with being there, not exactly unfitting for a song about Hobert needing to be wanted so much that she will target her ex-boyfriend at a party, repeating the mantra of “Sue me, I want to be wanted”, ashamed of the desperation on display but being calculated enough to remember dates and observe his choice of drink, giving an edge to the song that stops it from grovelling, and instead a release from whatever part of her brain is telling her no, with the drop into the chorus from the non-build of the pre-chorus being so natural that it doesn’t fragment her desire, just continues pushing into a possibly unwise situation that none of the intermittent vocal takes passing in and out of the second verse can convince her out of. I’m a sucker for bitcrushed synths and while this isn’t hexd or anything, the added crunch after the chorus weighs the song with a necessary grease that is accompanied in the bridge with a decidedly unsexy vocal performance once they actually get there, kind of a repulsed belt followed by a speak-sung devil on the shoulder that eventually meets into an actually worthwhile half-time breakdown with sound effects and finger-snaps straight out of a future bass remix. The ephemerality of the affair – but still how likely it is to repeat – continues to be emphasised in the breezy outro and makes for a decent closing moment to a narrative that I can imagine is expanded on elsewhere in the album, not that it needs to be to keep this from being a great, satisfying pop song in its own right. Not what I expected considering her collaborators but I’m a fan of this, it fits right in with contemporary electropop, hope to see it last on the chart.

#66 – “Kingdom of Fear” – Cameron Whitcomb

Produced by Jack Riley

Today, I learned that Canadians could be eligible for American Idol. After having been a contestant in the series’ 20th season, this singer-songwriter from a small city in British Columbia has had decent success in his home country releasing singles since at least 2024, mostly in the sphere of country-folk-indie mix operated in by acts like Noah Kahan or Whitcomb’s major influence, Tyler Childers. This is only his second top 40 hit in Canada but it’s reached worldwide charts a few months after its release this March. On a scratchy acoustic romp, Whitcomb strings through his insecurities in quick-paced verses and pre-choruses for a rougher belt in the chorus about living in the “kingdom of fear” that seems to be himself and his own fears that prevent him from building meaningful relationships without closing people off or warning people about how it might end up badly and it won’t be any potential partner’s fault. With stomp-clap tracks, it can be pretty difficult for me to get over the sound as it’s not something I’m a fan of but Whitcomb does a decent job at making the frantic acoustics worthwhile lyrically and as someone who has a fight-or-flight response when I hear Mumford & Sons, this is pretty thematically perfect for the genre’s breakneck speed, basic structure and lack of backing grit, with the throaty rasp of Whitcomb’s otherwise nasal vocal – holding a narrow space between country singers and Kid LAROI – at least attempting to make up for not having much on the low end. It’s not my genre, it falls into some of the trappings of it, but I respect the more unique vocal presence and even some of the writing, which doesn’t break new ground for mental health in pop but is at least interesting and unfortunately relatable enough to hold a similarly exhausting set of twinkly guitars. Again, kind of a surprising one for me to enjoy, but it’s really not bad.

#25 – “bloodstream” – Alyssa Grace

Produced by Steven Martinez

Okay, I’ll bite – who the Hell is Alyssa Grace? Well, the Australian government wanted me to believe she was a music teacher from New Zealand but wrong Alyssa Grace, this one’s another US folk pop singer-songwriter who got big on TikTok with a personal song, this one being the follow-up to the California-born 18-year-old’s last single “picking petals”. Like many similar artists, Grace’s music is minimal to focus on the lyrics, with her quoted as saying “Everything I’m working on right now has that same raw, emotional feel. It’s just me and my guitar, not overproduced. That’s what feels most authentic to me”.

So how does her breakout single stand out from the rest? Well, in two major ways – firstly both the verses and chorus are pretty wordy and decently in-depth about how being raised by her mentally unstable has damaged her ability to trust in any intimate relationships going further, with lyrics that stress her wanting a distance from her father that she can never reach for (again) two major reasons: she is her father’s daughter, hearing his voice, seeing him in her, and that she still loves the guy, understands the restraint he at least showed her and wants him to change for the better, in a strained desperacy that blesses the physical distance from the household and seems to want the best for him more so to ensure the environments he’s in aren’t unsafe, given the reference to her mother’s floor and the emphasis on physical separation. It’s all let out in a stream-of-consciousness vent that both keeps in all of the breaths and run-on sentences, but adds punched-in cuts to new lines, kind of a make-shift audio representation of panicked messages, over-edited and confusingly let out. That brings me to the second major way it stands out – instrumentally, it’s not quite just her and guitar this time, with Steven Martinez bringing in some basic drumming and an anxious swell, but it’s Grace herself, with all her voice cracks and at times, over-the-top delivery of belted lines that seem to have started with a general attempt at the typical, spoke-sung and R&B-influenced cursive singing you hear in a lot of TikTok-ready indie pop, but quickly bursts at the seams with the lengthy lines cracking her voice in watery, breathless gasps that at times halted my ability to really connect with the lyrics, putting a bit of a wall up. Safe to say it’s a pretty powerful song in my opinion, even if still in a more typical pop format, and her vocal performance – though understandably an easy turn-off for many – poking large holes in her confidence and leaving it a bit of a mess, the kind you might have to reflect on for a while to piece back together, the kind of messy paragraphs you need more context to try and make a futile attempt to make sense of. It’s the third in a theme this episode of very, panicky human debuts that won’t really be reflected in the next two.

#22 – “PASSENGER” – Alex Warren

Produced by Adam Yaron

Alex Warren has popped up with another new single from his upcoming sophomore album, Wildchild, named after a nickname his dad called him when he was a kid that stuck, and presumably not because anything he’s released is particularly “wild”. Though he does drive a forklift through a wall in the music video, so I’m sure that counts for something. There is nothing in this song that justifies the property damage caused by that forklift. It’s a cute pop-soul cut with copy-paste guitars in the verse and drums that unfortunately lose much of their impact in the chorus, swapping into a webby clap and nonchalant whooping that makes Warren, who seems more out of his element than ever (though I’ll give him this is something he makes reference to in the second verse), stall in place vocally whilst trying to express a frustration that he wants to express his love to a woman that is completely uninterested. That conceit is far from dead on arrival even if it doesn’t sound great on paper, you would really need to sell either the melodrama or the pathetic narrator, and I don’t think Warren’s groan, though less muddy here than in previous songs, really ends up goaling either net. I fear Warren has this issue where he sells every song with either a grating nonchalance or confessional belt, not knowing when to switch into a different mode, and it’s not like group vocals or multi-tracking can help every time. Much like “FEVER DREAM”, it’s an incessantly catchy and very inoffensive song, making it all the more ignorable in comparison to his more theatrical (yet perhaps less listenable) work which I at least find has something more to it than his attempts at being a basic pop star. Most don’t like “Ordinary” but it worked as a hit for its drama and Warren’s daisy-frolicking nothing-pop thus far hasn’t caught up with the… well, I don’t want to say quality, but consistency of his mopier gospels.

#1 – “I Knew It, I Knew You” – Taylor Swift

Produced by Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift has, after a weird false countdown previously, released a new soundtrack single for the upcoming sequel no-one wants or needs, Toy Story 5, the follow-up to Toy Story 4, a sequel that no-one wanted or needed but of course, it’s Disney, so it’ll rake in the cash and Taylor can do her bit too with releasing a tie-in track, one that she performed at the premiere of the film. She even claimed that the new film is a masterpiece and her favourite of the Toy Story films which is somewhat insane to say about a franchise that produced at least two great and innovative classics that Taylor would have been the target demographic for around their release, but I suppose it is also the only one with her name in the credits. Maybe it really is just that good, but she also starred in the 2012 adaptation of The Lorax so when it comes to animated cinema, I’m far from taking Taylor’s word for it.

Co-written with Jack Antonoff, “I Knew It, I Knew You” is marketed as a return to her country roots which is pretty accurate though it may be further organic than her earliest work and Antonoff’s presence helps it lean into the more contemporary folklore and evermore. The song starts with a harmonica so it basically wins me over immediately in the first place. Sure, it’s pitted against some flatter drums and less than inspired vocal melodies from Taylor, but the push-and-pull of slower melodic phrases with the rhythmically spoken sections in the verses is pretty typical of 2020s Taylor, and I’d argue has much more of a purpose here wherein two different moments of time are being described: a hazy memory of youth that has been reduced to the natural surroundings and small, cute details like the sound of this childhood friend’s footsteps, and the present situation, which sees Taylor briefly but meaningfully reunited with that person long after the two had grown up. Mirroring some of the themes of the Toy Story themes and even subtly calling back to the Randy Newman-written tear-jerker “When She Loved Me” from the second film, Taylor does a good job at making this a standalone country pop song that is ingrained with nostalgia and friendship but avoids being dreamlike or overly sentimental, probably in part due to the ephemerality of the two reconnecting, only really described as brief interactions like a smile or just a hit.

Really, whilst it is similar in parts to those 2020s folk albums, it ends up harkening back prominently to the innocence and immediacy of her earliest country pop work, which isn’t anything new and it’s probably the most blatantly sappy element of the song’s release and promotion, especially considering it’s a similar idea behind the release strategy of Disney sequels, but as a song on its own, I think it’s about what you should expect from this kind of soundtrack cut, even a little better executed. It’s a little shame that it has to be connected with the physical-printing Taylor machine because when that’s out of the picture, this throwaway seems a lot cuter and even perhaps a little more honest.

Conclusion

content warning: One Crude Innuendo

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “Bangaranga” by 2026 Eurovision Song Contest winner DARA of Bulgaria (after only two weeks), “Share the House” by Ewan McVicar, “Stargazing” by Myles Smith and, because, yes, this was in the top 75 last week, “Riptide” by Vance Joy.

As for our returns, we welcome a few tracks back to the bottom of the chart, like “back to friends” by sombr at #75, “Opalite” by Taylor Swift at #73 and “Willing and Able” by Noah Kahan at #69 (more on him later), with boosts for already charting tracks including “Girl Like Me” by PinkPantheress at #61, “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac at #44, “Cinderella” by the late Mac Miller featuring Ty Dolla $ign at #41, “On the Floor” by Jennifer Lopez featuring Pitbull at #35, “NOBLE” by F3miii all the way up to #34(!), “Self Aware” by Temper City at #29 and finally, “Hit the Wall” by Gracie Abrams at #27.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson down to #5, “Janice STFU” by Drake surpassing it up to #4, “the cure” by Olivia Rodrigo slipping a little off of the debut to #3, and of course Sam, Olivia and Ari in the top two, the latter of which we’ll get to after these brief messages from our sponsors: Noah Kahan and… Montell Jordan?

New Entries

#56 – “Orbiter” – Noah Kahan

Produced by Noah Kahan and Aaron Dessner

We have yet another song from Noah Kahan’s former #1 album The Great Divide which I’ve discussed many a time now. “Orbiter” is not one of my favourites but, like I said when I reviewed “Willing and Able”, feels like it would have functioned as a great title track because it embodies the awkward space Kahan is in with his family after his musical success. I’ll be brief as not to repeat myself – I like the album but it does encroach on familiar territory quite frequently – but “Orbiter” is largely about his mother, whom he brought as a plus one to the GRAMMYs, and dedicated to how even on “alien ground”, Kahan’s faster life circles around his mother, with the lyrics being honestly a little sappy (especially the pre-chorus – “Some will never know they're beautiful until the crowd points it out for them”) but delivered with the same slightly haunting detachment as some of the more confused moments on the album, hitching the uncertainty Kahan feels about his music career and acclaim (demonstrated in the rapid frolicking of acoustics that starts and drives the song initially) onto the back of the song like something he can’t pull off, it’s pretty sad.

There are small details in the vocal mixing that make the song for me – when the multi-tracking doesn’t fully overlap, when the “you” in “I circle you” echoes but quickly vanishes into the minimal instrumentation, there’s not much delay on it. The second verse has several vacant spaces that seem to stagnate the song a little, the pre-chorus has an odd delivery on “camera flash” that seems a little out of tone with the rest of the song as if it’s still unusual for him to even consider that as a part of his lifestyle, and even in the melodramatic closing moments of the song, Kahan’s voice slips into harmonies that give a hazy weight to the open-ended, repeated line in the outro, “If I’m going to lose you either way”. I am a little surprised that this song is only on the reissue tracklist, subtitled The Last of the Bugs, because it seems pretty essential to some of the album’s major relationships and arcs but maybe the four bonus tracks just weren’t ready in time. Either way, it’s another good song from Kahan that I don’t think will become a major hit but will probably linger for a few weeks more on the charts.

#43 – “On 2nite” – Silva Bumpa

Produced by Silva Bumpa

Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell is Silva Bumpa? Well, of course, our story starts long before this week. In 1999, in fact, with the release of “Get it on Tonite” by US R&B singer and Nutty Professor star Montell Jordan who is somewhat forgotten these days outside of his biggest hit, “This is How We Do It”, but still had a spattering of minors hits through the late 90s, with “Get it on Tonite” peaking at #15 on its debut week in 2000 and spending only four weeks on the UK chart, his last charting hit until a 2015 remix. Westlife’s “Fool Again” debuted at #1 the week “Get it on Tonite” peaked and to be honest, you can understand why the song didn’t last over here. Typically, I do stick up for 90s R&B but Jordan seemed at odds with the lover boy image required of him during that era (read it from the Jordan’s mouth here) and it honestly bleeds into the music with this single, which outside of some cheeky guitars seems to lean a little closer to the literal painting of walls than figuratively. It was still a hit in the US, backed by a remix featuring LL COOL J, whose lyrics seem particularly at odds with Jordan, who now runs a church with his wife. In 2013, Justin Myers actually wrote an article for the Official Charts Company about the song, calling it a Pop Gem and marvelling at how brilliant Montell must have been to come up with the idea of standing near a fridge wearing flip-flops and socks in his music video. This was not long after the track was sampled by Azealia Banks of all people though that did not appear on the UK Singles Chart neither have any samples, remixes or covers of the tracks to my knowledge until today.

So, who’s Silva Bumpa? He’s a Sheffield DJ who, according to his Sony Music UK press release at least, has recently sold out a UK headline tour and is influenced by… Aphex Twin and Arca, huh. Whilst these are greatly influential electronic artists, it does seem a bit strange to mention them and Mura Masa instead of any classic bassline or UK garage tracks and DJs so I was wondering just how experimental “On 2nite” would be. Turns out, not really at all. Released on Room Two Recordings last week, the track is a very conventional garage flip of Montell’s song, shifting him up in pitch and backing him with basic drums and twirling keys you’d expect from this genre. I do like the little inflections of bass synth and waivering sound effects as well as fragments of echoed Montell ad-libs that pepper the song’s build-up, already backed by an alarm sound and some nice compressed drum crashes. I do probably prefer this version of the song, if not just because garage rarely misses for me and I like the nostalgic casualness with which Mr. Bumpa approaches it. The track seems like it’s still focused largely on being percussive and letting the sample do the melodic lifting, but little slatherings of synth in the second build and bubbling up in the outro help connect the song into something cleaner than, say, PAWSA, who had a few hits in 2024 with similarly simple garage house flips that seemed a little more slapped together and bordering on not even being transformative of the original. Can’t be mad at a simple remix like this that at least seems to care about being its own thing.

#1 – “hate that i made you love me” – Ariana Grande

Produced by Ariana Grande, ILYA and Max Martin

I wasn’t expecting new music from Ariana Grande too soon. After the success of the Wicked films and the continued rollout of 2024’s eternal sunshine through its deluxe edition, I was a little surprised to see there not be a longer wait for the follow-up, petal, which arrives this July and has already given her an eighth UK #1. Working again with Max Martin and ILYA, this release comes as, well, a release, of the “negative attachments” that she cuts off in the writing of this album, one she presented as a bit of a surprise to her label and describes as “a little feral”. How does the single prime our expectations for petal, exactly? Well, there are parts that shine through what is otherwise a somewhat unassuming lead single, like just how watery this web of plucky synths are – basically completely drowned under the stock drums that hit about as damply as the fish at the end of the Faith No More video, it isn’t lo-fi but it’s definitely avoiding being the massive comeback or release that fans may have wanted after the Wicked media circus… of course, that’s what the song’s kind of about!

Ari’s lyrics here connect – much more strongly than a breakup, in my opinion – to the parasociality of fans and the weird status of her agency with releasing art and expressing herself, being in relative control of her own public expression, but not in any control of what people will do on behalf of the person they think she is (“You studied my crown and borrowed my body”, a line that fittingly trails off into a ghostly echo during the second verse). Of course, you could interpret most of this as a bitter breakup song also, but the bridge makes it pretty evident – unless she’s collectively talking to her exes again like on “thank u, next”, she’s likely addressing the general audience as a whole, widening it to the legacy media’s unjust portrayals of women. So, the song is basically all about something I could not possibly connect to and takes a self-centred (not pejoratively, just objectively what’s being done here) approach to it, yet I think my problem is not its content, rather its lack of commitment to being so muted about it. The real rebellion against audience expectations would be to not paint the song with Ari’s signature strokes of stray vocal riffs and harmonies, or at least keep the stronger performances out and bury the muted, delicate vocal takes in stacks of harmonies that sound transparent – there’s something there with the fact the song is a fuzzy slab of filtered, watery greyness already, but “I barely tried” doesn’t exactly ring true when being belted. Maybe that difficulty to find a balance between her instincts, what she’s known for, what image she’s portrayed and want the fans want is what’s behind the awkward middle ground this takes, but a more striking deviation from the norm would have been cool to hear, especially since as it stands, this is like delivering another “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” with a pale, restraining whisper. With that said, I am a little intrigued and I can imagine the album cuts being a little weirder, perhaps even a little meaner, which I’m all for, so I can understand the restraint on the lead single. Let’s see what door this opens in July.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to sex, mental health, generative AI and the end of the world (somehow not related)

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to plenty of tracks, namely: “Make Them Cry” by Drake off of last week’s debut (more on him later, shebang), “FINE PLACE TO DIE” by Alex Warren, “worry” by LONOWN and riserayss, “Jane!” by The Long Faces, “Click Clack Symphony.” by RAYE featuring Hans Zimmer, “SWIM” by BTS, “The Great Divide” by Noah Kahan, “Die on this Hill” by SIENNA SPIRO, “Opalite” by Taylor Swift, “back to friends” by sombr and finally, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan.

As for our returns, we have “Riptide” by Vance Joy back at #72 for whatever reason and then a viral resurgence for “On the Floor” by Jennifer Lopez featuring Pitbull, which spent its first two weeks at #1 in 2011 and hadn’t charted since 2012 (I personally don’t see why you would want to bring this one back of all of the club-pop cuts from that time period, but alas, I’m not the general public). Back then, it dethroned Adele’s “Someone Like You” and blocked LMFAO’s slightly dumber, much more fun “Party Rock Anthem” featuring Lauren Bennett and GoonRock, which would eventually get four weeks at the top anyway. “Blessings” by Calvin Harris and Clementine Douglas is also back at #27 after peaking at #3 last year, then of course we have Fleetwood Mac who just continue to sit around on the charts as they have done consistently in the recent past, with “Everywhere” returning to #24 (it mostly bottom-feeds in the lesser half of the chart) and “Dreams” up to a new peak of #18 (it reached #24 in 1977). Apart from “Dreams”, we have another older notable gain in “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield at #40, but thankfully, it’s mostly newer tracks, like “Baby” by Prospa and Murda Beatz at #54, “Satisfy” by Calvin Harris and Jazzy at #46, “Talk to You” by ANOTR and 54 Ultra at #21, “Free Your Mind” by Prospa and Cloonee at #17 and two consecutive boosted tracks from Zara Larsson: “Midnight Sun” and “Lush Life” at #8 and #7. Okay, well, that last one definitely isn’t recent…

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “Dracula” by Tame Impala at #5 then “Go” by The Chemical Brothers featuring Q-Tip to #4 – still surprised but not upset at this retroactive success, at least it’s a more interesting song that wasn’t that big on release. Before “Rein Me In” at the top, our bronze medal goes to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” at #3 and, in stark contrast, a song that’s just been released, “the cure” by Olivia Rodrigo at #2, which we’ll get to after these messages from our sponsors: the other new arrivals. Trust me, I know the Drake episode was long, I’ll keep it snappy… maybe.

New Entries

#75 – “Girl Like Me” – PinkPantheress

Produced by aksel arvid, Count Baldor and PinkPantheress

A few weeks ago, PinkPantheress released a video for “Girl Like Me” from last year’s mixtape, Fancy That, which Ella Dorn wrote a great article about in The New Statesman if you’re interested in more of an analysis about that. We now see the song charting in the top 75, but our story, of course, starts well before this year.

In 1981, disco group Cloud One released “Don’t Let this Rainbow Pass Me By” featuring Margo Williams, which would find its way into the hands of UK dance act Basement Jaxx and be sampled in the absolute fucking tune “Romeo” featuring uncredited vocals from English singer Kele le Roc. The oddly vindictive yet vibrant funky house cut’s main pull is its hook of “Let it all go” as an ex-boyfriend drives Kele around the bend to the point of ending the relationship and wishing away all the stress, not that the litany of sound effects cobbled together by Basement Jaxx do anything to make it any less tense, it’s a bit of a madness and that’s my favourite element of the song apart from the slightly disparate bridge with that watery, phased-out 70s bassline. One of the greatest 2000s dance hits in my opinion, “Romeo” peaked at #6 on its debut week, the same week “Angel” by Shaggy featuring Rayvon was #1.

Despite her mixtape having a song of the same name, PinkPantheress samples “Romeo” on “Girl Like Me”, with the inspiration of Basement Jaxx motivating the production of Fancy That and the “let it all go” hook being reused by Pink on the track to much of the same effect, with the verses showing some exhaustion towards a toxic relationship at the end of its tether and having some references to physical photographs and drive-in movies to ground it in a nostalgia for when he was her Romeo rather than the ongoing mental torment of where they are now, a pretty nice subtle reinterpretation of the sample. Pink’s nonchalant, sometimes whispery delivery has plenty of backing quirks and detail that feeds into the twitching production, with the hesitant ad-libs during the recognisable chorus and the song trailing off into desperate pleads for the relationship not to end really pushing the “Let it all go” hook into similar “I’m totally okay with it ending, I’m already over it, trust” energy as the original Kele le Roc lyrics.

Though probably my least favourite on the tracklisting apart from the interlude, it’s still a fantastic play on Y2K nostalgia. I would be amiss if I didn’t briefly touch on the remixes from Fancy Some More?, where the song was retouched by French singer Oklou into a slower, delicate throwback in the entirely opposite direction of early 00s electronic pop and gets a middling, overlong shuffling house flip from KAYTRANADA that showed to me his ol’ reliable sound he’s comforted himself into lately is a bit dull for me. The song was oddly underutilised given some tracks got several remixes, and we only got one per disc for “Girl Like Me”, but it’s got a music video now so maybe it doesn’t need a Bladee feature. Just kidding, every song needs a Bladee feature.

#71 – “Cinderella” – Mac Miller featuring Ty Dolla $ign

Produced by Aja Grant and Dahi

Mac Miller was a great, nuanced and evolving artist in hip-hop who never really got his flowers, charts or otherwise, until he passed, and through a steady stream of respectful releases from his estate and under-the-radar cuts being rediscovered on TikTok, his catalogue has quietly kept maintaining some decent streams this decade. Though I wasn’t the biggest fan, I like a ton of his stuff, especially his jazzier side, and his 2016 album The Divine Feminine, inspired by and featuring then-girlfriend Ariana Grande among other women in his life who inspired him, leans into sensual R&B and soul influences that show a more vulnerable Mac than we’d seen at that point, though his record before – and my personal favourite of his – GO:OD AM definitely hints toward that direction. Ariana conceded that although not all of the album is directly about her, “Cinderella” apparently is and appropriately, it’s an intimate track with the TYCOON himself, Ty Dolla $ign, that also runs eight minutes long. Hell, it actually starts with Ty$, who paints the picture of a rebellious teenage love story over a slow, slightly eerier sample of Canadian indie-rockers Tokyo Police Club before DJ Dahi’s drums come in for the verse, kind of hitting the ratchet R&B and trap sounds you’d expect from Ty$ during this time but not fully, mixing it with itchier, metallic snares that seem to clash, giving it a little unease that you can hear in the guitar sample already, though most of that can be chalked up to the nerves Mac tries not to display in their date, seemingly their first sexual encounter given his need to curate a plan for the night and Ty$’s loveably dramatic lines of waiting all his life for this moment.

There’s always been a charming awkwardness to Mac’s lowkey murmuring though I will admit that it’s not as great on this darker alternative R&B sound than it is on more organic-sounding instrumentals, and the song’s first part isn’t exactly one of my favourite songs from Mac, even with a guitar solo from R&B production and songwriting veteran Jeff Gitelman and a great performance from Ty$. No, it’s the second section, where Mac calmly reflects – probably post-coitus – on how much of his life feels like it’s cleared up now he has someone to focus his energy and care for, with the harmonied reverb effect he often employed onto his less-trained singing voice helping his lackadaisical boyish rasp feel like the soulful crooner he’s evoking, though his lack of pipes in this scenario makes it so much cuter anyways, with the main line “It's only right that right after love, I write my name” being a cheesy but also genuinely clever hook over the much softer cushion of strings and pianos. Neither song would be that satisfying on their own but together, it makes for a good sequence, not my favourite but definitely not a lowlight for Mac. I hope his family and friends see how well even a non-single from a decade ago can continue to translate and resonate long after his passing, even to the point of appearing on singles charts.

#69 – “Like a Prayer” – Josh Fawaz

Produced by Fadi Fawaz

Okay, I’ll bite, as an AI language model, I can’t have worthwhile opinions on music or any of the performing arts, let alone be involved in producing fraudulent covers or remixes that flood streaming services and threaten revenue streams for real artists. However, I can use emojis and buzzwords to spew some press-release bullshit about this song that doesn’t really mean anything.

🎧✨ Josh Fawaz’s EDM reinterpretation of “Like a Prayer” is not just a cover of Madonna’s legendary classic — it’s a *genre-defining sonic journey* that fundamentally recontextualizes nostalgia for a new generation of emotionally connected listeners 🌍💫. From the very first beat, the track immediately establishes an atmospheric auditory landscape driven by cinematic synth layers 🎹⚡, immersive rhythmic progression 🔊🔥, and a dynamically engineered drop structure that feels simultaneously euphoric, introspective, and spiritually transcendent 🙏✨.

 🌟 Why This Track Works So Exceptionally Well

Emotionally resonant vocals 🎤💖

Polished, high-impact EDM production ⚙️🎶

Seamless fusion of nostalgia + innovation 🔄🚀

Festival-ready energy with cinematic depth 🎆🌌

A listening experience that feels increasingly relevant in today’s evolving music ecosystem 🌐📈

What’s particularly compelling, however, is the way Josh Fawaz strategically balances reverence for the original material with forward-thinking electronic experimentation 🎛️🧠. It’s not just dance music — it’s an exploration of how legacy pop can evolve within modern algorithm-driven streaming culture 📱💡. Furthermore, the drop itself isn’t merely “good” — it’s explosively cathartic in a way that feels optimized for everything from late-night drives 🚗🌃 to emotionally transformative festival moments 🎪⚡.

Ultimately, “Like a Prayer” succeeds because it understands a deeper truth about modern EDM ✨: authenticity is no longer simply about preserving the past — it’s about amplifying emotional familiarity through immersive sonic storytelling that resonates across generational and digital boundaries alike 💭🌍🔥. And speaking of boundaries, let’s hope we don’t have to repeatedly talk about this topic moving forward, though if what Spotify is doing is any indication, and after the recent Stromae rip-off that charted, “I Run” may as well as a Van Gogh painting. Hell, maybe this "Life a Prayer" doesn’t use AI vocals at all and instead just sounds like it does because it’s trendy to sound like disaffected slop.

#64 – “Let Me Be in Your Arms” – Sonny Fodera and Libianca

Produced by Sonny Fodera and Billen Ted

Cameroon’s Libianca had a great #2 hit when she debuted onto the charts in 2023 with the Afrobeats slow burn “People” but never truly followed up on that chart success until now, where she is disappointingly anonymised on Sonny Fodera’s newest pop-house cut, “Let Me Be in Your Arms”. Read what Claudia Miles of Sweet+Sour wrote about it and marvel at how similar it feels to my parody impression of ChatGPT from the last review. You do get some of the casual sluggishness Libianca bought to her first hit in the first verse’s loneliness but this is an otherwise typical track about unrequited love that at least does place her vocal in the centre and work off of the call-and-response to make for a great hook, though again doesn’t feel like it’s bringing Libianca into the fold as much as just making her serve as any other vocalist, which you could have easily avoided by accentuating that “mm-mm” refrain with an Afrobeats group vocal or infecting the production with some more organic joy than the same kind of wavey synths you hear on every track like this. It’s actually pretty unadventurous and uninteresting for Sonny Fodera who at least use to pack his tracks with a little more structurally. Here, the ball hasn’t been entirely dropped – it’s still catchy, mixed more dynamically than any old compressed pile of dance-pop fluff. I just wish the collaboration led to something a bit different for Fodera and a bit less vocally blank for Libianca, whose subdued delivery was one of the most distinct and impactful parts of her own big hit. Also, Mr. Fodera, fill in the “produced by” section of your Spotify credits, you’re not Drake, you are the damn producer.

#43 – “SS26” – Charli xcx

Produced by A.G. Cook and Finn Keane

Posting the lyrics to her Substack prior to release, “SS26” is one of four new songs released to pre-empt her next project, going for a fully apocalyptic lyrical conceit over another mix of electronic drums with alt-rock guitars, presumably how her next album will sound given “Rock Music”, and with a similarly irony-coated, paranoid drama to that song, too, though in a much more interesting way this time around. Using the naming conventions of fashion shows in the title, Charli semi-sarcastically (really, sincerely, but knowing how silly it may sound) laments that in the Hellscape we currently live in, music, fashion and art won’t save us, and we may as well be hopeless which, well, she doesn’t seem wrong.

Again, the approach she takes in the verses is similar to The Moment, revealing fragments of herself in an empty celebrity detachment that takes the edges off her own confidence, treating her principles and Indian heritage as selling points and marketing, which is a pretty hopeless road when she actually wants to say anything, because they function to the public as aspects of a sellable persona (“I think I’ll be alright if I look good in the clothes”). I did laugh at the blank space after “I was hacked” in the second verse, but it would have been funnier and less groanworthy if the verse was entirely instrumental after that part because I don’t think anything about cancel culture has ever been said in pop music, especially not in a song that tries to have some degree of universality and bring a sympathy out of how dehumanising celebrity culture is. Like “Rock Music”, it is still a pretty undercooked song relying on repeating the hook and buying into the narrative, which is starting to become a little unfortunate with Charli given how her previous albums from Charli to BRAT was able to find a real balance between fleshing out their identity and playing loosely with pop convention, whilst these rock cuts have been lacking in much of anything other than a podcast take and shittily-mixed guitars. At least this one has a more interesting take but, yeah, still not really convinced on this sound for Charli as more than a venting outlet.

#25 – “Shabang” – Drake

Produced by Maneesh and 40

I already discussed ICEMAN in great detail last week and thankfully, our three-song switcheroo grants us a new song that is – by design – one of the least interesting songs on the record or really any of the three he released, not that it isn’t decent instrumentally, but the verses are about as basic as possible, using the same call-and-response flow for nearly the whole track that is very catchy but increasingly useless at covering up the lack of anything meaningful being said. It could be a “we’re back” anthem if it wasn’t a weightless moan-fest about opps who are nowhere near “dead” and the verse didn’t start with how he couldn’t forgive them, then continue to diss said opps’ albums, though admitting he did listen to them. I do love the chipmunk soul flip Maneesh goes for under the bouncier trap drums and it does serve as one of the smoothest examples of the album’s beat switches given the slide into a cloudier 40-produced haze for the final chorus that has some lyrical and vocal changes to account for said shift. Drake, though, is basically just running through a bullet-point list of ICEMAN lyrical topics, it’s kind of funny that this song even exists on this album since it renders as a basic summary, bordering on parody, of the album’s themes. Shout out to Quavo on the ad-libs, at least. (SHE BAD!)

#2 – “the cure” – Olivia Rodrigo

Produced by Daniel Nigro

O-Rod has released her second single from her upcoming third album, apparently her favourite track on the record, “the cure”, again evoking her love for Robert Smith’s band of the same name yet the song isn’t about them, rather the impossibility to find a way out of the unhealthy thoughts and mental patterns she’s been dealing with, even if she has someone who loves her or comforts her, it’s not “the cure”. Comforting isn’t enough to quell a series of ingrained insecurities that have O-Rod comparing herself an array of other girls, with the implication being that the current partner’s dating history and wider societal expectation are looming over the relationship’s capability to actually feel like a safe, loved space for Olivia and not just temporary, over-the-counter comfort like taking medication. I do think that you could read into her maybe expressing some musical frustrations when you read that titular chorus as “it’ll never be The Cure”, but that’s not touched upon, which is always my favourite way of hinting at meta ideas in song lyrics: having it be a reasonable interpretation that you have to look slightly outside of the contained lyrics to really string together, no pun intended.

Lyrically, the song is actually a little more minimal for Olivia, with more repetitive verses that are a little less wordy or stream-of-consciousness than other songs but especially the lead single “drop dead”, perfect for her cold, multi-tracked delivery that sounds much less feathery than usual on the webby scratch of the main acoustic guitar line, more like she’s trying to work against it and never making progress – perhaps because all of the “antidotes” don’t actually “fix” these problems and serve mostly as distractions (including music!). The song’s slower build-up gives time for those distractions, sure, but the third verse’s delivery is a little frailer, more bitter, spiralling into the “I’m unravelled” refrain that has different vocal takes pattered across the mix like thoughts you hope escape you, convincing you you’re worthless.

We actually did get a song from a pop singer-songwriter about mental health last week and I don’t want to compare their experiences but the longer runtime O-Rod grants to “the cure” allows for much more progression in the instrumental, transitioning into frantic strings for the bridge that sees her belting those same “I’m unravelled” cries for help, around a main vocal asking why she can’t just miraculously have her problems solved by the relationship getting lost in all the build-up that I would say releases with the final chorus but really just, well, unravels into a panic once the drums (which I do wish were more impactful) run in. The added context of young girls being pressured to get into relationships, look their best (and feel their worst) to be with men (and, in the industry, compete with them), only for them not to be a miracle cure, makes that bridge seem larger than the domestic, it really gets justifiably intense and I think this is another brilliant single from Olivia. Excited to hear that upcoming record, this is already a fantastic streak of singles.

Conclusion

content warning: thousands of words about Drake, including language, references to death, cancer, misogyny, sex, gangs, mental health, Israel, bagpipes, everything really

Drake Entries

You can scroll down to the end of these icebergs of text to see the rest of the UK Singles Chart reviewed as we otherwise do every week. Drake’s chart prominence and my thoughts about the album, in particular its charting entries, justified to me a sequence break in the show so if you’re not interested, this may be a waste of words. Either way, Drake’s ICEMAN, obviously, debuts at #1 on the UK’s albums chart this week and as slap-dash as its two accompanying albums – MAID OF HONOUR (#6) and HABIBTI (#7) – may feel, the release strategy, the promotional videos and livestreams, even how the songs are written and constructed, it all strikes me as calculated, though not in a cold way that prevents you from finding and digging holes in the album’s themes (Hell, if he wanted that to be impossible, he would just not release anything at all). It’s calculated to overwhelm – not to astonish, mind you, not to bring you the most otherworldly music like Drake has never made before. Instead, he overwhelms with sheer amount, which isn’t far from what he did with, say, Views, which is probably the last track listing he had until ICEMAN that was this coherently sequenced, or any of his other long albums. The difference with ICEMAN is that he overloads all at once and all cylinders – songs will have three beats, lyrics will have subliminal shots at so many people, potentially at once, that it becomes easier to dismiss them as vague posturing, there will be five-minute tracks all with the same flow delivering lyrics that beyond the awkward wordplay at the surface, have layers to them that aren’t immediately obvious and once you do read into them, search for more, you end up finding out that Drake didn’t think too hard about them either. He probably didn’t think too hard about releasing three albums at once, two of which were much less positively-received, because flooding the streaming market with releases – one for the guys and the hits, one for the girls and the clubs and one for… PARTYNEXTDOOR fans and the sleep-deprived – he can once again overwhelm you with every single thought he’s had in the past two years, every single beat idea he was presented with, every single piece of music video footage he shot in what appeared to be a very troubled production cycle for this album. You don’t have three albums of vastly different material if you’re not either incredibly prolific or directionless on your intended sound. Yet, at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like a mess.

After the final livestream, which I did watch and did need to drink through so I could sit through the albums after (don’t worry, I have relistened), we got an album that feels purposeful, direct, textured with rich, dynamic production, full of corny Drake-type lyrics that ultimately present a pretty consistently insecure and sad portrayal of the man as he dips further into this cold, “ICEMAN” persona that no-one is buying and I think he knows as such. If you find “Drake” interesting as a person, persona or public image, like myself, you will be fascinated by Aubrey’s continuous referral to himself as if he can detach from the persona and observe like a critical outsider, taking on the role of the critics and Internet commentators like DJ Akademiks (who was on that final livestream), but just as continuous failure to truly remove himself from a conversation that it becomes a little clearer only he is seriously having. If you found the 2024 beef with Kendrick Lamar exciting, you can dig into the 70 rappers, basketball players and random women he’s dissing on the album and look at the pros and cons to each lyric – some are nasty, some are funny, some fall flat on their face and most sound okay until you reach the Genius annotation and realise he’s kind of lying by omission. If you find yourself obsessed with little production details, you will have a huge amount of instrumental touches and decisions to contemplate about why it was done and how it improves each song, especially with the most dynamic use of beat switches in Drake’s catalogue thus far, where no longer do we have abrupt, meaningless cuts to a second idea stitched to an unfinished track but we have purposeful, progressive production that mixes and matches elements of both the beat and Drake’s rapping in between sections to make for a complete package – you know, like an actual song. Sure, there are some more abrupt intros similar to For All the Dogs but if you follow along with the livestreamed music videos, they have a visual purpose that you can observe with the change of setting and lighting, which is usually a cold, misty blue tint that can get uncomfortably dour and brown at, interestingly, the least intimate moment. Even stuff like how Drake’s voice is mixed on the album is at its most ranged in years, and we’ll get into that a little with the vocal experimentation on certain tracks.

This is more of the same Drake formula, produced in what seems like a tough two years, but it’s designed so immaculately, delivered with at least half of the lore, cultural impact, visuals and mass-market flooding of a Taylor Swift record, that it seems calculated. It seems confident. And for Drake, I love that. For myself, it’s not easy to forget or look aside from the clumsiness of some of his similes (he loves those on this album), the tiredness of his delivery on the second half, the repetitive flows across longer tracks, the reliance on controversy or discourse to make songs work thematically, the hope that we forgot about all the grooming shit and the hesitancy to address more personal topics on the album when it’s not the intro or a personal attack on someone else, the absolute cope on display when hitting back at Kendrick lines from two fucking years ago and the frankly terrible, phoned-in guest appearances from 21 Savage and especially Future, who is on his final stage of proving that he just doesn’t give a shit. The lowest points, quality-wise, of the album, thankfully, do not appear on today’s chart as, of course, only three songs were eligible for the UK Singles Chart as is the rule – that is what this show is about, if this is your first time and you thought I was just a Drake fan review account. We do get to hear some of Drake’s lowest points in the confessional opener, however, “Make Them Cry”.

#6 – “Make Them Cry” – Drake

Produced by Maneesh among others

I believe official production credits have yet to be revealed, to my knowledge, for ICEMAN, which is really intriguing for me considering just how big it sounds and how many people were likely involved – it’s kind of his version of hiding the features. I am using the Genius page, Wikipedia and HotNewHipHop as the sources instead of the (mostly) reliable and official Spotify credits listing as I usually do, so please understand that there may be many more producers on a given track (“among others” means that the unlisted producers are credited by one source and not another) or that some are wrongfully credited for now as more information comes out. Either way, the producers need to be credited merit-wise for their layered work on “Make Them Cry”, one of the absolute highlights of the album.

The first in a sequence of four contemplative “Make Them…” bar-fests, “Make Them Cry” has the least filler bars and the most to prove, setting itself as the standout intro that keeps you wanting to hear just what else he has to say whilst not holding back really at all on personal thoughts and anecdotes that don’t paint Drake as too likeable or focused but do give genuine insight that is much less closed-off than he’s appeared even on these supposedly confessional or introspective piano-led boom bap tracks before. In the first four lines, you get absolute classic Drake-style bars with a corny pop-culture reference punchline, a brag about he’s a singular guy you can’t replicate and a convoluted bar that seems to want to go over your head by mentioning so many family members it needs to be digested what he’s actually trying to say about his family dynamic. This family conceit continues until he starts talking about his long-time producer and close friend 40, who has apparently been more distant and unwilling to lend an ear to Drake recently, hence why he closes the “family” section of the verse – cool writing structure there.

Said family section sees Drake lamenting – or, really, just commenting as it seems like he’s accepted this as fact – his unhealthy dynamics with his parents, wherein he has to be overly protective of his mother because of his father’s absence, yet still treat his father like an “older brother”, someone to see as competition due to his musical background and the emotionally stunted way he’s still moving up until recently, instead of anyone he could look up to as a father figure, especially when he has Adonis whom, for all we know, sees a caring side of Drake closer to how he and his mother treated each other than how Drake gets along with Mr. Dennis Graham, though elements of that do seep into their relationship publicly as we see Adonis in the ICEMAN videos driving a police car with Shane Gillis in the back, seemingly replacing any need for Drake to be lip-syncing to the lyrics like he does in the rest of said videos, and him appearing on the back of For All the Dogs tracks for his own little beat switch, treating him sort of like a peer (Dennis also got his own spot on Dark Lane Demo Tapes).

Like I said, if you find Drake interesting, there’s a lot to unpack here and I appreciate him getting into his family given that was a topic covered by “Meet the Grahams”, but also because it seems to set fire to the rest of the track, with parts of these family dynamics reappearing, like how his father’s battle with lung cancer (which he reacted… fittingly nonchalantly to) had stages much like his struggle to reconnect with him post-abandonment or how he talked to the mother of his former friend’s child and realised that the guy, who has sold his OVO chain, was “moving backwards”, as if the progress he’d made in starting a family was being reverted by increasingly desperate, erratic and hopeless behaviour (or as Drake says, “nefarious actions”), that he won’t forgive but still calls him “our brother”, an interesting little phrase when you consider how more angrily he lashed out a few years back on “Away from Home” at Michael Raphael, who designed the OVO owl then “sued the fuckin’ guys” and has been out of Drake’s life since. That increased need to continue to connect to those who strain their relationships with him, likely out of desperacy following the fallout of the beef, is a recurring theme on the album, and makes the line about said guy who sold his OVO chain – “I think he's so desperate and our life is going fantastic” – very ironic and the straight-faced delivery seems to be astutely aware of that irony.

This seeps into his still very shallow and difficult relationship with women too – for the first time since maybe Take Care, he seems genuinely upset and not just guilt-tripping about a woman who did him wrong, acknowledging that the calculated materialism inherent in how he attempts to show this woman his admiration (“I put the "man" in "manipulation" when I pay your rent and that is an obligation to our attachment / Then I sprinkle in a little Mercedes and fashion / If that's not enough for you, well, baby, go back then”) is a cruel tactic that can only lead to the relationship’s demise but one he’ll go back to again and again, for when it all falls apart, the consequences of such (“You gave him reason to speak on my name, that's some weak shit / They texting proof to my phone and my heart is in pieces”) lead him back into relying on spending money as a last resort or, in his mind, only option, for emotional fulfilment, decrying the whole situation – wherein this woman bought a house for is screwing this other dude in said place – as an example of his endless cycle of “rescuing leeches”, setting up the colder persona that he takes on throughout the album as well as the complex web that leads his money to his girls, turns his guys to his “opps”, turns his music into his diary and, as much as I hate having to write this phrase, turns Drake into the “ICEMAN”.

Amidst all the personal stories, there are some silly lines though given Drake’s stream-of-consciousness way of writing on these “Make Them…” tracks, it would be odd if he didn’t try and crack forced jokes like a guy telling a couple stories he wants to spice up and get reactions from, and the note it ends on is one of “Fuck it, I’ll go in”, because if he still has the strength to protect his mother, help his father through cancer, gather a real, adoring, obsessive fanbase, he can go even further, right? He can “battle the label” by suing them and talking shit about Lucian Grainge from Universal, forcing the radio stations to play his hits again, but seemingly, more importantly, being open. He says earlier in the song that he hates the words “dig deep” because it brings him pain (though his girl betraying him is “more than painful”), and he ends it off with him saying “I’ll gladly explain it”. Years of rescuing leeches gives you tracks worth of sob stories, betrayals, interesting characters, disposable income flexes, and whilst I don’t think he actually did much of that on ICEMAN, the progression on this track to that point is well-reasoned and, when playing on the livestream, got me a little excited! For a Drake album!

I love how his delivery continues the same flow but instead of drooping off into exhaustion like the rest of the “Make Them…” tracks, he gets tougher and more fired up about what he’s going to deliver, and the production helps a ton. Maneesh and collaborators provide three layers of instrumental here that slide into different modes seamlessly as Drake goes on – even though it’s basically three Drake type beats with similar tempos, they are distinct enough to carry the stories of Drake’s lyrics, with the first relying on a filtered female vocal loop (sounds like it’s run through a vocoder) that pans around and becomes increasingly distorted as the track goes on, with very 40-type drums, before a proclamation of Drake that he’s been “all alone” for the sake of his mental health. So, now that he’s not written off digging deep, the beat can open up into a bolder, soulful boom bap track fit for talking a whole lot of shit and building that mental image of himself back up, though once he starts talking about the woman who cheated on him, all those therapy sessions, all the fears of unpacking, are blocked with another filtered beat that replaces the soulful release with muddy, plodding drums and watery, muffled cries for help in the beat that plug the doubt back into Drake’s relentless shit-talking, with the final change in the beat working against Drake instead of supporting him, almost like how his career has been one long stretch of success in spite of everything that has finally been meaningfully halted and he has to build back up that goodwill. You could say I’m overthinking it – tell Drake that, this album has so many deep cut references to bullshit you won’t know exists unless you’re on r/Drizzy or literally live in Toronto.

As an opener, it’s everything I could have wanted and it’s a shame that he didn’t fully deliver, but the sequencing of the album does benefit from that in part. Once you’ve listened in to what he’s saying there, you get a false sense of relief with the slower, R&B intro to “Dust” that bait-and-switches into two menacing Memphis trap cuts, the second being “Whisper My Name”, an immaculate production that could still chart next week (for round 2) given I doubt “Make Them Cry” will last but it’s a shame I couldn’t include here, just know I think that song is phenomenal. You know what wasn’t as immediate?

#2 – “Janice STFU” – Drake

Produced by b4u among others

This was a grower as when this first played in the livestream, I figured it was the first dud, the first song that made basic, surface-level changes to the existing Drake formula without significantly shifting his perspective into the one he takes on the rest of the album, ending up a weaker, stodgier cut that – when combining the pitch-shifted moaning about women of the hook with him trying to appear tough on the verses, which are peppered with a sample from The Sopranos and random shots at Kendrick and JAY-Z (for some reason) – seemed like a troll. Swedish singer Lykke Li, who also recently released an album, thought Rick Nowels’ text about Drake wishing to sample her biggest hit “I Follow Rivers” on his newest record, was also a troll, but no, it’s right here, the chorus melody is lifted straight from Lykke’s 2011 indie pop track and this is what makes it much more purposeful to me.

Firstly, “I Follow Rivers” surprisingly never actually charted on the UK Singles Chart, which is crazy, but the song’s content is what matters here – Lykke LI said it was about desire as a natural force that pulls the submissive, almost voiceless narrator into situations (“Be my only, be the water where I’m wading”, “I follow you, deep-sea baby […] dark-doom honey”). Here, Drake turns that desire into a resurrection, with the mindless following into this girl’s arms – where he wants her to teach his immature self new things about life or, perhaps more probably, sex (“I'm so green, you gotta teach me, baby”), as well as impress her with his new car that has comfortable, heated seats (playing again with the hot-and-cold theme of the “ICEMAN” persona) and, if 40 can’t lend an ear anymore, vent to her about his issues with his record label and how he wants to no longer be under their control. Oh, and of course, blow him “like some green tea”. It’s implied and sometimes outright stated in “I Follow Rivers” that the desire is found in a person, even when wrapped in metaphors of nature, but Drake takes no time to mention that this is about a specific person (the first word of the song is “Emiliana”… despite it being named after Janice). There is nothing more Drake to me than flipping the hook of a classic song that has a universal feeling to make it about a side-piece who texts him occasionally for the mutually beneficial transaction of giving him a blowjob and letting hem vent about his label and rap beefs. Instead of the journey of following the rivers being what makes him feel alive, it’s the very ephemeral end goal that, after it’s reached, is met with a plunge back into the demons haunting his everyday that she was supposed to relieve in the first place. It’s a harsh and gross cycle, so the song sounding as gross as it does is perfect.

There’s an incessant “go-go-go” vocal loop under the pads that peeks behind Drake’s compressed croon on the hook and acts as his hypeman for the less structured verses, and he cribs very obviously from Yeat with how manipulated his vocals are over the rage synths and buzzing bass with loud-ass snares, unnecessary sound effects, verses that tear apart the song’s foundation with flow-switching tangents and a litany of layered, Auto-Tuned, whispery ad-libs that pile up into the dead space left by the verses though, importantly, not all of it, and the bareness of the second verse especially singles out the isolation he wants to make us believe he feels in the rap games. He’s done Yeat impressions before but did not understand why they worked, instead just thinking he could replicate the youthful energy without the quirks (Yeatails, if you will), but now, he’s paid full attention without losing the Drakeness of it all, with brag lines like “They say that karma could take an eternity, yours is droppin' the same night as me” maintaining his dominance as a stone-solid sales beast in spite of, or because of, his deficiencies as a rapping presence, which he has no reason to prove on this track so… he just doesn’t! The flows are catchy but basically equivalent to a fly that won’t leave you the fuck alone, with fast-paced, high-pitched Auto-Tune raps that would be called “relentless” for the constant stream of disses if it weren’t for how it’s set up as disaffected rambles on an R&B cut. See what I mean by calculated?

If he’s going to continue to fight with the shadows of the beef, he’s going to be disconnected further from reality, leading to him saying some flagrantly offensive shit about how white people only listen to conscious rap because of their white guilt and that the artists gain fulfilment from feeling like they’re educating white people and gaining their approval without being themselves, which is… I don’t even know where to start on how wrong that is, and that he has to be so deluded and anti-intellectual to believe that this is why sociopolitical music is worth hearing or this is who it serves. He drops this absolute plonker in a series of lines about how rappers such as Kendrick don’t give back to their communities, evoking the scene in New Jack City with Thanksgiving turkeys supplied in the hood to help a drug lord’s public image to imply that Kendrick’s charity is purely to soften the public image of someone with skeletons, when Drake – he does it for REAL. What “it” is… well, it’s not charity. Instead of listing what he does to help his community, he continues to rap about how the money grows on trees, he bought his friends several luxury cars, he runs the streets and that he goes to Paris because his girl texted him “oui-oui-oui-oui”. Instead of wanting to appear like the good guy pulling the rug from under a fake moral high ground, he’s going to embrace a “nonchalant” villainy that does not care about any of that shit, only taking shots at those who do at least pretend to so he can emphasise that his life of jaded hedonism is “for reallllllll”, as he droningly croons repeatedly in the track’s final moments.

“These hoes know how I pop it for real” – as long as the “hoes” believe it, Drake can believe it too, and those vulnerable moments where his on-and-off calls him up for some sexual and emotional comfort, they don’t reflect the “realllll” Drake, the mafia-boss-money Drake, the ICEMAN, he doesn’t even repeat the chorus after that rambling second verse. Once again, it’s a song full of cope, even if that cope has colourful production, stupidly catchy interpolated melodies and some silly moments I can’t help but love – my favourite is the “(back) back-up-up-up” ad-lib in the first verse – it’s still endless cope from a confused man who has no idea who he is and refuses to accept his multitudes with any grace or consistency. And it makes for a great, drugged-out revenge fantasy. Maybe not a convincing diss response but the song’s called “Janice STFU” so he calculatedly (and realistically) leaves his most ridiculous thoughts to the unassuming, private pop-trap cut for the girls and the live shows. By this point in the album, he’s battling ghosts more than the label. Then he goes “ICEMAN turnt” like a Goddamn Pokémon on the next song, but given what charted, not that I’m reviewing them in order anyway, we can skip a few tracks to my absolute favourite on the album…

#3 – “National Treasures” – Drake

Produced by Boi-1da, OZ, London Cyr, Nico Baran, Patron, Ben 10k, Ryan Bakalarczyk and Wraith9 among others

Now, apart from the songs already covered, I do like the Quavo-backed “Shabang”, the hilariously disrespectful and petty “Burning Bridges”, the shit-eating grin of the Mac Dre parody “2 Hard 4 the Radio” and even the hazy, strip club contemplation of Kodak Black pastiche “Little Birdie”, but my ultimate favourite track from ICEMAN is absolutely “National Treasures” which, on paper, should not make sense. Firstly, this song was actually released prior to ICEMAN as part of a publicised leak that may or may not have been on purpose, so it’s not really either a new track and was released in unfinished form featuring some Canadian dude Pressa, who ended up being omitted, despite the fact the song is about Canada. Secondly, the song is about Canada, and specifically how despite all the rumours (and some facts) surrounding Drake’s reputation, Toronto, and the nation of Canada as a whole, will always respect him as one of the most successful Canadians, a “national treasure” if you will, which in the UK is a term we mostly seem to reserve for elderly legends of broadcasting like David Attenborough, not rappers in mid-life crisis, but I digress. Thirdly, he spends half the song taking shots at basketball players, as if they’re ever going to respond or even have the capacity to care about a rapper being upset with them, especially not someone like LeBron. I’m predisposed to not care for this song at all – pissy moaning about people I don’t know from a guy demanding respect thanks to his reputation in a place I’m not from, over a beat I heard in a snippet already. The execution of this, however, is top-notch, and let’s start with the production.

Drake’s flow the entire song is monotone so the production really needs to develop around him and, as you’d expect with this album, we do get a beat switch, but like with “Make Them Cry”, there’s a familiarity to the sounds, being given new contexts by the time that has passed since the Drake formula was perfected. Look at the confirmed production credits – you have three generations of Drake producers there, essentially, with Boi-1da, OZ and London Cyr lending a hand alongside new faces like the smooth, atmospheric producer Nico Baran and the hard-hitting EsDeeKid collaborator Wraith9. You see these clashing ideas of what a Drake beat should sound like congregate into a massive-sounding production that starts by placing heavy trap drums over a vintage chop with decoloured strings that strain over measures of cold, Memphis-inspired snares and subtle skittering inflections of hi-hats that don’t go full-on manic like a recent Southside beat for Playboi Carti or Future but grant brief, itchy flutters over the tunnelling beat until a watery pad absorbs the beat for a bridge that drops us – not seamlessly but hinting towards a shift – into a completely different instrumental with less menacing energy.

Instead, the song is going for something much bouncier, because the other part of being a national treasure other than hard-earned respect is an easy ride into luxurious fun and endless leisure. For as convinced as Drake seems to be of his woes, when he runs back to the 6ix with them, it’s not like he’s struggling, and there are various moments in the ICEMAN visual livestream where you see Drake at skating rinks, strip clubs, or even on top the CN Tower cheesing and doing bullshit, with the most memorable example being “Burning Bridges”, wherein in a secret room in a Toronto restaurant, Drake hangs around drunkenly with his friends and OVO collaborators, dragging them all on screen, including when he references them in the song, to lip-sync the lyrics. Amidst all the delusion, the “ICEMAN” is protected by a constant group of yes-men that end up prolonging his inability to thaw by not being honest with them and having his realisations delayed to when he sees material losses. In the “National Treasure” section, Drake is surrounded by tough guys in what looks like the backrooms with dark lighting, representing OVO members and affiliates that back him at home… for the first beat. The second sees him doing goofy “Hotline Bling” dances and lip-syncs to memetic lyrics all on his own in a square aspect ratio where the monochrome colour shifts represent both playing into the “ICEMAN”/”nice man” memes and a reference to the video for his last big pop hit, “NOKIA”.

We get a straight comparison there between the Drake he wants to be, the “ICEMAN”, and well, the nice man, the Drake we like to hear, the Drake with the melodies, and the production reflects that, bringing back the kind of liquid vocal loops you’d hear on an earlier Drake record but glitching them awkwardly (because parts of his image “died” as he reflects on across the album) and embracing the static of an EQ’d sample by having the thick, textured bass bounce along the sample chop’s built-in call-and-response. Still, there isn’t a release for all of Drake’s verse, constantly teased by Wraith9’s reoccurring “okay” tag and seemingly random synth jams interrupting Drake’s wordplay, as well as a moment where pads sprinkle the loop in classic 2012 melancholy Drakeness, until the very end of the track, where we can finally pop the cork on the champagne bottle for this wonky, lackadaisical beat’s last, anti-climactic push, the warbling loop now spraying off the groove with little polish and a freedom that Drake rarely gets to feel the entire album. It is one of the best instrumental progressions on any Drake track for me, even if it is straightforward, because it mirrors the dichotomy of Drake’s public image that he struggles to reach in his private life and makes it sound massive, outweighing the personal baggage that bogs Drake down the entire album for one of its briefest yet freeing passages. Now, let’s take a look at what Drake himself is saying on the track.

Lyrically, the first half is dedicated to dissing basketball players, mostly DeMar DeRozan, a California native who played for the Toronto Raptors, a team beloved by and maintaining some degree of relationship with Drake, who mentions “planning [their] Mexico trip in the spring”, indicating the two’s close relationship whilst dissing him in the same line as when a basketball player underperforms in the playoffs, fans joke that the losing team get sent to Cancun, and that same dismissive energy is littered in the wordplay here, calling DeRozan “a part of the team” that was easily replaceable, called in from the West Coast to honour Drake and Toronto by helping getting the Raptors a win but disposed of in place of yet another Californian once he wasn’t useful anymore, incorporating Toronto slang and a callback to an EP Drake released to celebrate the Raptors’ success without DeRozan.

When DeRozan comes back to California, Drake taunts him with how, firstly, he apparently lives there now too and they don’t ever come face-to-face and secondly, he utilises the repeated phrase “back in the day”. Again, I’ll say that dissing basketball players is silly and a waste of time to do on record, but the thieving pettiness of dangling national respect over someone who has lost that is part of what made Kendrick’s West Coast-repping bars from “euphoria” and “Not Like Us” go over so well, as it creates an in-group that can speak for the artist in absence and construct an image of people gathering to shun someone from that in-group, specifically Drake’s guys in the 6ix in this case, some of whom he name-drops and reassures that they’ll back him forever, no matter what, because they back him  now, during the most tumultuous period of his career. I’m not going to say I know anything about basketball or Toronto street politics but this is a damn cold verse and ending it with “Don’t stick around in the 6ix”, also a warning for his foes to not stay too long because of people who will apparently slide for Drake, opens up the track to its shift into a looser beat, as Drake moves on from attacking into a nonchalant defence where he irons out the kind of person who he will keep around him.

Once Drake’s “opps” are not “in the 6ix” (i.e. Kendrick doing his sold-out shows as part of his tour in the city then quickly moving on, allegedly backed by police security, or DeRozan being traded out of the Raptors), we can move onto the fizzier, colourful second beat that inspires Drake to write such profound lines as “I would probably need a YouTube search just for me to do a laundry load”. His goofier lines are delivered with a croaky self-seriousness that leans into a recent whisper flow Drake prefers to do on fun tracks, making the lines sound like drunken thoughts clumsily slapped onto a track with no second thought other than all the guys around him (also drunk) laughing their ass off when he first came up with it. In other words, it’s the in-group laughing and chuckling, appearing not to care about how they come off, when what they’re trying to codify are the people around them not questioning them whatsoever – “gotta be around ICE[MAN] on the same shit like we monotone” – so why care about how you come off when you’re drawing the lines between you and the rest of the world?

For as cold and insular Drake comes off in the first half, setting a contrast for the looser ending, the counterpart verse has just as many barriers set up, if not more, by alienating everyone not on the same page, despite the song and its video otherwise embracing the kind of Drake the public might tune into a lot more willingly than the one who “acts tough”. Drake’s nasal “It is what it is” is the most static and forced that phrase has sounded coming out of any rapper and might even be funnier than some of these goofy, clumsily-worded punchlines – “better have a bag with a pipe like they came from a Scottish home”, my personal favourite “Alex Moss tryin’ to bring me back a hundred years from now, he got my body froze” (who else is doing cryogenic bars?) and the line that pre-empts the beat drop about pushing so much ink on signing deals that he feels like a squid. Firstly, maybe sign a cheque for SahBabii while you’re at it, secondly, emphasising that line out of any line to repeat feels like the harshest contrast possible to the looming ghost of “back in the day”, though it would be accurate to say that Drake has stretched his tentacles out to every inch of the 6ix.

Certified yapfest aside, “National Treasures” is one of Drake’s most concise declarations of his own psyche to date, one that tackles personal beefs I shouldn’t care about and wouldn’t without Drake, using a beat switch and corresponding top-tier rapping performances to musically represent the most intriguing and frustrating internal conflicts of self-expression that have been embodied in Drake’s music and career overall for years. I’m not sure if this or “Janice STFU” will be the biggest lasting hit from the album (they debuted right next to each other and I reviewed them in reverse order), but both have got the memes on their side. I would love to write even more about ICEMAN, personally, but I’m not going to entirely destroy the format of the show for a one-off review of the entire album that would take this episode into dissertation lengths, though if you skipped all this because you hate Drake, then this episode will be on the shorter side. Let me know if album reviews that are in-depth and less chart-related like this are something you’d want to see more of, it’s definitely more fun than reviewing Gracie Abrams. Oh, yeah, speaking of…

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Rundown

Drake’s total of 50 top 10s can’t touch the very top, as “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean spends a 12th week at #1 on the UK Singles Chart and as always, we start… uh… continue, our episode with the notable dropouts, those being songs exiting the UK Top 75 (which is what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid farewell to plenty songs prematurely, like “Rock Music” by Charli xcx off of the top 40 debut, “Bring Your Love” by Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter, “Baby Steps” by Olivia Dean, “SHE DID IT AGAIN” by Tyla featuring Zara Larsson and “Potential” by sombr, followed by the not-so-premature “Porch Light” by Noah Kahan (more on him later), “Share the House” by Ewan McVicar, “YUKON” by Justin Bieber and finally, the classic “(When You Gonna) Give it Up to Me” by Sean Paul featuring Keyshia Cole.

As for re-entries, “Nice to Each Other” by Olivia Dean does a three-song-rule switcheroo at #40, “back to friends” by sombr doing the same returning to #70 and “Stargazing” by Myles Smith is back yet again at #74. We only have a few songs already charting that got a boost, as much of the action on the chart was closer to the top, but there are gains for “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield at #46, “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac at #43, “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles at #35 (what do you notice about those songs…?) and the youthful exception, “Boston” by STELLA LEFTY at #27. Our top five of the UK Singles Chart starts with “Dracula” by Tame Impala down to #5 and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” at #4 before the Drake twofer we already discussed – “National Treasures” at #3 and “Janice STFU” at #2 – and of course, “Rein Me In” at the very top. We still have a trio of entries to discuss outside of Drake, so let’s take a quick look there.

New Entries

#50 – “Willing and Able” – Noah Kahan

Produced by Noah Kahan and Aaron Dessner

Well, I’ll keep this one a little shorter than I would otherwise given I’ve already discussed songs from the album the week it impacted the chart though since, I have given full spins to Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide and its reissue, The Last of the Bugs, which I thought was a very solid album. To paraphrase my initial reviewing thoughts, the detached nostalgia of his writing and vocal performance grants Kahan’s on-the-road contemplation and emotional homelessness some real power and ghostly effect. He's torn in two directions about his career’s success and that is driving him into the same black hole that he sings about his friends and family approaching – really, the song “Orbiter” would have been a more fitting title track for me. Alongside the single “Porch of Light”, my favourite tracks were “End of August”, “American Cars”, “Staying Still”, “We Go Way Back”, “A Few of Your Own” and, what do you know, “Willing and Able”. The track’s chorus is about shooting the shit with a family member, as Noah Kahan sings through some of the pluckier acoustics of the album about a highly negative, hyperbolic vision of himself that he fears his family has about him after he separated from them to tour and promote his music (written partly about them, which is a recurring theme on the album), using the more minimal instrumentation to confront his family about what he sees as impossible expectations, with tougher guitars in the chorus and one of Kahan’s best, most pointed vocal performances across the record. I would hazard a guess that due to the mention of the “childhood lie” (the perception of life their parents raised them in within rural Vermont) that both Kahan and the person this is addressed to left, this is directed towards a sibling who has a competitive relationship with Kahan, especially as he sings about sharing drinks with them and “throwing a rock around” which, given some of Kahan’s rural imagery, could be embodying either (or both) the two at a lakeside throwing a pebble across the water or, say, throwing a catching a ball in the yard, a very American family image, to represent their relationship being marred by a constant back-and-forth. The string swell that comes in is pretty cheesy, very PG movie heartstrings moment of him, but it works and for someone whose closest family relationship is with a sister, there’s something about the song’s jagged, to-and-fro portrayal of the distant relationship that resonates with me personally. Great song.

#21 – “Bangaranga” – DARA

Produced by Monoir

No, not related to Skrillex, as far as I know. This is possibly the least Eurovision-related Eurovision week in REVIEWING THE CHARTS history as despite the grand final of the European song contest taking place last Saturday (the 16th), hype was a little muted, partly because of controversies surrounding Israel’s participation and the subsequent boycott and recalling of entrants from several countries. Even amidst it all, we still lost, and our entry hasn’t even cracked my list of new arrivals. Winning the competition, for the first time ever, and after a years-long absence from Eurovision, was Bulgaria, represented by singer Darina Yotova (or just DARA), who’d previously appeared on the Bulgarian edition of The X Factor. Winning both the jury and public votes, DARA snabbed 516 points, despite earlier considering dropping out of the competition due to negative comments. Inspired by the Bulgarian practice of kukeri (a ritual that warns off evil spirits through elaborate costumes), the song is mostly in English apart from the Patois title which represents the riot and disorder of the practice, though since it supposedly warns off evil spirits, the chaos has been adopted as a sort of self-empowerment theme, complete with a needlessly cinematic intro, classic Eurovision nonsense lyrics and a stuttering techno groove that ends up having all its momentum sucked out of it by a switch into what I assume is traditional Bulgarian instrumentation over a rote reggaeton beat, which then speeds up against DARA’s rhythmic breaths and the song just basically loses its fucking mind, though not in a particularly interesting way like doing anything super striking or experimental, just repeating the same ideas with little change and little care for any kind of structure that is satisfying as a listener. Part of me is surprised that it won given the lack of a strong hook but another part of me isn’t surprised that in 2026, the most popular entrant had the attention span of TikTok brainrot, and I’ll admit that the erratic nature of the song does lead to some cool moments in the performance. As a song, personally, it just sounds like throwing shit at the wall to me.

#17 – “Hit the Wall” – Gracie Abrams

Produced by Gracie Abrams and Aaron Dessner

Singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams is back with the lead single to July’s Daughter from Hell, which will follow The Secret of Us, an album that produced the UK #1 hit “That’s So True”. #17 isn’t #1 but it’s a sizeable debut considering the business at the top and it could grow with the album release – for this show’s purpose, do I enjoy it? Well, I’ve been mostly unimpressed by the songwriting deficiencies of Ms. Abrams before, especially when in the folk-pop lane, but the darker, flaming promotional material, her upcoming acting debut in an A24 film, it’s silly to say but the edge of it all does intrigue me a little more, though she is still working the familiar collaborator Aaron Dessner. The first single, “Hit the Wall”, immediately delivers on a series of egregious writing clichés, prefacing them all with “I’m a…”, which is just a terrible way to start a song, but at least there is something to how she plays with a few of them – “I’m afraid that my fortress is a glass box” – isn’t just throwing a stone from a glass house, it’s building up a self-esteem that can be so easily shattered but also presented. Glass boxes are used as safety against shoplifters and also connote high-quality items that need to be protected, like a jewelry store which will have rows of glass boxes all full of luxurious necklaces and such, so the idea of having a glass fortress links into Abrams being a performer who, when on tour, has to build up the courage to deliver on her public image in front of thousands on a regular basis, with millions scrutinising her daily anyway through social media, which will not do wonders for her mental health, the real focus of the song, which is mostly about her exhaustion and burnout (hence hitting the wall) and feeling that in her instability, she closes off people who, with best intentions, want to try and solve those problems (though, of course, Gracie sees herself as the problem needing and unable to be stopped). The blunt, uninspired lyrics read pretty badly on paper, to be honest, especially the first verse with “Felt good for a day but that stopped” and “I thought we'd get married but I guess not”, but the diaristic style of writing isn’t terrible across the rest of the song and it is at least refreshing to hear her using a more electronic, alt-pop sound thanks to some minimal pads from Dessner and stray inflections of strings in the left ear. It fits her breathy voice, even if it doesn’t help coat some of the plainer, partly groanworthy lyrical moments that are delivery very sincerely and, in the bridge, in a compressed half-belt that just sounds awkward against a bed of plastic synth mush. I think I’m just not a Gracie Abrams fan, but this is not awful, it reminds me of Lorde’s last album in places but without lyrics as specifically relatable or a satisfying structure or striking, unusual sonic ideas. So, basically, if she hit a wall.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to incest

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “RUNWAY” by Lady Gaga and Doechii from The Devil Wears Prada 2’s soundtrack, “Risk it All” by Bruno Mars, “House Tour” by Sabrina Carpenter and “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan.

Our final notable dropout is a three-song-rule switcheroo for “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” by Michael Jackson, caused by an ongoing re-entry phenomenon. Yes, now for yet another Michael Jackson re-entry thanks to the biopic which I covered two weeks ago now and caused a resurgence for his classic catalogue. “Human Nature”, returning to the UK Singles Chart this week at the incredibly high spot of #6, started as a song by Steve Porcaro who developed it with fellow members of his band Toto during Thriller – though not intended for MJ, once the late and legendary Quincy Jones heard a demo, the song was repurposed and made it on the album proper – thank God it did! It’s one of MJ’s greatest songs, in my top personal favourites, and also one of his most extensively sampled, especially treasured among R&B and hip-hop artists of the 90s. Though Michael doesn’t even have writing credits, Porcaro’s pristine keyboard line, MJ’s infectious vocal riffing that forms gorgeous, practically wordless hooks, it’s prime for remixing and interpolation, and as a result, has become one of those songs where the sampling of it becomes a web of samples in itself, with a plentiful batch of reinterpretations (maybe Miles Davis was onto something when he suggested it should be a standard) so let’s have yet another round of MJ chart history trivia, all scoured through the Official Charts Company database.

“Human Nature” was the fifth top 10 hit from Thriller Stateside, but here in the UK the song was never released as a single during the original success of the album. Why not? Well, who knows? It was released nearly everywhere else and charted in plenty of territories for a late-album, R&B-oriented single, including in Europe, and it was ultimately the B-side for his #2 hit “Leave Me Alone” though, obviously, it wasn’t a double A-side or promoted single there, it was an album era afterwards, so this isn’t really its peak. Regardless, it is still a re-entry, the song peaked at a relatively miniscule #62 in 2009 following the King of Pop’s passing. Cascada’s “Evacuate the Dancefloor” was #1. Resultingly, until this week, the song had been outcharted by its deviations. Two of the most iconic samples of “Human Nature” come in the 90s. First, beatmaker Large Professor flipped the track for Nas’ “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” from the generation-defining Illmatic. This was Nas’ UK chart debut, peaking at #64. That song is a classic in itself and much like “Human Nature”, was a bit of a slow burn that gained prestige through showing up as an influence for later artists. MJ collaborator Teddy Riley’s clean remix of SWV’s “Right Here”, however, was a little more immediate. The Brian Alexander Morgan-penned R&B song by the girl group was already fine but Riley’s “Human Nature Remix” was the magical missing touch, even if he might not even have actually produced it. A young Pharrell pops up on the remix, which propelled a middling US R&B hit to an international smash. “Right Here” peaked at #3 in the UK the week that Culture Beat’s “Mr. Vain” (also a personal favourite of mine) was #1. Soon, SWV’s remix became a trademark sample too, being sampled by, well, SWV themselves in another remix of “Anything” (#30, 1994) and then by Mary J. Blige (in a remix of “My Love”, #29 in 1994) Tamar Braxton, Madonna (in “Don’t Stop”, not her unrelated song also titled “Human Nature”) and Chris Brown, whose “She Ain’t You” samples both the original MJ song and SWV’s sample. It peaked at #53 in 2011.

After SWV, DJ Jason Nevins lifted “Human Nature” for a top 10 hit of his own, the Holly James-fronted “I’m in Heaven”, which peaked at #9 in 2003 (“Breathe” by Blu Cantrell featuring Sean Paul was #1 that week). MJ impersonator Michael Trapson’s New Orleans bounce remix, to the dismay of everyone, never charted. “Human Nature” has otherwise been implemented by a litany of artists, mostly in R&B and hip-hop, like Usher, Drake, Big Sean, 2Pac, LL COOL J, Justin Timberlake, YNW Melly, Burna Boy – it’s a ludicrous list. Him too. LL COOL J used it in his album cut remix of Ne-Yo’s UK #1 “So Sick” (weird thing for that to really exist in the first place). The track was covered by Boyz II Men, Liam Payne, the aforementioned Miles Davis and yes, the Glee cast. However, to my knowledge, the original MJ version is the only full recording of “Human Nature” – so not including samples – that has charted in the UK and now, well higher than its original peak, which is a little criminal and not too smooth about it either. Just bad. I’m glad he beat it.

We also have “Share the House” by Ewan McVicar back at #74 but as for notable gains for songs already on the chart, we see boosts for “NOBLE” by F3miii at #57, “Die with a Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars at #46, “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles at #40 (more on him later), “The One that Got Away” by Katy Perry at #30 because I guess we’re doing this now, “I Want You Back” by The Jackson 5 at #27, “The Visitor” and “Material Lover”  by SIENNA SPIRO at #33 and #23 respectively, “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd at #21, “Go” by The Chemical Brothers up all the way to #7 which is an unexpected but very welcome surprise to see it doing so well.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with even more MJ, with “Beat It” up to #5, followed by "drop dead” by Olivia Rodrigo at #4, “Billie Jean” by MJ at #3, “Dracula” by Tame Impala at #2 and of course, once again, “Rein Me In” at #1. Let’s cut straight to the new songs.

New Entries

#65 – “Baby” – Prospa and Murda Beatz

Produced by Prospa, Murda Beatz, Cubeatz, Felix Leone and Gini

You know, I just didn’t really expect to be talking about Murda Beatz first thing. Anyway, this is the follow-up to DJ duo Prospa’s big chart breakout “Free Your Mind” with Cloonee, which I am glad has become a hit because it is a great throwback house tune. So what does Prospa end up cooking with Canadian producer Murda Beatz? Murda is mostly known for trap tunes (you may even recognise him from being inexplicably credited as a feature on 6ix9ine’s “FEFE”… what great choice of collaborators) though he’s dabbled in house and pop before, particularly with Ariana Grande on “motive”, so it’s not that surprising to see him pop up in an EDM context. Bringing Cubeatz and Felix Leone on with him, “Baby” relies on a set of straightforward female vocal loops – some of which are lead vocals but the most notable being a ghostly “ooh” that really drives the song alongside that pumping bass and factorial drum pattern. The stop of the haunting vocal before the end of a measure is a little awkward but the song ends up leaning into this a little by introducing more seeming non-sequiturs like a male “Uh!” grunt, quiet scratches of industrial fills, further flips of the sample creating some indecipherable sounds I can only describe as the stretched-out moan of a weary NPC’s dialogue. Structurally, there is a lot relying on the main drop which has a Murda Beatz signature producer tag added (honestly off-putting), clanking up a lacking mix with more nonsense instead of an effective counter-melody like the synth that also appears in the post-drop refrain. Some attempts at making the song feel grander than it is, like the evil church organs and pre-drop synth haze, ultimately take me out of it a little when I know the result of the drop, which is slightly disappointing, but not crazy in either direction so I just hold in hope for a more impactful track that probably only exists if you give the track to a remixer for two hours or so. There doesn’t seem to be an official remix yet, I really wouldn’t mind to hear one.

#58 – “Dance No More” – Harry Styles

Produced by Kid Harpoon

Thanks to a new music video, Harry Styles debuts a not-so-new track from his March album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, “Dance No More”, a track towards the end of the track listing that to be completely honest, I did not remember much of as I don’t revisit Styles’ album. Sure, I preferred the sound to his previous, but outside of maybe an “Are You Listening Yet?”, the song structure isn’t as satisfying and the lyrics not as resonant than indietronica and alt-dance I can find elsewhere, so whilst I do like “Dance No More”, it’s definitely not one I’m hearing regularly. I will be short here since I’ve already covered my overall thoughts on the album, which “Dance No More” slots in quite nicely with its main conceit of DJs not dancing to their sets anymore and wanting to perform a coolness and a preparedness for the audience to dance to instead of engaging themselves into their own fun, which is pretty sad. Styles talked to Zane Lowe about the release and freedom he felt was granted by the dancefloor and it is interesting to think of how being in control of the people experiencing those freeing, euphoric moments actually limits the DJ quite a bit, especially when their finances rely on it (“keep your customer satisfied and live your life”). He doesn’t go too deep into it – none of the album does – but I like the bassline and Harry’s scatting vocal that provides some really needed charisma and liveliness to his overall presentation, which otherwise relies on some stiff deliveries, only okay falsettos and crowd call-and-responses that feel a little muted under the groove in the mix, much like the whole album which never lets itself burst in the way its lyrics hint towards. Trust me, I do actually like this album, it’s just that its contradictions and sheepish restraint is kind of written into much of its emotional throughlines. Nice little jam, I’m really not sure if it has a strong enough hook to last beyond a fan favourite moment late into the album’s life cycle but we’ll see, I’ve been wrong about that before.

#55 – “Satisfy” – Calvin Harris and Jazzy

Produced by Calvin Harris

Calvin has a new one, this time with Irish singer Jazzy who you may remember from “Giving Me”, her collaboration with Sonny Fodera or, if you remember way back, Belters Only. Yeah, God knows why they never lasted. This new cut is pretty dull and is very out-the-gate in just how limited it is, which is a damn shame because I do think Calvin Harris cares a lot more about sound design than the average DJ and there are promising, vintage elements to it that are given a fresh coat of paint like the typical house pianos twirling into a garage house track and having an accompanying string line, but with some punchy sci-fi sound effects accentuating transitions and harder drums on occasion to fill in some rhythmic space before the verse. Said verse has these blobs of blue, deflated 90s synth I really like, and shaking up into the gnarlier, panned staccato synth melody is cool for keeping the song from being entirely predictable. Unfortunately, a lot of these elements just don’t make a satisfying song when added together for me. There are a lot of rigid structures, much of which is quite percussive and stabby, including Jazzy’s own vocal, slightly drier vocals that lack in much melody or vocal riffing at all, not leaning into full-on roboticism but just coming off as grey and detached. Structurally, the song is practically on autopilot to make semi-satisfying drops and doesn’t leave much of an impression outside of mildly cool sounds that prevent what could have been quite breezy and carefree. Just sounds like the two phoned it in and when the song is already a calmer summertime house cut, there is an unavoidable artificiality to how that nonchalance is reached that pulls the song into falling flat. I can see Calvin Harris fans liking this as just more in the same, but I typically want to hear more from him, even if the experiment doesn’t land. Laurels are being thoroughly and comfortably rested on here.

#36 – “Rock Music” – Charli xcx

Produced by A.G. Cook and Finn Keane

Charli dabbled in rock music in her earlier years during the mid-2010s, making a full pop-punk album with Sucker and surprisingly enough, for people who haven’t been paying attention to the crossover of hyperpop with indie rock in the 2020s, A.G. Cook has also made a decent amount of pop rock fusions with his electronic style in the early part of this decade. Of course, as much as this is a rock song (it's really closer to new rave than anything any newer), it’s more so about rock music and the feeling of banging your head, having that rockstar energy of crowd surfing into the audience, hoping for the best, and losing some hope in the dancefloor as a medium to make people move. This song could basically be the theme song for the shallow and self-indulgent (not derogatory) The Moment film that starred Charli in a mockumentary style that parodied her own BRAT album rollout, with the exaggerated characters trying to preserve control over not just an industry project but a cultural phenomenon that quickly spiralled out of hand because it relies on the instable popstar at the centre: Charli, who is never going to do exactly what she is told. This seems like an extension and continued hyperbole of that image, especially since it’s barely a fucking song, really. It has got verses and choruses, but they melt into each other and delve into a mess of glitched, stuttered vocals that isn’t far from the choppy, “sure, throw it in” lead melody and the basic guitars that – in my opinion – should be even more bitcrushed. It’s not hexd enough, damn it. The song is about rejecting structure and wanting to feel the adrenaline of hurting yourself through risk, so the punkish brevity of it all can’t not be overlooked but isn’t a deficiency either. It’s not exactly moving me to think this sound has potential for Charli – if it did, I think I’d be missing the point of the song, framing itself to exist purely out of rejection to her most recent style she adopted. When knowing Charli’s overall audience is not just the general pop scene, though, it is a little disappointing this coats itself in reaction and irony when a full-send in the style of a 100 gecs or underscores could very well work with Charli, though I’m not sure what else she would bring to that table based on this snippet. Wait, what was that about incest?

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to sex, misogyny and the apocalypse

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “WAGWAN” by Central Cee, “Ready, Steady, Go!” by Harry Styles, “Share the House” by Ewan McVicar, “E85” by Don Toliver, “Eenie Meenie” by Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber, “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac and “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims, though who knows, a couple of these could be back next week.

As for our returns, we have a lot of nonsense to get through here – more than our actual new entries, which is ridiculous and feel free to skip to the new songs if you don’t want to take an awkward trip down memory lane. I can’t find that many concrete reasons for why these songs have had viral resurgences but “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield is back at #42 (it most recently charted in July of last year, so no chart history or trivia there), right below Katy Perry’s “The One that Got Away”, which recently got a director’s cut of its music video narrated by Stevie Nicks but that’s not even why it’s back, seemingly. It’s just gone viral on streaming. It spends its 30th week on the chart after previously peaking at #18 back in 2012 with a chart run that started the year prior. Coldplay’s “Paradise” was #1 that week and I’m sort of surprised it didn’t peak higher. There are a few notable covers of The One that Came Back but none of them charted to my knowledge or scouring of the Official Charts Company’s database. Speaking of said database scrolling, a lot of that had to be done with our next re-entry.

The Jackson 5’s classic debut single “I Want You Back” is yet another one of the tracks propelled back onto the chart by the Michael biopic which I covered last week and actually gave MJ’s greatest hits compilation this week’s #1 on the albums chart. Written and produced by Motown’s songwriting team The Corporation, “I Want You Back” first charted in 1970 – it hit #1 Stateside but was blocked at #2 by Lee Marvin’s “Wand’rin’ Star” over in the UK. Raise your hands which song you remember more. Like many of MJ’s hits, the song returned in its original form in 2007 and 2009, but has been re-recorded, covered, sampled, interpolated and remixed many a time. I may be missing something – I’m a flawed researcher and OCC has a flawed website (unless they want to hire me) – but from what I can gather, it was re-released and charted as “I Want You Back ‘88” in, well, 1988, peaking at #8 whilst “Theme from S-Express” by S’Express was #1 (yes, S’Express is styled two different ways).

“I Want You Back” has been sampled pretty extensively in hip-hop, including two classic tracks that have been sampled, remixed, etc. about as much as the original: “Jump” by rap’s first child stars Kris Kross (which, like the original, topped the US Hot 100 and peaked at #2 in 1992 behind K.W.S.’s double A-side of “Please Don’t Go” / “Game Boy”) and “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” by JAY-Z, produced by a younger Ye, both of which would eventually collaborate with MJ. Though briefly returning in 2004, the song peaked at #21 in the UK whilst Afroman’s “Because I Got High” was #1. The same year, we see an extension of child-friendly rap as Master P’s kid Lil Romeo sampled it on “My Baby” which spent one week on the chart at #67. Hell, if we’re going to go to literal babies, a popular remix of “Take Me There” by Blackstreet (who were on last week’s rundown of MJ samples too) and Mýa featuring Mase and… Blinky Blink from the Rugrats: The Movie soundtrack sampled the song. In 1998, “Take Me There” peaked at #7 and considering the UK CD had the “Want U Back Mix” which, now that the songs are finally on streaming after decades of unavailability, has more streams than the original by a decent margin, I would count this as a full-on sample. The song charted into 1999 and peaked whilst Cher’s “Believe” was #1.

A couple years back, R&B singers Total interpolated “I Want You Back” on The Notorious B.I.G.’s “One More Chance”, which peaked at #34 whilst Take That’s forgettable “Never Forget” was at #1. In 1998, English girl group Cleopatra made a fairly successful cover of “I Want You Back” that peaked at #4 whilst Boyzone’s “No Matter What” was #1. It’s a solid cover, and the last song I’ll mention here was Eamon’s 2004 #1 that famously did not want me back. Positivity wins out though as we don’t really remember Eamon and “I Want You Back” is back at #33 this week. No diss to Eamon, though, we wouldn’t have DJ Chipman’s generational “Beam Ahhh” without him.

We still have another strange return, this one being a brand new top 40 peak for “Go” by The Chemical Brothers featuring uncredited vocals from Q-Tip. It was a great comeback single then for the Chemical Brothers and it still holds up today, 11 years after release, which was also when they last charted – and with this very song. Basically, the song popped back up like it was 2015 again, which was when it peaked at #46 (“Black Magic” by Little Mix was #1 that week). The song appears at #22 this week thanks to appearing during a “key moment” in the Netflix film Apex which I did not know existed. Additionally, “Jane!” by The Long Faces is back at #75 – it’d only been off the chart for a week anyway – and “RUNWAY” by Lady Gaga and Doechii is back at #59 thanks to the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and its soundtrack (more on those later).

As for our notable gains for songs already on the chart, we see boosts for “NOBLE” by F3miii at #63 (not complaining, check out the guy’s other stuff if you haven’t), “Boston” by STELLA LEFTY at #38, “Self Aware” by Temper City at #36 (both okay songs that still wring out a dire greyness on the top 40), “Free Your Mind” by Prospa and Cloonee at #23 and Michael Jackson’s returns from last week, “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” at #15 and “Beat It” at #10. Finally, Zara Larsson’s remix album Midnight Sun: Girls Trip (helping the standard edition re-enter at #36 on the albums chart) propels the title track “Midnight Sun”, granted a middling remix with PinkPantheress, up to #7.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “FEVER DREAM” by Alex Warren (more on him later) at #5, followed by Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” back up to #4, “drop dead” by Olivia Rodrigo down to #3, “Dracula” by Tame Impala up to #2 and of course, Sam and Olivia at the top.

New Entries

#67 – “Material Lover” – SIENNA SPIRO

Produced by Omer Fedi

My friend Luca says that he enjoyed The Devil Wears Prada 2. Like most films which chart soundtrack singles, I have not yet seen it and probably won’t, but give me £10 and I’ll go see it and tell you what I think. This isn’t a movie review show unless you pay up. Jokes aside, instead of the new songs from Gaga on the soundtrack, which is really just a compilation of older songs preceded with an EP’s worth of tracks (it’s at #14 on the soundtracks chart, if that chart means anything to anyone). “Material Lover” is similar to the song I initially misspelled it as in this document, Madonna’s “Material Girl” (more on her later), with Ms. SPIRO craving a connection with materialism that some may deem superficial in a kind of innocuous, nonchalant way that frames it as an escapist experience to buy something cute and treasure it. Given the sincerity of the pop-soul instrumentation, going for a similarly vintage feel to say, Olivia Dean or RAYE, but with a more compressed, less developed set of dusty drums, distant horns and organs that honestly just sound grey to me. I don’t know if it’s how little charm SPIRO’s vocals have, still taking this kind of content as seriously as her ballads with each strained attempt at a fun vocal riff sounding forced and not nearly as relaxed as the song’s content demands. Maybe it’s just that there’s a lot of pop-soul stuff nowadays that takes this sound into directions that make for actually great songs and this ends up being a little basic in comparison, not even setting up a bridge for a final chorus and just meandering onto a natural end, with a climax that seems a little forced as well, like the song couldn’t go anywhere but the end and they didn’t want to write anything else. To me, this is just a typically half-formed soundtrack single, really not seeing much in this, though with hits by Olivia Dean, Laufey and The Marías on the soundtrack, at least it probably fits in with the rest.

#29 – “Bring Your Love” – Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter

Produced by Madonna and Stuart Price

A Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter collaboration makes perfect sense. If she were to ever call upon the help of new artists with her later work – this time a sequel to Confessions on a Dancefloor and not a full reinvention as she otherwise tends to – Sabrina is a fitting choice, both in giving her a contrasting voice musically and aligning with the pair’s respective image. You can draw a pretty straight line from the “Like a Prayer” video to the one for “Feather”, for example. The song was first teased at Sabrina’s performance in Coachella, which saw Madonna appear as a surprise guest and perform this song, “Like a Prayer” and “Vogue” (yet still, somehow, no one was dancing, apparently). So how’s the studio version?

Reuniting with Stuart Price, who handled the first Confessions, Madonna brings a level of mystique and boundary-pushing melodrama to dance-pop that it has been missing for a long time, albeit coasting on a legacy of controversy rather than creating any new ones. Pitchfork’s Harry Tafoya wrote that elements of it seemed “vague and nonsensical” – I don’t think that’s true at all as most of it is pretty straightforwardly about Madonna as a public figure and her remaining in the industry in spite of – and perhaps because of – her history of getting under people’s skin and transforming the expectations for a woman, especially an older woman, and their place in music business, hinting that you can’t try to silence her expression because she’s been there for so long that she both knows the skeletons in certain closets and knows that she has enough power and reach to start opening them up. So, in a weirdly threatening way of bringing the title in, bring your love because bringing judgement, hate, unjust expectations… she’s fucking Madonna, it won’t end well for you. My favourite lyrics probably come in the second verse where Madonna revisits the shit she would get from puritans wherein their fears and insecurities about their sexuality ended up being thrown as criticisms against her for freely expressing and monetising it (as if that religious fundamentalism isn’t an industry in itself, but I digress), and that one shouldn’t rely on either of the two’s moral compress or discretion because whilst they definitely have them, they’re willing to throw them away for the shock factor and I think both ladies have proven as such.

Musically, the song relies on filling the dancefloor with theatrics, including a sample of Detroit group Inner City’s 1988 house classic “Good Life” which is a fascinating track in this context considering its pure, optimistic escapism (now that song may be vague, check out that second verse). Madonna’s song is, in some way, about revenge and the utopian stylings of diva house being evoked is both very Madonna – especially from the early 90s more so than Confessions – and very interesting, as there is no enemy to speak of in the original, let alone one as real as misogyny or one that requires the cross-generational team-up of sexy popstars to threaten or defeat. Whilst we’re on “Good Life”, the song peaked at #4 in 1989, whilst “Especially for You” by Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan was #1, with re-releases and remixes credited to Inner City coming later like 1999’s “Good Life (Buena Vida)” (#10 peak whilst another absolute classic in dance music, “You Don’t Know Me” by Armand Van Helden was #1) and 2001’s “Good Love” (how creative, peaked at #81). The immediately-recognisable “Good Life” was sampled to death pretty much immediately, in Nexus 21’s “(Still) Life Keeps Moving” featuring Donna Black (#91) from 1989, Cyclone’s “A Place Called Bliss” (#92) from 1990 and many more that didn’t chart. In more recent times, it’s been sampled by the likes of Gossip, Hercules and Love Affair, Britney Spears, Rihanna, will.i.am, Beyoncé, Scooter, M-22 and even Maxsta’s charting hit “Wanna Go” featuring Little Nikki, which peaked at #43 in 2013 whilst OneRepublic were “Counting Stars” at #1. “Good Life”, like “I Want You Back”, has been pretty heavily sampled so I could have very well missed a charting single that lifted from the track.

If you go back to “Good Life” today, it sounds closer to Super Mario 64 than anything, yet it came from early innovations from much less privileged Detroit musicians – that wish for escapism is here but it’s obfuscated by the fact that experience in the industry, in Hollywood, seeing it for what it is, you may not be able to ignore the demons but it’s the knowledge of the shadiness that increases the duo’s power here and makes Madonna’s signature “Vogue” whisper just that slightly out of place going into the compressed, fruity house tune, that has energy injected into it by the youthful chuckle of a Sabrina Carpenter who, however stacked with harmonies, ends up nearly as phased as Madonna’s watery, Auto-Tuned take that feels barely present – their unstable chemistry and clash of vocal mixing makes for an awkward trade-off in the second verse and pre-chorus that has some cuts, punch-ins, overdubs, that all feel a little uncanny, much like the pitch-shifted stuttering, staged spoken word and almost PC Music-esque vocal manipulation in the bridge and outro sections. “Bring your love” would be a punchy phrase if it wasn’t sung in a breezy, de-emphasised manner that tries and fails to find a space between a hopeful call-out and nonchalant dismissal. It’s a super awkward song to me, doesn’t quite work, doesn’t seem to relive any specific era in its entirety, more just amalgamating parts of her legacy into a soup that consists of so many textures that it almost sounds like none at all. As a Madonna fan, it’s cautiously intriguing, I’ll say that.

#20 – “FINE PLACE TO DIE” – Alex Warren

Produced by Adam Yaron

In anticipation of the single’s new release, Alex Warren Airdropped the full song to Joe Jonas, or something. Hey, sometimes, the level of intrigue the music brings you is pretty evenly-matched with its marketing. Apparently, there is some degree of cross-promotion on TikTok with characters from the book Fourth Wing which “Ordinary” and now this song has been heavily associated with but to me it all sounds like rumour and speculation desperately searching for something more interesting to give an already fine song some meat to its bones.

“FINE PLACE TO DIE” is very similar to “Ordinary”, with strings, stomping percussion and gospel choirs giving it an apocalyptic feel that fits Warren’s devoted declaration of happily dancing with his partner, happily submitting himself to her, through the last moments they have on Earth, taking an almost masochistic tone with the second verse and the borderline self-immolation. We don’t really know what the stakes are apart from a man on the television who has apparently appeared to warn him of tensions rising and given you could probably make the comparison between that and a family member of his partner talking to him on FaceTime, saying she has some problems, you could make the case that this entire apocalyptic drama is the most over-the-top analogy for a breakup song ever, wherein Warren still holds an unhealthy obsession with said partner and seeing the writing on the wall, wants to save his pride in some kind of mutually assured destruction. Hell, it would be almost camp if not for Warren’s nasal murmur, especially tapping flatly on the second verse, but much of the chorus is spent in a belt that fits the song’s stakes much more – when he’s more subdued, it’s the domestic scenes that should be a respite from the “apocalypse” but end up serving as reminders of what’s to come. The choir vocals are pretty suppressed under the drums and Warren in the mix but when they peek out, especially in the bridge where they sound particularly bizarre, it’s kind of a fuzzy, caged cry for help that couldn’t matter to Warren, whose eyes are never touching the windows if they leave his partner at all. It’s not exactly a touching song for me, it takes itself too far and a little too seriously, but I do think this is pretty good, likely my favourite from him so far. Maybe do more miserable, vaguely Christian-rock adult contemporary, it worked for me with both this and “Ordinary”. Someone get a three-person’d God to batter this man’s heart stat so he doesn’t make any more Myles Smith fluff.

Conclusion

content warning: language, brief references to sex, drugs, pants being pooped

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “Steady” by Bella Kay, “Drive Safe” by Myles Smith and Niall Horan, “Elizabeth Taylor” by Taylor Swift, “party 4 u” by Charli xcx after the Record Store Day return last week and, thanks to three-song-rule shenanigans, “Baby” by Justin Bieber featuring Ludacris, “Nice to Each Other” by Olivia Dean and “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan all dip from the chart. More on them, particularly the latter two, in a bit.

As for our returns, we start with the Antoine Fuqua’s spectacle biopic Michael – bringing to life a sanitised biography of the King of Pop’s early life and career – helping several tracks to return by Michael Jackson, whose performances and music videos have been painstakingly recreated by his nephew Jaafar in the film. Apart from the dedication taken to replicate those, a brilliant-on-arrival soundtrack and some great acting from Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson, the film might not be anything too special or anything you don’t already know about Michael Jackson, but it’s fun as shit to experience in the cinema and I honestly recommend it. It’s no doubt going to be better than however they handle the second half of his life, which… could be a bit of a mess, we’ll have to see in a couple years’ time. Yeah, it’s strange, I actually saw a movie that impacted the chart for once. Regardless, it’s time to get into some chart history for one of the biggest artists ever, thanks to a biopic that has already set its own records. If you’re not interested in all that trivia and memory lane, just skip to the new arrivals.

All three of our returning tracks are produced by the late and legendary Quincy Jones. The first is 1979’s “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” from the disco classic Off the Wall, known for its hilarious and adorable chroma-key music video, iconic spoken intro and lyrics that seem suggestive but are really about following your dreams. I won’t go too deep into the background history of any of these songs because they’re not new entries but when it comes to chart history… listen, the Official Charts Company has its database for reasons, and one of them has to be. MJ’s original recording for “Don’t Stop…” peaked at #3 in 1979, whilst The Buggles’ equally iconic “Video Killed the Rock Star” was #1 and after leaving the chart the same year, it would return for a few weeks in 2006 and 2009 thanks to a video single and Michael’s passing, respectively. Like all of MJ’s hits, a variety of artists have sampled, remixed, covered or otherwise reinterpreted “Don’t Stop…” since 1979, though only one of which, to my knowledge, has charted. In 2004, Mr.ON and the Jungle Brothers flipped it for “Breathe Don’t Stop” which peaked at #21 whilst “Take Me to the Clouds Above” by LMC vs. U2 was at #1. There may be more hidden in the OCC database I haven’t been able to find.

The next two tracks are from the 1982 classic Thriller, with the first being “Beat It” – about walking away from a fight despite how badly you want to prove you’re tough and macho – that is known in part for its award-winning music video featuring opposing gangs and its epic guitar solo from Eddie van Halen himself. “Beat It” also peaked at #3 whilst a new wave classic was #1, this time behind “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie in 1983. Like “Don’t Stop…”, the original “Beat It” would return in 2006 and 2009 for the same reasons. Perhaps the best-known cover of “Beat It” is by Illinois pop-punkers Fall Out Boy with guitarist John Mayer, whose version had a decently long chart run of its own in 2008 and peaked at #21 for two consecutive weeks (whilst Mint Royale’s “Singin’ in the Rain” and the much more notable “Viva la Vida” by Coldplay were topping the chart). Another iconic cover is comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Eat It” parody which peaked at #36 in 1984 whilst Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” sat at #1. Finally, in 2023, Drake told us – yes, us – to “beat it” since he was one hit away from Michael on “First Person Shooter”, which peaked at #4. No, that’s not an interpolation, just needed to get Drake in the episode somehow. It always ends up happening.

“Billie Jean” was Michael’s second solo UK #1 though it only spent a week there in 1983, stalling out “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler which would soon overthrow it. MJ introduced his signature glove, jacket and moonwalk during his televised performance of the track and it resulted in his most-celebrated hit, and his most-streamed at that with over two billion on Spotify. The song spent considerably more time in the top 100 than the other two, as outside of the 2006 and 2009 re-entries, it appeared in 2008 and also as recently as this year – in fact, it spent a few weeks dwelling in the bottom of the chart in 2025 and returned to the top 100 last week at #93. Again, various renditions have charted in the UK across the years. It’s notably been the focus of many medleys, mashups and remixes, including the Italian act Club House pairing it with Steely Dan’s “Do it Again” in 1983 (yes, already) for six weeks on the chart and an #11 peak (Paul Young’s “Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s Home)” was #1 at the time). Also in ’83 was US singer Lydia Murdock, who continued the tradition of answer songs by taking the perspective of Billie Jean in “Superstar”, which peaked at #14 whilst “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club was #1. In 1984, Bobby Orlando lifted the drums from “Billie Jean” (without credit) for his original mix of the Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls” which would hit #1 in re-recorded and reissued form later on – similarly, an official remix exists of Blackstreet’s #9 hit “No Diggity” from 1996 that is literally just a cover of “Billie Jean”. That same year, a German punk band The Bates covered it for a #67 peak. The song must have been popular that year as the late Aaliyah appears to have used an uncredited sample in her cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give it Up” featuring Slick Rick that peaked at #37 whilst The Prodigy’s “Breathe” was at #1. Linx mashed MJ’s “Billie Jean” against Eric B. & Rakim in his “Billie Jean (Got Soul)” bootleg peaking at #82 in 1997. In 2000, Ian Brown of the Stone Roses covered it as the B-side of “Dolphins Were Monkeys” (#5), the first step to a hypothetical full EP of MJ covers (that never came out). 2002 saw two remixes emerge – “Billie Jean 2002” by Jakkos World (#92) and simply “Billie Jean” by the Sound Bluntz, which peaked at #32 not long after (when Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” featuring Redman was #1). In 2008, the late and legendary rock vocalist Chris Cornell covered it for a #77 peak.

In 2008, both Thriller tracks were included in a megamix that peaked at #96. This week, they sit at #22 and #12 respectively with “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” not far behind at #23. We also have a few other less interesting re-entries, namely Justin Bieber’s “YUKON” back again at #27 as well as “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims at #73.

Then we have our notable gains, a quieter bunch including (sigh) “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers at #52, “Boston” by STELLA LEFTY at #48, “Self Aware” by Temper City at #45 and finally, Noah Kahan, who lands three hits in the top 20 thanks to his new album. We’ll, of course, talk more about that when we get to it, but “The Great Divide” returns to the chart at #17 and “Porch Light” speeds up to #20.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “FEVER DREAM” by Alex Warren up to #5, “Dracula” by Tame Impala at #4, “Beauty and a Beat” by Justin Bieber and someone else still at #3, followed by of course, both Olivias in the top two. We actually have more from Dean this week too, among a few others, so let’s get to them now.

New Entries

#71 – “NOBLE” – F3miii

Produced by F3miii

Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell is F3mii? Pronounced “Femi” according to his Instagram, he’s a Dublin singer who released this track in December of last year – he’s been putting out singles since at least 2020. Slowly growing streams since, “NOBLE” has found itself the subject of TikTok virality thanks to his Frank Ocean-influenced sound and… “steamy fancams” involving characters from HBO’s teen drama Euphoria. Damn it, I could have got the Drake mention here instead. As for “NOBLE”, you can hear the Frank Ocean or even Childish Gambino comparisons immediately with his lighter voice over that wash of beeping synth that covers the basic, punchy R&B groove and singing that honestly mixes Frank with a bit of The-Dream, or at least that’s how it sounds to me in the kind of melodies he goes for over a very sweet, compressed instrumental F3miii produced himself. Lyrically, F3miii paints the picture of this flashy girl and the thought process behind when the two meet eyes – “I see her glasses comment” is a great little line about subtle body language – that ends up in a beautiful, intimate moment we don’t actually get that much detail about, which I love. “She has composure” kind of hints towards something sexual, but the lines about control and running in circles in the same chorus give the impression of dancefloor ecstasy. F3miii can confidently take her to paradise, obsessed with this woman and proving to her he’s the one in a way that feels very traditional R&B, calling her a blessing from above in the second verse. The second pre-chorus is gorgeous enough but when it leans into the drumless chorus with that fuzzy synth bass front and centre, commanding the rhythm through a wonky heart pulse that coalesces soon but not soon enough into the full wave of bubbly synth goodness that is the complete instrumental… it’s not really a surprise I love this. I’m not even a big Frank Ocean fan, I just think this hazy, blocked-out slab of electro-R&B is super vivid and really deserves to be a hit. Check this guy out if you haven’t, his recent singles are pretty eclectic, he has some great indie and dance-leaning stuff if this isn't your cup of tea.

#68 – “I Can’t Love You Anymore” – Ella Langley and Morgan Wallen

Produced by Ella Langley, Austin Goodloe and Ben West

I was a little disappointed when I finally got to hear Ella Langley’s album Dandelion, which – much like Kehlani’s recent self-titled release actually – was so dwindling in its throwbacks that it lost a little personality and aped tried-and-true structures without perfecting the songs or, in most cases, saucing them up with something interesting or at least a narrative you wouldn’t hear from their respective genres. The problem was less evident in Langley’s album though that’s likely due to my lesser familiarity with the history of country pop than R&B so I can imagine someone’s a little bit more of an expert either finding it frustrating or loving the throwback. What was equally disappointing was seeing her pop out a song with Morgan Wallen to tack on some streams onto the end of the track listing, though I actually did like this song, even if it seems a little egregiously cobbled together at points. Truth be told, I was listening to the album and this track came on right after the outro (notably with no Miranda Lambert to be found in the credits unlike most of everything else), as a pretty unexpected upbeat country-pop jam. Then I got jump-scared by the Joey Moi honk machine. Jokes aside, the washed-out acoustics and flat drums from Aaron Sterling fit this kind of breakup song where the reminiscing quickly teeters back into an obsession that neither can kick, with plenty of smoky imagery about cigarettes, ghosts, kisses leaving a burn, pictures covered in dust. The ashiness of some of the lyrics contributes to the blurred, dreamlike framing of Langley and Mr. Wallen (whose voice sticks out only to meekly slime back into Langley’s at the end of some lines… it’s actually a great coincidence for thematics). They’re both fighting their own memories of each other and despite the clean production (and a bridge that’s a little lacking in development – feels like they just needed a last-minute section they could both sing), I think it culminates in a song that gets across that frustrating, repetitive process of getting over someone. It might even be on par with “Speaking Terms” as my favourite on the album.

#31 – “Baby Steps” – Olivia Dean

Produced by Bastian Langebæk and Zach Nahome

We get yet another sleeper hit from Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving charting – this time, it’s fan favourite “Baby Steps” which really should have appeared sooner than now and, yeah, I’ll keep it short since this album’s continued success grants us bonus Dean hits every few months but I think it’s a great song. Though hidden towards the end of the track listing, the song has still accumulated over 200 million streams and has just now appeared on the chart, with the album having been released back in September last year. Like much of the album, “Baby Steps” is a gentler song with the post-breakup angle being taken pretty slowly and within as much reason as possible – all of the empty space left by the breakup can be difficult, but she’s slowly moving forward, being more independent, though given the infantilisation (“baby steps”) and some of the more helpless lines against the piano and soul guitar that rise out of a filter in the intro, you can still hear the fear of being alone. Those hesitant drums that only start stepping towards the mix in the second half of the first verse really define the song’s tone of awkward balance to me, with great little flairs like Olivia’s high-register aside riff in the second verse (a kind of frustrated yelp that is supposed to be reassuring, we all know it isn’t) and the shifting of the bongos in the left ear all contributing to a sort of clumsy, stuttering track that still takes time in the bridge to acknowledge the finality of the breakup, taking an odd sort of respite in that at least she can’t “fall back” if she’s always making steps forward and tripping herself up along the way. I wouldn’t mind seeing this become yet another hit for her, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the steam has been lost a tad with how many months it’s been out. Not that has stopped any other Olivia Dean song…

#12 – “Doors” – Noah Kahan

Produced by Noah Kahan and Gabe Simon

I have yet to listen to Noah Kahan’s latest album The Great Divide, which just debuted at #1 on the UK albums chart, his second to do so after Stick Season. I really want to listen but it is, if including the expanded release, literally feature-length at an hour and 36 minutes. I simply have not made it a priority to sit down and take it all in yet. I’m not a machine. Hell, even the machines are unable to do some of what I do. Ask ChatGPT for a list of charting “Billie Jean” remixes and see if they include fucking Jakkos World. Anyway, “Doors” was first teased around a month ago so fans have been anticipating this one, alongside the rest of the album which he (perhaps jokingly, yet to do my own determination on this) said could suck and just be completely underwhelming. Well, is that the case for “Doors” or this the song that’ll finally win him the Kids Choice Award he’s pooping in peoples’ pants for? Check his Twitter, that’s not just an insane metaphor.

“Doors” introduces itself as almost a classic outlaw song, with a backstory of Kahan being born into a literal ice storm in Vermont and that forecasting (no pun intended) his acting out as a kid, with his dad’s line of “God forbid [he] hurt someone” ringing out as he continues to get into a different kind of trouble when he gets older: hurting his loved ones through being an unreliable and paranoid person (including having night terrors, jumping at the rattling of keys – the kind of domestic fears that make you wonder how his dad’s concern related to other traumas). That chorus uses the “doors” analogy to give this person in his life options to leave it behind and hopefully never look back… but for some reason beyond Kahan, they’re still interested in reaching into his life out of a closeness or a fascination. Even a bridge that hopes for his partner to moves on reaches a final chorus that flips the flighty lyrics to one of complete finality: “I just live here, babe, but you’re the one”. With the added “it gets harder to see me the closer you try to look”, it could even imply that the difficulty is part of the appeal. The same doors to leave may be doors she wants to open up out of curiosity, they may be doors she can’t open up because of Kahan’s mental barriers or she won’t like what she says. It’s a pretty nuanced conceit to write a song about and I really like the execution here.

Instrumentally, it’s nothing you wouldn’t expect from Kahan’s brand of folk but it’s hardly distracting and I liked the sort of ghostly, detached delivery and multi-tracking he used in the first verse especially. To be more muted and lowkey for a song with this theme was intriguing until the song finally let up into a second-verse belt from Kahan and accompanying strings that doesn’t fully release, feels like it’s still keeping some kind of imaginary barrier between the raw emotion and the listener, I think mostly because of the constant drums. I love how the reverb clings Kahan’s words together meekly into a soup in the chorus and it even has a damn guitar solo, however short and sort of frail it is. I love this as much as “Porch Light” and I really am antsy to hear that album, even with its length, now that several of these singles have gripped me. Great stuff again.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to sex, mental health and double agents

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “RUNWAY” by Lady Gaga and Doechii off of the debut last week, YE’s BULLY tracks “FATHER” featuring Travis Scott and “ALL THE LOVE” featuring Ye-I and André Troutman, “I Know You’re Hurting.” by RAYE, “back to friends” by sombr, “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims and finally, “YUKON” by Justin Bieber – in exchange for some of his “classics”.

On August 15th of last year, Sean Kingston was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on charges connected to wire fraud, less than a month after his mother was also sentenced on fraud charges. In a February lawsuit, Kingston was alleged to have falsely claimed to have an active working relationship with Justin Bieber despite the fact that they had not collaborated on a song – to the plaintiff’s knowledge – since “Eenie Meenie” in 2010. This week, on a completely unrelated note, thanks to remaining buzz surrounding his Coachella performance, the historically bad “Eenie Meanie” – known for many silly lyrics but my personal favourite is “She’s indecisive… she can’t decide” – is back on the UK Singles Chart at #32. It peaked at #9 the same week that “Gettin’ Over It” by David Guetta, Chris Willis and friends was #1 and hadn’t charted since it left in 2010. What had charted since 2010 was the most disliked YouTube video of all time, “Baby” featuring Ludacris (or Chipmunk, if you remember that). Only briefly, though, as it had returned in 2011 and been covered by the Glee cast the same year for a peak of… #67. “Baby” originally peaked at #3 for two non-consecutive weeks in 2010. “Pass Out” by Tinie Tempah was #1 the first week, “Telephone” by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé the second. Two of his already-charting songs are up to the top 10 as well – “DAISIES” at #5 and “Beauty and a Beat” featuring Nicki Minaj all the way up to #3.

Outside of Bieber, “party 4 u” by Charli xcx, originally released in 2020 and peaking at #19 last year, was released on vinyl for Record Store Day, which was caught in this tracking week, helping the song return to #60. “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan also returns to #73 – I’m sure it’ll either gain next week or disappear given his new album. Other notable gains include “WORRY” by LONOWN and riserayss at #69, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #50, “Free Your Mind” by Prospa and Cloonee at #30, “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd at #29 and “Elizabeth Taylor” by Taylor Swift right up to #14.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with the aforementioned “DAISIES” back up to #5, followed by “Dracula” by Tame Impala at #4, “Beauty and a Beat” at #3, “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean down to #2 and of course, “Drop Dead” at the very top. Before we get to her, however, let’s look through our other new tracks.

New Entries

#70 – “First Light” – Lana Del Rey

Produced by David Arnold, Lana Del Rey and Dean Reid

After the strange but enticing “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter”, Lana has already found herself distracted again with some kind of non-album side project. This time, at least it’s not beefing with Ethel Cain on Instagram and it’s a James Bond video game starring Lenny Kravitz. I suppose there are now Bond themes for the video game tie-in as well as the films, though this is not that unusual. Joss Stone and Mýa sung themes for Bond games before, Lana herself even submitted one for the 2015 film that was eventually soundtracked by Sam Smith instead. “First Light” is, as tradition, named after the Bond… game, 007 First Light, though that tradition largely only applied to film songs. Written with David Arnold, “First Light” is from the perspective of an admirer of the double agent – could be a Bond girl, could be the audience (or player) – who is in awe of Bond’s dangerous life, with the big wham line being “Dying just to know whether you’ll play your life like a game”, followed by a post-chorus asking “Will you play?”. Okay, it sounds terribly corny on paper, how does it sound?

Well, it’s terribly difficult for me to care about a Bond theme (Billie Eilish and Shirley Bassey are exceptions), but this seems perfectly on brand at least with the dramatic orchestral strings, dark guitar and a wispy delivery from Lana that doesn’t really lend to a heavier yelp during the chorus, just has more feathery layers added which makes it sound better in isolation, I’m sure, but not against horns and drums I can only describe as final boss music (more on that later). She really could have delivered more there to make this feel as epic as Arnold was going for, especially since it’s already a little cheesy lyrically and has all these sickly strings and vocal harmonies in the bridge. She’s not above making something big and dumb and she nearly gets there – for as much as the mix will allow – in the vocal riffing of the final chorus, but the best part of the final hook is more the percussive “Stop”, etc. ad-libs Lana makes on the drum hits that somewhat play into the lyrics. Comparing this to the similar-in-concept “No Time to Die”, it would have been great for them to let Lana work with a close collaborator to work the song to her strengths and bring Bond to her rather than the other way around. As is, it’s pretty close to being a dud, if it’s not there already, to be honest.

#68 – “Stay Love” – Lewis Capaldi

Produced by The Monsters & Strangerz and Michael Pollack

After first performing it on his Madison Square Garden show on the 16th, big Lewis has surprise-released yet another piano ballad “Stay Love”, which had previously been the centre of some speculation surrounding a “mystery vinyl” that had been distributed to record stores and featured the song with pitched-down vocals to anonymise Mr. Capaldi. Now the guessing game is over as it’s been retroactively added to his Survive EP. The song, like everything Capaldi has released from this EP, is fine. The vocal melodies feel particularly basic over the typical pianos but dipping into his falsetto is nice on the pre-chorus and the lyrics about hoping his partner stays with him throughout the roughest moments of his depression are well-written enough, though some depth about just how difficult it can be to keep up with that would have been great to include, at least better than lyrics like how trying to make it on your own is a “fighter’s fight” and Capaldi’s the “loving type”, which is just awkward. The song doesn’t really develop beyond the short bridge, it’s pretty unremarkable, but it’s sincere and ultimately pretty inoffensive to me. I can see why people would really connect to it though. I just wish Lewis Capaldi had something to say, something to say a bit more often.

#65 – “Sugar Talking” – Sabrina Carpenter

Produced by John Ryan and Sabrina Carpenter

We’re still getting new old tracks pop up from Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend, as the album’s fourth track debuts months after its release in August last year. Hell, this one’s already certified Silver by the BPI and for good reason. This was one of my favourite tracks from the album. That’s mostly thanks to the main keyboard line from John Ryan that runs through the bedding of cooing and acoustics into the first chorus, which is pretty immediate in getting you to understand this song’s conceit: this guy Sabrina’s with does a whole lot of talking and texting about their love when she mostly wants to get physical. You can definitely slot this in the straightforward, raunchy songs across the record about how Sabrina has little time nor space for male behaviour but all the time to seduce them, but the second verse and chorus (after the first verse implies it) give a lot more insight to why none of it means anything to her. This is far from the first time that he’s tried to use words and not actions to get back with her but can’t actually commit, with each of these “paragraphs” – that you may have thought were expressions of love – actually being just apologies. “You filled my whole apartment with flowers that die” is a pretty on-the-nose but effective nonetheless analogy for the temporary nature of overwhelming love and I love how despite the new information we get from the song’s second half, the ending chorus line “Get your sorry ass to mine” doesn’t change – she still wants to make it work and actually being there with her and for her is an essential part of it, kind of but not quite flipping the sexual tones you may assume from the song and its placing in the track listing. It’s one of the more nuanced, less comical songs from that album and also one of its prettiest with the guitar solo, I’m glad to see it here.

#40 – “SHE DID IT AGAIN” – Tyla featuring Zara Larsson

Produced by Ari PenSmith, Mocha Bands, Believve and Sammy Soso

With her new album A*POP on the way and set for release in July, Tyla has released a new single with one of the current it-girls in pop music (notably also one of 2016’s, it’s been interesting to see that career progression), Zara Larsson. With a video emulating Shakira’s sultry collabs “Beautiful Liar” and “Can’t Remember to Forget You”, the song has some tough classics to live up to. As much as I think you may need more than one album proving you’re “that bitch” before all of your songs are about it, that does seems to be Tyla’s brand right now and it fits fine into the public image of both popstars so as long as it can work into the song, I’d give someone free pass to act like the best thing in the world. Hell, even if I don’t like your music, any mega-famous popstar is worth their salt to act like that. Except Drake.

Anyway, I don’t like this song at all and it’s mostly from some baffling decisions. Why the pads are shrinking sirens, I don’t know. Why there’s a chipmunk vocal in the intro and post-chorus, I don’t understand – I usually like chipmunk vocals, especially samples, but in a minimal, rhythmic Afrobeats dance track like this, it’s just annoying, especially with the sing-songy cadence. Why the verse melody is quick-paced and slippery, now, that I get and it works for Tyla as this is far from outside her wheelhouse, with a kind of delivery and cadence like that perfect for amapiano. Larsson, on the other hand, sounds in her verse like she’s desperately trying to keep up with some kind of inaudible shadow vocal, with her entire performance sounding less like a collab with chemistry and more just filling in open verse. There are also a bunch of rubbery bass hits that are probably good in a song with more frenetic energy but with these static, factorial drums and excuse for a groove, it just shoves itself in. Like “CHANEL”, it goes nowhere so immediately that the rest of the short enough song is a complete drag. It did make me chuckle how she compares herself and her sex life to things that it isn’t twice. Boys, Tyla is not the UK soul legends Sade or the football federation FIFA. For what it’s worth, there’s little smoothly operating about this song. I’m worried for that album.

#31 – “Potential” – sombr

Produced by sombr and Tony Berg

Not long after “Homewrecker”, sombr has released another single alongside a music video he thinks is his “best one yet”. It’s a shame with all these music videos that Billboard in the US isn’t even counting YouTube video streams nowadays, though artists have been releasing them on Apple and other platforms too. Anyways, I’ve not been impressed by pretty much any song this guy has released but, to be cheesy, does sombr live up to his “Potential” on this track? Well, no, because it’s more of the same. Working with the same smoky disco-rock territory he’s been in for the past few singles, this sounds pretty familiar and sombr isn’t delivering much here that he hasn’t before, with slightly condescending lyrics about a relationship having “potential” and getting obsessed with that post-breakup. He’s not worried about her and is sure she’ll found someone else soon, even though the first verse can be basically summed up in the old adage “you’re insecure, don’t know what for”. The second verse is a little all over the place in what he wants to go for there – he’s thankful in part for the breakup because the songs he wrote about it helped him succeed (what exactly she did, other than be self-conscious, to deserve this pissiness isn’t covered in the song itself) but also he questions what the cost was because she was the last person he could trust, despite him not giving her much reason to trust in him.

I kind of like this creepy character who womanises and gets super in his feelings about it afterwards – sombr can kind of pull it off with his voice nowadays – but man, you’ll need a stronger hook than this jammy, up-and-down yelp that just sounds weak, especially when he has the gall to bring a vocoder post-chorus. I love vocoders, talkboxes, you name ‘em – Hell, I like when artists dowse themselves in Auto-Tune to sound robotic – but the surrounding song and the hook you’re actually inputting into the effect has to hit before you do the throwback talkbox effect, you can’t just place your already awkward non-hook into it and hope for the best. Roger Troutman you are not. I will admit, I love the bridge! With his belt measured against a vocoder harmony and the guitars, it’s an amazing layering, and it even has the so-stupid-it’s-brilliant lyric “You aren’t the final boss, but you still make me lose”. Hell, it almost sounds like it should have been the chorus, but it never reoccurs. Instead, they pull out the chintzy instrumental stops to coat the chorus in a load of bells and whistles (not literally) that really don’t add anything but extra sound. It’s a shame because… well, it had potential. It’s not driving me mental, though, it’s just a bad song.

#1 – “drop dead” – Olivia Rodrigo

Produced by Daniel Nigro

I wouldn’t have been surprised if O-Rod landed the #1 without the alternate versions but they certainly didn’t hurt her chances even if it’s a bit of a silly tactic to me – K-pop or otherwise, it just looks ridiculous. I mean, look at that “LiviesHQ” playlist promoted on her official Spotify account that spams the song. Marketing aside, I was interested in what O-Rod’s next move was going to be as her work, particularly the singles, tend to be hit-or-miss for me – really, it was mostly misses during GUTS – and thankfully, the lead single for you look pretty sad for a girl so in love coming this June, drew me back in. Of course, our story starts in 1987, when The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” peaked at #29, whilst the Bee Gees’ classic “You Win Again” was #1. Flash forward nearly 40 years later and O-Rod’s ex-boyfriend knows all the words to that song. It’s not a sample but it’s cute to see the name-drop to another single, especially one Olivia has actually performed with Cure frontman Robert Smith at Glastonbury. She even wore a shirt with the line “You know all the words to “Just Like Heaven”” on stage, though Smith apparently graffitied it with “…or do you?”, which is a pretty funny story. Oh, yeah, this isn’t trivia time, sorry.

The mirroring of “Just Like Heaven” is found not just in a cute crossover and name-drop but really the themes of the song, being that Rodrigo writes about an infatuation that has her wishing the date never ends, jokingly paranoid that she had just imagined it all and using pretty punchy, sometimes violent language to describe her aching for this guy, all at a mostly PG level too, which gives it a youthful crush energy that is a nice drift away from her other singles about heartache. It definitely has the same “hyperventilating” energy as “Just Like Heaven” and whilst jangly post-punk may be the best way to depict that feeling thus far, O-Rod gets damn close with those damp 80s synths and elongated lines in the verses that panic into a more staccato delivery once the chorus comes. The sung-spoken second verse begs him to hold her hand and make out whilst also asking him tons of curious questions, one of which about taking the Eurostar to France has the same Anglophile crushing that “so american” had a few years prior. I do wish there was more to the bridge – I think that fuzzier tone and its beautiful pay-off deserve a little more than sticking to what is a bit of a formula for her, but the final chorus is definitely a good trade-off with its gorgeous multi-tracking and final lines waiting to complete, Olivia anxious to make sure it never ends. If there’s more like this on the way from the album, I can’t say I’m likely to have the same middling opinions as I’ve had on O-Rod thus far because this is great and most importantly, I want to see where this narrative goes. This is less “I want to hear the new songs” and more “I want to know the next chapter”, which is a great appeal for a writer like her to have. Brilliant #1 debut.

P.S. Dinosaur Jr. and Katie Melua covered “Just Like Heaven” – the first version from 1989 peaked at #78 whilst Melua’s, releasing alongside “I Cried for You”, peaked at #35 whilst The Pussycat Dolls’ “Stickwithu” was #1. I can’t just leave the already-opened bottle of chart trivia on the counter, it’ll go off.

Conclusion

content warning: language, discussion of family trauma, abusive parenting, dubious business practices and dated Eddie Murphy comedies

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “Body to Body” by BTS, “NO BATIDÃO” by ZXKAI and slxughter, “Be by You” by Luke Combs, “Release the Pressure” by Calvin Harris and Kasabian, “The Great Divide” by Noah Kahan (I assume this’ll be back soon with his album release – right now, it’s below “Stick Season”), “Soda Pop” by the “Saja Boys” (the voices of Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Danny Chung, KEVIN WOO and samUIL Lee) from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, “I Run” by HAVEN. featuring Kaitlin Aragon, “MAYBE.” by SIENNA SPIRO and finally, “Stargazing” by Myles Smith (more on him later).

So, let’s talk about Justin Bieber. At the first Coachella weekend, Bieber spawned a lot of social media attention for a remarkably casual approach to playing his greatest hits. The Biebs scrolled through YouTube for a 20-minute passage of his performance, greeting the Coachella audience with a projection of his laptop as he sung along to his classic hits, early YouTube covers and even some funny videos and memes. For an artist, one of the first artists, whose life and career was documented nearly entirely online – warts and all – celebrating his career this way, by performing a semi-duet with a YouTube video recorded before he’d even hit puberty, I’m sure that was meaningful for his fans, especially as you hear the stark differences in voice and appearance that is all online for everyone to see and under the same name. A lot of frustrations can be raised about Bieber’s “growth” as an artist but that’s not exactly what a career’s evolution is always about. It’s about change so evoking what has and hasn’t stayed the same, having a reflection of the past playing behind the present, who decides through the laptop YouTube scrolling what the future will be… it’s super interesting. You can read what Mike Callander, a lecturer in music industry at a university in Melbourne, had to say about how the performance played with expectations of live shows here. Unfortunately, I can’t find an official upload of the full set.

How this matters for this series is what impacted the charts and we mostly see his hits from last year, “DAISIES” and “YUKON” from the SWAG album, appear in the top 40 at #15 and #26 respectively. “DAISIES” spent a week at #1 in 2025, the week after its debut, whilst “YUKON” peaked at #12 a couple weeks later. Reaching a brand new peak is “Beauty and a Beat” featuring Nicki Minaj from his 2012 album Believe. The song spent 25 weeks on the UK Singles Chart across 2012 and 2013, reaching a peak of #16 in November 2012 the same week Robbie Williams’ “Candy” debuted at #1. The song has grown to become one of his most iconic, having already been a worldwide hit at release, and returns to the chart this week, for the first time since it left, at #11. It’s far from my favourite Bieber song – I prefer his R&B stuff generally and the aching 2012 of it all has really dated EDM tracks from this time… not that a Nicki Minaj verse isn’t enough to do so nowadays – but I get that people have nostalgia for this one and he did perform it during his viral set. I kind of wish it was “Baby”, just to see Ludacris back on the chart.

Elsewhere, Sabrina Carpenter had a little resurge herself as Man’s Best Friends tracks “Nobody’s Son” and “House Party” re-enter the chart. “Nobody’s Son” is back at its peak of #68 whilst “House Party” takes its great music video (that I cannot present any appropriate comment on) to #20, a little shy of the song’s #17 peak on release. If you have a couple million, you can buy that mansion, by the way. If you really happen to like these blog posts and have a couple million, you can buy me that mansion. As for notable gains, we only see boosts for “Self Aware” by Temper City at #51, “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter at #43 and “Free Your Mind” by Prospa and Cloonee at #39 (Hell, yeah, I hope the momentum sticks for that one).

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart is a clunkier bunch this week, nearly all gaining – it starts with “Babydoll” by Dominic Fike at #5 (joy), followed by “Homewrecker” by sombr at #4, “FEVER DREAM” by Alex Warren at #3, “Dracula” by Tame Impala at #2 and of course “Rein Me In” at the top. With no further ado, let’s get into the new songs.

New Entries

#74 – “Worry” – LONOWN and riserayss

Produced by LONOWN and riserayss

Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell are LONOWN and riserayss? LONOWN is definitely not “le known” to me but he’s been active since at least 2017, working to pioneer the supposed “angelcore” genre, something that artists on LONOWN’s ARCADIA label are the creators of. According to their website, of course. Who are ARCADIA? Well, they’re “an international art community dedicated to the creation, promotion and development of progressive electronic music” and their website feels like I’m travelling through the portal that gets me to the Metaverse. An artist under the label, Øneheart, charted before in 2023 but LONOWN isn’t just an artist signed to the label, he’s the founder.

Hailing from Saint Petersburg, Russia, LONOWN works mostly in the ethereal electronic genres of wave and witch house though also the less atmospheric, more minimal electroclash, which is probably what this track from October of last year fits into. Despite how I just described the genres, this song definitely keeps the ethereal nature of wave in mind behind the throbbing synths and basic percussion that has a really satisfying clap – sounds like it peeks through the nightmare of the rest of the mix and then slowly lowers itself into it as more gooey synths float around it, it’s great. Alexey Tokman, or riserayss, as well as Asenssia, both also from Russia, have their vocals pitch-shifted and chopped up and flickered around the mix in a way that reminds me a little of how vaporwave acts treated vocal samples or even how Clams Casino flips Imogen Heap. The louder lead synth is a little much in the distortion department but I like how soon it’s countered and how it stops to give a fragment of vocal time to breathe, only to again consume it, with a clear verse-chorus structure that is a little obfuscated by the distortion and how you can barely make out the vocal. It’s not in Russian either, it’s just a re-sung sample – according to Genius, riserayss handles the bridge but the main loop is Asenssia interpolating a sample flip of Mariah Carey’s 1995 album cut “Underneath the Stars”, which ARCADIA confirmed was a replacement of the original flip after the vocals were changed in March. Presumably, this was done to avoid sample clearance issues after the song got viral, which I also presume came from TikTok, given the existence of an “ultra slowed” version (and a slowed version with more streams than the original!), so I can’t be that surprised something like this is charting at all, but I do like it! It may be worth checking out more from this label if this is what “angelcore” sounds like.

#58 – “My Mess” – Myles Smith

Produced by Peter Fenn and Myles Smith

This is Luton folk-pop singer Myles Smith’s new single, a very personal track about his fractured home life in his youth and how the oppressive way he was raised has led to difficulties in making decisions and maintaining relationships in adulthood, taking the interesting approach to own that trauma as “My Mess” that he needs to sort out, despite being pretty clearly treated abusively and having expectations to deal with shit he did not need to at such a young age. Because of his inability to remove himself from the burden of that trauma, despite the desperate attempts he describes in the second verse, he becomes a little stuck – unable to open up but followed by memories he’d rather keep shut closed in the past. There’s a lot to this song and the framing of it as his problem is the one we probably don’t want to hear but is the most realistic – at some point, shit happens, growing up is hard and the adult life is harder, you have to be your own person, it’s not easy, it is what it is.

Sadly, this song ended up being realised as an acoustic guitar-led ditty with multi-tracked vocals in the chorus (that feels a little clunky, the words don’t hit as much as they should, he kind of just flails into it) and an underdeveloped bridge that does do a great job at making that overwhelming reminder that this is his life and what happened to him can’t be fixed but can’t be dwelled upon feel like it’s inescapable, but also just leads into a nothing outro and doesn’t have that much variance in the vocal delivery of that one line, that mantra, to feel like it means more than it would on paper which… isn’t much, honestly. It’s the shame that the repeated lines feel the most fleeting and lacking when the verses give the kind of detail I find makes a song like this interesting and the framing could give way to much more nuance than this pop song structure allows for. I don’t like the song and it’s not the first time more personal content has been handled… strangely by Myles’ songs, but I don’t think how he deals with the subject matter in his music is going to be 1.) always reflective of how it is in his life and 2.) worth harshly criticising. It seems more important that he got this off of his chest so if he can do what he loves doing and make some new fans (or royalties) off of it, why not? I’m glad he can finally open up – I wonder if the scope of his audience and the knowledge that so many of them have likely gone through similar trials is what permeates the brain fog and allows for this kind of vulnerability.

#57 – “Boston” – STELLA LEFTY

Produced by Joe Reeves

As opposed to STELLA RIGHTY, the Reform candidate for the Rhondda Valley. Jokes aside, Ms. LEFTY has been active since at least 2024 and is now on the Scream 7 soundtrack, which is… maybe worse than being associated with nothing at all, actually. Even worse is to be associated with a billionaire executive, by the by. I found an article about this that I disagree with on most points – “[If] you can sing, you can sing. Cream always rises to the top.” (sure, buddy, the most talented artists always win out, that’s why D-Block Europe have 30 top 40 hits) – but does give you some heartwarming (your mileage may vary) detail on how Stella Lefkofsky (or LEFTY for short) gets emotional when she “sing[s] to her old man” and because of how close they are, she writes and sings about him frequently. All of this, of course, sounds like straight-up paid promo when you realise that the article’s author, Grayson Weir, nearly exclusively writes about sports otherwise. He may have a thing for wording his milquetoast articles in ways that stumble into mocking their subject, like his headline that calls a female basketballer an “Israeli sharpshooter”. Technically the truth but also Jesus, Grayson, think about how that sounds. Also think about how it sounds that a billionaire’s daughter, whose music he promotes to investors on LinkedIn, is one of the fastest rising artists in “country-indie-pop”. Mr. Eric Lefkofsky is the co-founder of Groupon, who were found to be in “widespread breaches” of UK consumer protection laws in 2012, and is currently the CEO of Tempus AI, who want to apply new AI technology into healthcare. Read more about how scrutable Tempus’ leadership and business model is here in a report by Spruce Point. If you don’t want to risk investing in Tempus, hey, how about we invest in Stella?

I can’t believe I’m fucking saying this already but the story of “Boston” actually starts in 2022 with the release of “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan, which had a long rise as a sleeper hit and eventually spent seven weeks at #1 on the UK Singles Chart in early 2024. It is still charting today in its 124th week. See, what should have tipped you off about Stella’s background is that she was able to clear this interpolation – Kahan gets a writing credit here on a decently faceless love song with basic piano and some infusion of country guitar that fits against Stella’s lighter tone that thematically is perfect for that youthful feeling of being so in love that you feel you’re never going to hop off that metaphorical train to Boston. What, did you expect me to say that this was a talentless nepo baby? No, I like the song, she can sing (though nothing here is too crazy thanks to the song’s relaxed tone) and it’s produced – aside from a vocal glitch at the start – like it has some backing behind it. I even think it has some unique framing in that she’s in love but it’s unclear if the partner is – “I like it when you’re nice to me” is an awfully passive way of singing about being in love and being treated well and it gives an almost uneasy sense to this relationship dynamic. I can’t rag on the song too much – firstly because of its quality and secondly because you can be a billionaire’s daughter and completely fail in music even when everything is going for you to even just astro-turf that success. She’s not exactly portraying herself as something she isn’t and it wouldn’t matter if she was because that’s what being a popstar is. As a wise* man once said, “Tearing something down is easy; building it up is hard. Maybe it’s time to stop taking the easy way out.” You know who said that? Eric Lefkofsky.

#54 – “Mr. Know it All” – Teddy Swims

Produced by Julian Bunetta, Ammo and John Ryan

Teddy Swims likes to consider himself the Jack Black of soul music. Well… at least it’s not R&B’s Donell Rawlings. “Mr. Know it All” is his new lead single with a surprisingly lowkey, liquid groove with a great pattering of drums and Gotye-esque counter-melody of strings, all appearing in an intro that treats you to Teddy’s unconfident cooing and a faint, repeated yell of “Woo!”, it’s all much more filtered and intriguing than I would expect from someone who’s mostly done pop-soul throwbacks to this point. The song tells a story of Teddy coming back repeatedly to a relationship that always ends up in some kind of heartbreak but can’t keep himself out of it, even if he predicts it all from a mile away. The vocal treatment (and approach overall) doesn’t allow for the straightforward belt of his I’ve Tried Everything but Therapy material, instead having him murmur a little in the verses under layers of multi-tracking that doesn’t explode that much coming into the chorus. I mean, why should it? What overwhelming emotion can be felt if you know how it feels to have your heart broken, know that it’s coming, know that you’ll come back, know that the cycle will repeat, probably know all the dirty laundry that comes with every rerun of the same old drama? Hell, he even begins to make comical analogies comparing the relationship to pulling dominoes from a coffee can and a tennis ball through the ceiling fan because he sarcastically bets her that she’ll “never end up fallin’ back in [his] hands”, which is just hilarious. I love “I can't act like I don't keep dressin' for the storm then blame the sky” too – with a name like “Mr. Know it All”, I really shouldn’t have been surprised by how lighthearted it is, especially once we get closer into Teddy’s bread and butter with the final chorus’ string swell and plenty of vocal riffs. If I have much of a complaint, it’s that the nasty guitar in the outro should have been there in the bridge! I know it’s a length-optimising 2020s pop song but come on, this is a song that deserves a solo, it would branch the over-the-top sensibilities of the lyrics and build with the cooler suspense of the verses pretty well. As it is, I still really like this. Maybe you should have brought those snappy one-liners to the roast battle though, Teddy. Next time.

#50 – “Be Her” – Ella Langley

Produced by Ella Langley, Ben West and Miranda Lambert

Alabama darling Ella Langley is currently sitting on top of the US charts and doing damn well here in the top 20 with “Choosin’ Texas”, so it was only a matter of time before another single from her newly-released album Dandelion (#7 on the UK albums chart) scraped onto the chart, with this one already having made the top 10 Stateside. Co-written by audio terrorist and prolific country songwriter Hardy, “Be Her” is a song about desperately wanting to be someone else, though that someone else probably isn’t a real woman Langley adores but instead of a better version of herself. An impossibly perfect version of herself Langley longs to reach, the chorus is unusually simple for country tracks, mostly repeating the clever “I just want to be her so bad” / “it hurts so bad” refrain, with the breath of the “H” sound really hitting, it sounds breathless, I love the delivery on this entire song. The lyrics too – “She drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle” is a brilliant straightforward opening line. This woman Langley details isn’t exactly a contradictorily perfect person either, you can have these multitudes (with serious self-controol), and that’s what makes her lack of access to that version of herself hurt so much, that she feels she’s doing something wrong by not being that person. You see the kind of person you want to be all the time when you think about your life or any interaction you have, but you can’t just be that person without sacrificing being the person you already are, and sometimes temptation to smoke or drink, non-commitment to a partner, loss of faith in God and God forbid, a little over-embellishing, is part of that person.

The neo-traditional country sound, with a couple washed-out moments that implement faint chatter and organic sound underneath the wistful guitar, especially that beautiful outro, mostly works like a charm for this theme, aside from the drums from Aksel Coe. I’m sure Coe’s drumming is fine – he did “Choosin’ Texas”, as well as Zach Bryan’s “Something in the Orange” and ROLE MODEL’s “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out” – but it’s mixed like a block on this and is pretty distracting in the verses. I know, nitpick, but it is a pretty essential component of the song that makes it drag a little. It doesn’t drag that much for me, thankfully, mostly due to how the song is written – I really appreciate how what is essentially a second hook is added after the second chorus to develop the song beyond your expectations of its structure, giving it a counter-refrain out of what could just be a one-and-done-bridge that is much slower and a little closer to conventional country music hooks. It fleshes out the track, it’s close to great for me, I really should listen to the rest of that album.

#32 – “RUNWAY” – Lady Gaga and Doechii

Produced by Bruno Mars, Andrew Watt, Cirkut and D’Mile

In the 1996 version of The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy plays respected biochemist Professor Sherman Klump who falls in love with Jada Pinkett Smith, gets roasted by Dave Chappelle and turns to science to “fix” his obesity and give him a renewed sense of confidence. His weight loss formula transforms Klump into the asshole womaniser Buddy Love. In the film’s climax with the best CGI PG-13 body horror and comedic acting 1996 can offer, Klump comes alive within Buddy, and Buddy’s final words before he fully transforms back into his overweight self are: “No matter what, no matter what, you got to strut”. Now, I fucking love The Nutty Professor and I think the false confidence exuded by Buddy turning into a mantra for embracing and accepting who you are is one of its most endearing qualities. It was only a matter of time before someone used that quote in the context of a queer anthem. I just didn’t expect it to be Bruno Mars.

Now, I can’t confirm that the pitch-shifted voice at the start is Bruno but he’s credited with writing, production and backing vocals… and he just seems like the type to remember The Nutty Professor’s self-fight scene. It definitely doesn’t seem like Lady Gaga’s wheelhouse – this is one of the least Lady Gaga songs she’s ever released, with her smoothest moments being when the echo is turned way up and she sounds like the kind of immense diva vocal that would be used in this vintage ballroom house sound, with Bruno’s throwback tendencies exploring yet another scene that he actually effectively modernises here. I’m always pretty impressed by Bruno and D’Mile as perfectionist producers and the vocal production especially is great, from the Bruno-Doechii layering that stacks up for the hook to the reverbed-out Gaga that I mentioned earlier and the stuttering that leads into the bridge-turned-outro. Said outro is really where the production shines as instead of running the chorus back, we get what is practically an instrumental to ride out and show the alien texture of the synths in full detail, as every little shift in the instrumental – like those great little Daft Punk-esque guitar licks – is punched up by the drums.

Lyrically, it’s basically just about being that bitch for lack of a better phrase in semi-cheesy ways that don’t go out there as Doechii could but hit that ironic/iconic dichotomy just the same. I assume they couldn’t stray much from the fashion runway theme though it would have been nice to go super “Vogue” and start making more direct references. Oh, yeah, this is for The Devil Wears Prada 2, a sequel to the 2006 film that I only knew was coming out because I saw the trailer before The Moment. I’ve not seen the original either. I am going to see the Michael Jackson biopic of all things next week though so maybe you’ll get a bonus review about that. I wish I could claim going to the cinema ostensibly for this blog as a “business expense”, but it would mean I have to only ever see biopics, documentaries and whatever movie Bebe Rexha is soundtracking for the rest of my cinema-going life. God forbid they put Hazbin Hotel in cinemas too.

#14 – “Pinky Up” – KATSEYE

Produced by dwilly, “hitman” bang and Frants

I have not been able to keep up with KATSEYE and the drama surrounding them, but I did try for this review. One of the members Manon has left the group or at least gone on hiatus from it starting in February. Sporadically appearing in some photoshoots with them and mentioning that she has negotiated “agreements” with the group and management, it appears that Manon was ultimately excluded from “PINKY UP”, its video and the upcoming EP that features it. Manon was present at Coachella but not with the group, instead with Ice Spice and at Justin Bieber’s afterparty, apparently… which is hilarious, I would do the same. Fuck singing, let me do shots with the Biebs. Especially if I have to perform KATSEYE songs because yeesh. Weirdly for a group whose only character thus far has been “annoying”, there’s a notable difference between the manic and confrontational “Internet Girl” and “Pinky Up”, a plodding stock drum loop behind stuttered vocals and blobs of electropop synth that are prominent enough in the mix but very much just go with the motions, a bit quieter than they should be compared to the rhythm section (especially the heavy bass) and not really giving me much melody to work with, just being there to jerk side to side and keep existing, keep working, stay awake, until you get a group vocal leading into a “drop” that lasts for barely any time before the song ends and can appropriately be described as BLACKPINK’s leftovers. Sounds like this beat may need to take a temporary hiatus.

Conclusion

Rundown

As always, we start this week with our notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This episode, we bid farewell to: “The Sick” by Bella Kay, “Chains of Love” by Charli xcx from the Wuthering Heights album and former #1s “Into the Groove” by Madonna and “Aperture” by Harry Styles, because of the three-song rule shenanigans that lead to possibly the most interesting thing to happen this week.

“Sign of the Times”, Harry Styles’ debut solo single and a former chart-topper from 2017, is our most notable re-entry this week. Back then, it debuted at #1, kicking “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran off the top spot for a week. Thanks to being included in a film called Project Hail Mary – starring Ryan Gosling, otherwise no idea – it’s back at #28 after last charting in 2018. Taylor Swift’s #3-peaking “Elizabeth Taylor” takes its music video boost to return to #58 as well, with other, smaller re-entries including “Soda Pop” by the “Saja Boys” (the voices of Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Danny Chung, KEVIN WOO and samUIL Lee) from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack at #74, “STARGAZING” by Myles Smith at #71 and “I Run” by HAVEN. featuring Kaitlin Aragon already back at… #67 (only appropriate chart position for that song). As for our notable gains, there’s “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims at #66 (more from him… next week), “Stay (if You Wanna Dance)” by Myles Smith at #64, “Steady” by Bella Kay at #63, “Release the Pressure” by Calvin Harris and Kasabian at #62, “Free Your Mind” by Prospa and Cloonee off of the debut at #60, “Everywhere” and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #57 and #47, “Drive Safe” by Myles Smith and Niall Horan at #56, “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan at #52, “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone at #51, “Share the House” by Ewan McVicar at #46, “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd off of the debut straight to the top 40 at just #40, “Talk to You” by ANOTR and 54 Ultra at #29, “I Just Might” by Bruno Mars at #26, “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley at #16, “Ordinary” by Alex Warren at #14 and finally, another top 10 hit for Dominic Fike (not as in “finally!”, as in just literally, finally) as “White Keys” is up to #10. This seems like a lot but it’s really one of those filling-in-the-blanks weeks, I don’t know how much of a shake-up it’ll be long-term.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “FEVER DREAM” by Alex Warren at #5, then “Lush Life” by Zara Larsson at #4, “Dracula” by Tame Impala at #3, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay at #2, then Sam and Olivia at #1, it should all be familiar. Let’s just get to the new songs.

New Entries

#75 – “Be Mine” – James Hype

Produced by James Hype

We only have two new songs this week, they’re both minor cuts in the bottom third of the chart. The first is from James Hype, who generally has a pretty good track record with his tunes, is coming off the decent success of “Waterfalls”, I had some hope for this one. Then I saw the runtime as less than two minutes, and the backstory that it was originally a demo recorded in 2016 with Daecolm. So, in ten years, the song sat on a hard drive and did not expand past two minutes. Regardless, it still had some apparent TikTok hype (I know) behind it so it’s here and it’s a James Hype song for sure. The filtered vocal runs over a flatter, kind of muted synth bass that builds a little before dropping into a surprisingly fuzzy drop that lays the distortion on thicker than expected, overlaying the drums and creating a friction in the rhythm that is interesting, especially when the vocal chop and string stabs come in. Sadly, the song basically copy-pastes from there with some slight rearrangements, though I liked when the fuzzy bass was in the centre of the mix for a change with no drums, I wish there was more tension in the track like that but it just tails off soon after. It sounds less like a rediscovered demo or hidden gem than it does like a song he had made in 2016 and stripped all of the 2016-ness out of it, hastily replacing it with whatever he’s feeling that day and not bothering to mix it coherently. I can’t say it’s terrible but it’s definitely one of the more egregiously thoughtless EDM tunes to chart in the past couple years.

#61 – “Self Aware” – Temper City

Produced by Chen Kordova and Aviv Barenholtz

It’s our highest debut this week and I still have to say it… I’ll bite, who are Temper City? I think a lot of people have that question because the first thing I saw when I searched “Temper City band” was a Reddit post asking if they were AI. For the record, they have severable identifiable members on Instagram and in the music videos, I don’t think anything’s too fishy here in regards to their humanity, it’s just they appear to keep a relatively low profile and have skyrocketed in streams very quickly as of recent. Five million monthly listeners off of a single song that is their only release on Spotify is interesting, though. The song was distributed with Thirty Knots, whose website demonstrates a roster of whonows and… Nicky Youre, if you remember them. A few more recognisable names pop up on the roster of Keel, the management company that is in full association with Thirty Knots. Hell, they have the same website layout, damn near. They’re both out of LA, founded by the same two guys, so who the Hell are Temper City then?

Well, according to this profile, firstly, the song’s about a toxic relationship but we can figure that out for ourselves, and secondly, the band consists of three guys working in LA, who have been apparently behind-the-scenes working for Fuerza Regida, Zeds Dead, Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike and other decently successful artists. Eytan Peled is a US-born Israeli songwriter who had success in his home country, this article claims he was going to work on Noa Kirel’s Eurovision entry in 2023 but the credits don’t seem to add up with that – he did work with her before so maybe his contributions didn’t make the final cut (and less said about that, the better). The other two guys are LA-based Israeli production duo SYNC, consisting of Aviv Barenholtz and Chen Kordova who indeed have been writing and producing, they have around 100+ credits to their name across databases and have apparently been active since 2019 according to Kordova’s Facebook. The three have always worked extensively enough together and seem mostly local or low-profile outside of a few larger names. What matters, I suppose, is that they’re here now and it’s a bog-standard indie pop song with rote, slightly dustier drums, a distorted semi-whiny vocalist, a bassline that… is honestly pretty flat, typically this kind of song at least gets that right but this one’s not too interesting. The chorus has a certain Eurovision flair to its melody – I’m not just saying that because they’ve worked with Eurovision acts, it’s a lot softer and basic than the choruses on indie rock songs can be – but otherwise, you really couldn’t pick this out of a line-up of sombr songs. As much as I’d like to uncover this is some kind of secret industry plant conspiracy, the song may have just caught on immediately because it’s catchy as sin. The chorus is super basic but it’s already taking its home in my head as an earworm and honestly I’d prefer Peled’s dazed-out harmonies to sombr’s voice any day so… yeah, it’s kind of lazy, kind of weird circumstances, but it’s not bad.

Conclusion

content warning: language, brief discussion of death, artificial intelligence, depression and the Holocaust

Rundown

As always, we start our episode with the notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK Top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid farewell to: “FYA” by BTS and “Nightingale Lane.” by RAYE thanks to three-song-rule shenanigans (more on both later), “The Hardest Part” by Olivia Dean, “Drag Path” by Twenty One Pilots, “Dying for You” by Charli xcx from the Wuthering Heights album, “DtMF” by Bad Bunny, “I Run” by HAVEN. featuring Kaitlin Aragon (don’t worry, more AI vocals coming up soon, serving up slop!), “Fame is a Gun” by Addison Rae and “Think About Us” by Sonny Fodera, D.O.D and Poppy Baskcomb.

Then as for our re-entries, we have “NO BATIDÃO” by ZXKAI and slxughter at #72 and “Stay (if You Wanna Dance)” by Myles Smith at #69, as well as boosts for already-charting songs like “Everywhere” and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #64 and #54 (hope Lindsey Buckingham is doing alright), “In My Room” by Julia Wolf at #63, “(When You Gonna) Give it Up to Me” by Sean Paul featuring Keyshia Cole at #26, “The Fate of Ophelia” by Taylor Swift at #25, “Midnight Sun” by Zara Larsson at #16, “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” by RAYE at #15 thanks to her brilliant album that also propels “Click Clack Symphony.” with Hans Zimmer close to the top 10 at #11 and finally, Dominic Fike, with the comical “White Keys” at #12 and the terrible “Babydoll” at #8.

The UK Singles Chart’s top five starts with “SWIM” by BTS down to #5, followed by “American Girls” by Harry Styles at #4, “Dracula” by Tame Impala way up to #3 (definitely not complaining about that), “iloveitiloveiloveit” by Bella Kay at #2 and of course, Sam and Olivia at the very top. We have, uh… a week for sure, let’s not waste any more time.

New Entries

#74 – “NORMAL” – BTS

Produced by Ryan Tedder and Sean Cook

I am actively going to try to keep my sections on albums a little shorter, and I hope some of that comes with Ye and RAYE later on (editor’s note: Nope.) but part of me is glad I can easily keep this one short given I explained everything I loved about BTS’ ARIRANG last week, and this is one of my favourites! Co-written – like “SWIM” – by Sean Foreman of 3OH!3 alongside writers like Ryan Tedder, Pdogg, Derrick Milano and Livvi Franc, “NORMAL” is about the unjust normalisation of the relationship celebrities have with fame and success, particularly performers, and how that fast-paced life leaves them more vulnerable to harmful perceptions from both audiences and themselves, with Jimin’s verse being particularly self-reflective in a falsetto that isn’t exactly unfamiliar for Foreman and Tedder. Hell, the filtered, blocky pop rock guitars under percussion that trickles and echoes itself out of hitting as hard as it could – it reminds me of OneRepublic or even 3OH!3’s more “serious” tracks from their newer output. There are still some clunkier lines, particularly in the chorus and with the rap verse, but it’s the same appeal with BTS’ relationship with the English language that I get from some older Eurodance. It’s not going to be great, it’ll be cheesy at times especially, but that’s just part of their character and even though I do like when they sound more natural in Korean, a song like this shouldn’t be natural. The boys are arguing not between themselves but between different versions of themselves in self-contained struggles they have to rush to fit inside a collective song, much like how they don’t have the time to deal with personal struggles in showbiz. I personally like this and much of the more melancholy tracks on the second half, especially the one that follows this, “Like Animals”, which might be my favourite song on the record. I can get where it’s lacking for people but as someone who isn’t a BTS fan (or at least wasn’t), I’m into it. Hell, we’ll get to the songs later on where I’m a part of the cult fanbase and I can’t see what everyone else less absorbed in the lore is seeing in it, so it’s not just these guys. It’s still a while until we get there, though.

#71 – “Free Your Mind” – Prospa and Cloonee

Produced by Prospa and Cloonee

Prospa are a house music duo from Leeds who have been around in electronic music for over a decade, with some brief sparks of chart success lower down in the 2020s before finally making their first entry in the top 75 with “Free Your Mind” alongside Sheffield DJ Cloonee, whose Spotify bio simply reads “Made in Hell”. Yeesh. This one’s a jam, not very Hellish at all, though those stabs of vintage organs alongside the diva vocal do have a slightly haunting effect not dissimilar to really early house that used disco divas’ isolated vocals over cheaper beats and basic melody lines. The cheeky organs sit alongside rising strings peppered with a drum build that has some dustier percussion choices and a vocal that sometimes trades off into a group vocal ghostly filtered to fit alongside the breathier diva sample that is actually chopped from Sybil’s “Oh, How I Love You”, a new jack swing album cut from 1993 that honestly sounds great, especially with the slight reggae touches. Sybil, who racked up a few chart hits in her own right, is sped into a classic framing of the disco diva promising that if you free your mind on the floor, you’ll find love. Her love, in this case, but it’s really reappropriated to just be a ethereal, out-of-body experience – a “point of no return” – that glitches out for the hook and its prominent bass that isn’t too nasty to take away from charm of the sample but definitely pushes further into the mix with the creep of the vinyl crackle. The bridge is fucking amazing, with the kick faintly powering through the walls of Sybil’s vocal building up chorally against the organs, with the percussion shifting in some of the haste before the drop… that doesn’t come quite yet. Instead, we get a new, echoed vocal from Sybil, some more powerful organs – as if the chamber that’s been locked up around us kept the ceiling open and we flew all the way out. We even get a throwback “Woo!” as one of the many clouds passing by us on our way back from the point of no return back to the floor, with an incredibly satisfying pre-drop break. I should check out more of Prospa because this is a damn masterclass in throwback house. Incredible use of the sample too. I love this kind of thing and I’m glad to see it here. There’s been a few examples recently of charmingly old-fashioned house appearing on the charts, I wouldn’t be upset if this was a trend going forward.

#68 – “Earrings” – Malcolm Todd

Produced by Malcolm Todd and Charlie Ziman

Malcolm Todd is a singer-songwriter from LA who has technically charted before and still is right now as his US sleeper hit “Chest Pain (I Love)” was sampled by Don Toliver on “E85”. “Earrings” is even earlier, originating as the opener to his 2024 mixtape Sweet Boy. The brother of songwriter Audrey Hobert, who has a #1 under her belt with Gracie Abrams’ “That’s So True”, this is basically my first impression for Mr. Todd in a context that doesn’t involve me having to briefly drift over it and talk about Don Toliver so, are the sleeper hits best worth slept on? No, I don’t like this at all. Now, this kind of lackadaisical, anxious indie synthpop isn’t dead on arrival, especially with the 80s synth funk textures that add a little glimmer to an otherwise very flat-sounding track, with rote drums to boot and a delivery from Todd that sounds more like he’s desperately trying to feel something than he is actually feeling much at all, he can’t full-send that fast-paced chorus about a breakup. I actually somewhat like that aspect – if he can’t move on, but he can’t go back, he’s going to sound defeated, but this is a song with drowned out guitar solos and brief, abrupt distorted drum fills that – if they contributed to a better, more complete song – could really help ride this hopelessness to a new post-breakup perspective. Yet it doesn’t have a verse, it doesn’t go into any of the vices or details, its mix seems kind of sloppy and unwilling to let anything feel real or soar from below the first layer of drums and plastic synth. The bridge-turned-outro is a cringeworthy newspaper clipping about how Malcolm’s “in his feelings” and, yeah, it just sounds like a demo from a hypothetical 2018 where this guy was old enough to be making demos. Yet here we are with it being popular in 2026. I blame Dominic Fike, I guess. When we had stuff like this from Steve Lacy and “Bad Habit”, I wasn’t a big fan but at least I saw where the song developed. This is just a whole lot of nothing with less character. It accepts the title of “Earrings” as a symbol of or gesture towards any kind of storytelling without being much more than a vent. Just terrible in my opinion, frankly. Sorry.

#62 – “Jane!” – The Long Faces

Produced by Halden Cooke and Dan Ball

Aw, UK Singles Chart, why the Long Faces? This is a single from all the way back in actual 2018 – the year I started this show – from Canterbury indie band The Long Faces. Apparently, the song has resurged (well, really, just surged) after a TikTok viral meme surrounding the anime Jujutsu Kaisen. I don’t know what that is but the Genius annotations for the song sometimes sure want me to or at least assume I do. Seemingly about a murderer or serial killer called Jane (some interested Internet commenters have connected it to the 19th century nurse-turned-killer Jane Toppan), the song more so uses Jane! as an analogy for looming death overall. We’re surprised when death’s early, we can’t fully understand the patterns but we can generally see glimpses of what’s coming, murderers take the glory from death and stigmatise its natural process (“your life’s work is dirtied by the fools that adore you”), it’s all quite grim and clever in its decidedly English poetic approach. If you can get over lead vocalist Tom Lane’s delivery, which may be too close to cringeworthy theatre kid territory to some (mostly on the content as he’s otherwise pretty standard for post-punk) but as someone who used to not accept the sincerity of that approach to music and has often had friends closer to understanding the appeal, I’ve gone pretty full-circle to enjoying the wackiness of it, especially when you have a cartoonish villain vocal representing Death and some honestly sick guitar solos dramatically following each chorus, including a satisfying bridge that adds what sounds like a stock horror screech sound effect to the mix. It’s not that unique for its space but is unique for the charts, especially when not (originally) connected to a soundtrack and is instead actively trying to be a song, I can dig the showtuneyness. That’s a word, fuck you. This is the last review I wrote. Sorry to break chronology, I did this one last and I’m 5000 words in, accept “showtuneyness”, I beg of you. Good song.

#53 – “Younger You” (from the “Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special”) – Miley Cyrus

Produced by Miley Cyrus, Michael Pollack and The Monsters & Strangerz

Miley Cyrus recently premiered a 20th anniversary special saying a farewell to her former alter-ego and children’s television programme Hannah Montana, with a new single release directed to herself and fans who may have stuck with Miley since those days and grown alongside her. I can’t speak for the quality of the Hannah Montana series or films but I’m sure it means a lot to the fans to have this and especially for Miley – as she says, it “was the beginning of the life she knows now” and I can imagine that celebrating something that seminal that you’ve been unable to move away from fully in spite of… everything she did try to do so, it can be pretty overwhelming emotionally but also requires some maturing, some healthy moving on. The song is directed from Miley’s younger self to where she is now, longing for a connection between what she used to be and care about, like her family, praying before bed, and my favourite line, “we used to be so happy just because”, reflecting that childlike joy and lack of awareness of where your own emotions are coming from that you lose with adulthood. Young Miley – or Hannah, I guess? I don’t really know the lore – hopes that after all these years, there’s still part of who Miley used to be in her, with the song somewhat framed as if these two sides haven’t just drifted off but one of them will be gone forever, which is interesting because those childhood memories do fade but until later on, you do recognise yourself in those old pictures. Maybe with all Miley’s been through, with all the public scrutiny and reinventions, she doesn’t. That would be profoundly sad and with the ending plea to “remember who you are”, that loss of touch is pretty tangible on this song. The track’s minimal and folksy, almost country thanks to Miley’s Tennessee rasp coming in full force which is very appreciated, barely cares to drive itself further than the position it’s already in, relying on Miley’s vocal to do the heavy lifting, even in the layered bridge which sounds great. I think there really is something to the distance between Miley’s current self and who she used to be that strains that initial connection. Just because it’s the beginning of the life you recognise doesn’t mean the same person who entered that life will understand the perspective of the people in it. Hell, “Party in the USA” is kind of about this if you think metaphorically and ignore that Jessie J wrote it, but obviously much peppier than this. At least now we can hope for the best of both worlds.

#47 – “KING” – Ye

Produced by Ye among others

Ye is the only credited producer on Spotify but we all know that many other people were involved and that credits for Ye albums are super messy and inaccurate, especially since he became an independent artist. So just take all information you get online about Ye with a grain of salt, really, including this, even though I am a fan and I am in some Discord servers so LARP aside, I might know a little more than average. That makes BULLY worse. Knowing more makes the album more frustrating with what it doesn’t do, what it demonstrates he can still do, where the energy is or isn’t. It’s worthy of an analysis that I won’t go into on this episode. I absolutely want to do that analysis here, trust me, but it’s more so sad than anything and without explaining a great deal of lore, it’s hard to really make sense of how we get to this point with Ye, which is partly why I imagine people both tuned out and quickly tuned back in once he was “back” back. All you need to know for this episode of this show is that BULLY debuts at #3 on the UK albums chart despite not being out on Friday (literally still wasn’t out when I wrote last week’s episode) and having physicals shipped that included earlier, demo copies of the album with vocals that use an AI filter over other vocals to replicate Ye, known to fans as “Ye-I”. Some of that is still present on the digital album because fuck, man, I don’t even think he can tell what was Ye-I or not when he re-recorded last week.

We have three songs from the album on the chart this week, they are from the first half which is generally better but “KING” is the only highlight that charted. Not to be confused with his song of the same name with Ty Dolla $ign, “KING” starts with a sample of Duke Edwards pronouncing that Mother Nature and all her glory have pronounced someone as the King, which quickly drops into a cacophonous buzzing below stadium-ready factorial drums that resemble an emptier Yeezus. Ye, though lower energy than he has been in the increasingly distant past, delivers one of his best verses on the record about the affect of controversy and scandal on his mental state, growing a cult-like audience of fans and yes-men that affectively leave him constantly intoxicated on his own high (“Guarantee my vices different than yours was / Drunk off power and I was pourin’ up” – I also hear “throwin’ up” there). He also has a great couple bars where his loved ones turning into “lost ones” and all the chaos that ensued from his bipolar episodes led him to reject parts of the Black history that led him to the space he’s in, playfully weaving in the Duke Edwards sample the song is named after. The rest of the first verse and the second verse aren’t as focused but go into the toxic relationships he developed with women and luxury, a common topic for Ye at this point, and I love the casual flow of the second verse. Overall, the song’s kind of badass, it would be a great intro to a great album if this really was the comeback he advertised. For some people, it is, I’m sure this tracks a means a lot to them, but the heaviness of this false promise makes me sink even more when I think about what really could be, what recollection and introspection could be had, and I start to think people mostly just want to see Ye outside than care about what happens inside. “You know what season it is” did hype me up in the listening party livestream, though, and he may as well have been right as he’s effectively “uncancelled” if you believe in cancel culture, as he’s set to play at Wireless Festival to some small degree of controversy. Now, can we get someone’s who’s less exhausting, a little easier to talk about?

#31 – “WAGWAN” – Central Cee

Produced by Gusto and LukasBL

Father, you answered my prayers. Central Cee’s newest mixtape-EP-thing, ALL ROADS LEAD HOME, is (fittingly) alright, debuting at #34 on the albums chart. It’s a short bunch of tracks that have not too much to them but some funny lines, decent performances (even if a little detached) and depending on whether I enjoyed the production, which was more eclectic but less hit-and-miss as a result of the shorter runtime, I would probably enjoy the song, especially without much switching up in the flow or content. 17 minutes of Cench is fine with me. The more composed and motivational “FEELINGS”, the seriously deranged “DC10” and the single “ICEMAN FREESTYLE” (which I reviewed a few weeks back) were my favourites and “WAGWAN” is probably the most boring track on the project. The filtered vocal sample is alright with the liquidy keys under the most bog-standard UK drill beat on an otherwise more interesting tape, though the percussion is a little more textured than it would be on the most generic cut on someone else’s project. Cench’s relationship content has always been surface-level and one-dimensional, so much so that even he sounds super bored of himself on this, it may as well be a drone compared to some of the more animated tracks. At least he clarifies to us that he gets his women with no coercion. He compares himself to Anne Frank two tracks later. Classic Cench.

#28 – “ALL THE LOVE” – Ye featuring Andre Troutman

Produced by Ye, Andre Troutman, Sheffmade and Quadwoofer

This song used to be called “Gas Chambers”, man. Before that, it was called “Reich”. It never had anything to do with the Holocaust, it was just… called that. Following Ye’s antics has introduced me to so many awful people especially during the sessions wherein this song was initially made, which were mostly in Spain live on stream with people like audio terrorist Digital Nas, fascist personality Nick Fuentes and known cuck, Sneako, fittingly for an album that was going to be called CUCK, before being changed to… In a Perfect World. But Ye fans (which includes me, by the way, I’ll be full disclosure, as a former fan – I’m still interested) will want you to completely forget that this song, which is supposedly beautiful, came from such a dark place. Maybe that’s where the beauty is – who is he talking to when he sings about hoping you get all the love and all the shine and all you wanted all the time? Is he reaching out to a version of himself that isn’t manic, that isn’t struggling, that is more self-aware (at least more than Ye presented himself as such in his apology, which may or may not be the truth)? For what it’s worth, this is much more universal than Ye’s post-Pablo attempts at anthemic tracks, which has mostly ended up empty, too self-absorbed or too… “1. STARS”. That’s mostly because it lacks any lyrical detail at all which, for Ye at this point, is not surprising and sometimes preferred! He did mumble a freestyle for this live on stream but only the singing ended up on the final product, with a now-classic Ye-I filter added onto it despite his real vocal take being present in the BULLY listening party the night before release. Sure. Whatever. Andre Troutman, a relative of talkbox legend Roger Troutman, brings some vocoder magic to this one and its industrial drums, with a coldness reminiscent of 808s & Heartbreak and a sample from Lebanese singer Fairouz which does help the song feel pretty massive given its haunting feel but it is still a lot of hot air. I can’t lie and say I don’t like how this song sounds, but the profoundly sad idea of this sentiment coming from someone who was as lost as Ye makes it kind of tough to fully endorse, especially with the AI use. There’s definitely a future for Andre Troutman if he plays his cards right because his involvement in the production and writing of this album last minute, including a live performance at the Mexico concerts that incited much of the post-delay hope for the record, was close to saving the album from some of its intended themes and sonic ideas, like the heavy vocal filters, sample-based emptiness, lethargic, grey antisocialism, completely failing.

#27 – “FATHER” – Ye featuring Travis Scott

Produced by Ye among others

This is the big single push YZY and gamma are doing for BULLY, mostly because it has Travis Scott on it and basically sounds like a Travis Scott song with a lengthy gospel sample. Not because it’s actually single material, of course, but it got a surreal music video directed by Ye’s wife Bianca Censori featuring a Michael Jackson impersonator and more in a church and… just read the Complex article I linked, at least Bianca put thought into the video. The song itself is barren and I simply don’t think the parallel of Travis’ come-up with Ye’s comeback is all that sensible – I can see the comparison with Travis having systemic issues working against him for wrongs they assume about him whilst Ye was blocked by systems for losing their trust through his statements. The song does so little with that, Ye’s best line is “You see this coat?” and his verse barely exists before the malformed hook (also known as, bars he repeats to fill time). This is all on an admittedly somewhat gritty, industrial hip-house heft that stands against a chopped gospel vocal that’s been filtered to remove all the soul, in a structure that reminds me of his troll song “Lift Yourself”. Lyrically, this has much of the issue it does with Donda and Ye’s born-again material: the redemption has to happen for us to believe it, and it’s kind of just sad seeing it promised (with weirdly mixed ad-libs) than actually seeing him lock into writing an honest verse from a new perspective. Ye’s best moments on BULLY are when he’s on about his early days (when he was BULLIED) and when he succumbs to that persona and villainises himself as the BULLY. “FATHER” and “ALL THE LOVE” are neither, they’re pretty safe, they’re just nothing worth all the baggage that comes with discussing Ye in the modern day. The James Brown interview clip is funny, at least.

#22 – “I Know You’re Hurting.” – RAYE

Produced by RAYE, Pete Clements and Jordan Riley

RAYE’s first #1 album, THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is a cinematic piece of songwriting that is completely unsubtle and theatrical yet still rewards relistening and paying attention to smaller lyrical details (jigsaw pieces) that are very much pronounced and obvious but you may not realise their impact until a little later, and for an album about hope, holding onto it when it seems impossible, that approach to writing feels like the most honest. Things can be glaring, you can think “how did I not see that?” and later on, it’s bless or curse you, depending on what it is. Contemplating aside, much of the album prophecies in a way for hope and escape alongside jazz-infused instrumentation and a powerful RAYE vocal performance and “I Know You’re Hurting.” is no different. It was standout track for me on my first listens alongside “Happier Times Ahead.”, “Life Boat.”, “Winter Woman.”, “Goodbye Henry.” with Al Green and “Fields.” with her grandad Michael, as well as the aforementioned “Click Clack Symphony.”. Much of that is down to just how dramatic it is – really, the harshest criticism I’ve seen on the record, alongside some clumsy lyricism (fair) is what makes certain moments so successful.

First performed at Glastonbury last year, the song had been a fixture of her tour before the record’s release and is directly addressed to the listener. At least, that’s the way we’d like to interpret it – in reality, it’s about a specific someone she cares about, but as she told Vogue, she couldn’t be there for them then and she didn’t need it then but months after, it’s her who cries listening to it. RAYE has no issue universalising this person’s experience, not just with the second-person address, but leaving more specific glimpses of them in the verses, about how good this person is at disguising their emotions, even at their most unstable, and appearing to do so with a “soft and gentle smile”. I like the framing of this person climbing up mountains of personal struggle and hiding the holes they could have fell in along the way, especially when “hole” here refers to a void in their life as well, and RAYE isn’t offering to fill them in, but hold the burdens, the baggage, pray alongside them for a miracle. Part of this “disguise” is clearer when you hear what she told Zane Lowe about the song originating from a conversation with her male band members on mental health and, like some other tracks on the album, the personal insight opens up to a wider problem and the music becomes the world. “Close your eyes and let this music get to working” – it’s a miracle as well as the soundtrack. The gravitas is best demonstrated by how the song sounds, which is immense. Sure, you can probably roll your eye at a typical piano ballad considering how many styles she explores on the album, but the grandiose strings here are less generic self-empowerment anthem and more like a classic pop or glam rock song, with a heavier focus on the chasmic drums and massive chorus release. The first verse’s build takes a small break to focus on RAYE’s small little harmonies riffing like dust particles orbiting around her lead vocal, with the song nearly distracting you from the more obvious catharsis you expect it to take before succumbing to the pop convention anyway, and that’s not a criticism. It’s like RAYE clicks into place and realises what the album is partly about – the power of music and communication as a whole – and her previously intimate vocal soars out of focus against the wings of orchestra to deliver the kind of theatrical pop smash to the heart you go into an album like this for and is probably ethereal live.

The frailer start to the second chorus – handing out two more lines like the arms she sings about holding before digging back into the main release – is one of my favourite moments across the album, and RAYE riffing for a great deal may seem meandering but as the band continues to power through it, RAYE can move up that mountain she’s composed for herself with a belief that God (and/or music) is there to work a miracle as long as she perseveres. The sad truth of how that can end up for many people isn’t exactly touched upon in the song, or really the album, but if RAYE’s desperate, quieter mantras of “It’s gonna be alright, it’s gonna be okay”, complete with knowing chuckles that it might not be, are anything to go by, the refusal to lend much of her voice to the times where she is hopeless is a purposeful gulp in the album’s throat, a place you just don’t want to go when you’re brutally crawling yourself back up out of that space. This is an excellent song from an album I thought was excellent all the way through – we’ll see if this sticks around or another album cut takes its place next week.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to depression, self-harm, cultural appropriation and Luke Combs getting hot and heavy in the honky-tonk

Rundown

As always, we start our episode with the notable dropouts, which are songs exiting the UK top 75 (that’s what I cover) after five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40. This week, we bid farewell to: “Body” by Don Toliver, “Stay (if You Wanna Dance)” by Myles Smith, “Eternity” by Alex Warren, “That’s So True” by Gracie Abrams, “Messy” by Lola Young and “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan.

Meanwhile, as for our re-entries and gains, we have Luke Combs’ “Sleepless in a Hotel Room” returning to #66 thanks to his album (more on that later), alongside a gain for his already-charting “Be by You” at #56, with other boosts being really scarce, mostly just short-point increases or slightly higher peaks for songs that have been charting for a while, so this section is… literally just Luke Combs. That feels odd, it’s so un-UK Singles Chart to just have this section dedicated to Luke Combs of all people but that’s just how the chart positions fell this week, congrats to the guy and more on his record in a bit.

Now for the top five on the UK Singles Chart, starting with “Stateside” by PinkPantheress at #5, followed by “American Girls” by Harry Styles at #4, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay at #3, and of course BTS, Fender and Dean at the top two spots. Before putting Luke Combs in the limelight once again and moving onto our bigger releases from RAYE and BTS, let’s go in a different direction.

New Entries

#72 – “Dinner Party” – Niall Horan

Produced by Afterhrs, John Ryan and Julian Bunetta

One Direction, of course. 1D’s former resident Irishman Niall Horan named his upcoming album Dinner Party – this title track revolves around how he met his girlfriend at a dinner party and they are still in love to this day, so the seemingly mundane and potentially dull aspect in his life became a much bigger, meaningful moment to them, especially looking back. I think if that’s what the album explores, I could be pretty interested in checking it out – growing up in the spotlight and being a global star before the fall-out and residing to a slightly more muted solo career, I’m sure there are a lot of small, seemingly unimportant aspects of his life that he now sees as a small but significant point in a long timeline of life-shifting events. The album’s out in June, moving towards a more live-sounding approach and here’s the title track to set your expectations. “Dinner Party” is about what you’d expect from a song produced for Niall Horan by pop songwriting vets John Ryan and Julian Bunetta, and though that sounds negative, it really isn’t. It doesn’t have nearly the same attention to detail as Bunetta’s work with, say, Sabrina Carpenter, but the emptiness that Horan’s laidback, echoed delivery over somewhat cold acoustics and rote drums definitely speaks to the song’s mundanity. Even the explosive beginning moment of the chorus, “crashing lights when you first saw me”, hardly sounds like anything’s crashing, more just a sprinkling of extra guitars and what sounds like a great backing harmony, inserting themselves to a decidedly boring domestic scene. The “crashing lights” are paired with the imagery of chandeliers and “2am coffee”. Horan repeats the disinterested, matter-of-fact “Yeah, I met you at a dinner party” in the chorus and I honestly love that line. It’s the “Yeah”, as if he’s confirming some invisible insecurity that their relationship isn’t built to last because of the (for pop music) unusually uninteresting arrangements of fate that led them there. Yeah, they were at the same dinner party and they hit it off. That’s it. That’s the song. Bless them. This is a casual, kind of autopilot track and I don’t think there’s a more authentic way to explore this kind of loving… ambivalence, almost, in song. Delightful little tune.

#71 – “Rethink Some Things” – Luke Combs

Produced by Luke Combs, Jonathan Singleton and Chip Matthews

It’s not every day that the 10th track from a Luke Combs album I did not even know released (even though I’d been covering singles from it… okay, maybe that’s my fault) debuts on the UK singles chart. It’s not every day, but it’s everyday, and that might sum up Combs’ appeal in general. The Way I Am debuts at #4 on the albums chart, a career best, and whilst I’ve been mixed to positive on the singles, like I said, the album’s release slipped by me so I haven’t kept up with the release as a whole. That doesn’t matter at all. I thought the title meant that he was rethinking in a contemplative way, that this might tie into a grander narrative of why Combs is the way he is, but no, this is a rootin’-tootin’ country sex jam. Sure, Uncle Luke, get frisky on ‘em. His delivery – limited once again by a throaty Joey Moi-esque murmur-tunage that rears its ugly head into modern country vocal production and cuts some harmonies short of their deserved grandiosity – seems a little wistful, despite him talking about how “that good God almighty 10 of a body” has him “all tore up”, and creates a very funny dynamic wherein he’s oddly sentimental over a nice enough groove about trying to leave this woman who’s just too damned sexy, he’s got to step back and question his desires. I can understand the appeal in this, for sure, it even makes use of its very short bridge by having a cute little guitar lead-in to the final chorus which doesn’t explode as much as you might want it to… but it’s a smoky jam about a hot girl that emphasises Combs’ perspective, one that is centred around him slowing down and thinking (see: ogling boobs, probably). It doesn’t need to be that dramatic, it’s fun enough, let country singers be horny. Kacey Musgraves is doing some good work with “Dry Spell” too, maybe Nashville is having its decades-late sexual revolution.

#68 – “In My Room” – Julia Wolf

Produced by Scro

New York singer-songwriter Julia Wolf has finally charted in her own right after her… befuzzling Drake-Yeat collaboration. “In My Room” was her breakout single, gaining TikTok virality after its release in 2024, but is only now charting, long after the release of its parent album, PRESSURE, which is just brilliant. Wholesome moment: artist I like finally charts with a song I like. This week may be saccharinely positive overall, so bear with the fangirling here – that album is mostly produced by Scro (who’s on the boards for this one) and features a great blend of alternative R&B singing over electronics-infused alternative rock, it’s a combination that I didn’t fully get at first but has grown on me immensely and before you even get to the conclusion, if this wasn’t such a great week, you could assume this song was an automatic Best of the Week and it’s not even really one of my favourites on the album. For much of the album, Wolf’s murmur rises to a breathy, exhausted register over roughly-mastered guitars and overbearing drums with an extra slice of hyperpop-adjacent quirky synths or breakbeats clicking in and out to tear the paranoid insecurities she sings of into a state of panic. I’ve seen a fair few complaints about the album’s mixing and I can understand but with the processed vocals, glitch effects and sludgy guitars, I think Julia Wolf is putting those walls up herself and with the writing being as sometimes straightforward as it is, the failure of those distractions is what makes the album much more interesting to me.

“In My Room” is an obsessive track concerned with self-perception like the rest of the album, though in this case through the lens of worrying how someone who has actually moved on from Wolf is perceiving her (“I stalk myself on the Internet just to see what you’ll find”) and wanting them back in her life, though it’s striking to me that this is described through wanting their personal belongings to remain in her room – every perception on the Internet is fleeting and intangible, she wants a physical remnant of that relationship, with the tragic irony being that if she did and they still had broke up, that would be a painful blight to her room, reminding her of what could have been. This isn’t something she wants to acknowledge – the track before it is “Jennifer’s Body”, where she pines, in a way playing with queerness, for herself to be the kind of woman this partner wants, and Wolf, throughout the album, latches onto these kinds of physical representations as a coping mechanism without always realising that they aren’t replacements for the emotion. In the instability of craving for that speck of confirmation from the ex-partner, that realisation doesn’t come quick enough, not before the dramatics of “I’d slit my own throat just to see if you’d mourn me”. She released the stems of this song onto SoundCloud a while ago – I literally remixed it at some point – and, yeah, those guitars do not sound great, especially separate from therest of the mix, it’s a bit of a slodge, but combined with the defeated refrain and semi-whispered “I want your things in my…”, it sounds just as lost as she is. I’m so happy this is charting, I know that any female-fronted emo or emo-adjacent song is basically like cheating in terms of helping me like a song, but let me have my scrimblos. I hope this sticks around but I also would be far from upset if she ended up charting a few extra tracks as well.

#46 – “Wide Awake” – Chris Stussy and Tom Did It

Produced by Chris Stussy

…Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell are Chris Studdy and Tom, and what on Earth did Tom do? Well, Chris Stussy is a Dutch DJ active since the 2010s mostly in deep house and having had some minor EDM successes, though not on the major UK chart. I do actually remember hearing (or at least hearing about) a Moby remix he made in 2024 (not that Moby needs more attention right now) so he wasn’t a complete blank spot for me but Tom Did It absolutely was. Tom, according to his Sony Music press release at least, operates out of a self-built studio and has roots in UK rap whilst using club beats and indie pop influences as well. He’s signed to Skepta’s management team and to answer the £1,000,000 question, Tom Did the Vocals. Over a straightforward piano house line, we get a thumping beat and super-processed vocals from Tom that sound like they were taken from an existing song and extrapolated far beyond their appropriate usage to sound like a fish out of Auto-Tuned water on this song, with moments of vocal indecipherability rendering him closer to Vory than Skepta. It’s kind of great that he fades in and out of existence on the track, though, because the phased-out synths do the same and Tom’s vague platitudes about the music waking him up, making him lose himself in the feeling, it’s all on theme. The flashiest synth transitions into a meandering, directionless bridge wherein Tom harmonises with an uncredited female vocalist, both of whom are met with a staccato flute peeking out of the mix that somehow doesn’t disrupt them at all. What does eventually disrupt them is essentially a temporary beat switch, replacing the bass-heavy deep groove with a couple synth string stabs and some littering sound effects eventually leading into a different set of drums that are immediately replaced by the familiar block of synth and building claps. If the intention of this song was to sound like we’re losing ourselves, I think we get there long before the adorable bubblegum bass vocal chops at the tail-end, though they are the stickiest part of the song for me. Not a conventional dance track to debut in the top 50, but I’ll take it, it’s great.

#45 – “Leak It” – FLO

Produced by Julian Bunetta and Grant Boutin

We meet once again with Mr. Bunetta, this time producing for girl group FLO, who have had some brief chart success before and are near their last peak (2023’s “Fly Girl” at #38) with this new, tongue-in-cheek single that uses the tropes of 2000s tabloids – appropriate for their throwback sound – to explore a relationship that’s too fun to not be public… and also because it might get back at the ex-boyfriend to appear like they’re having fun. The cover art is a paparazzi-style photo captioned “FLO BARES ALL (LITERALLY)”, which is particularly funny when you press play and realise the explicit version is literally censored, bleeping the swears in both Stella’s opening passage and within the verses, with the first verse also using an egregious moan censor that sounds straight out of 2006. Also sounding straight out of 2006 is the R&B production that harkens back to the Timbo drums and cheapo synths of that era, something that Grant Boutin has definitely explored before with Tate McRae. The throwback is so perfectly styled to the cheesiest aspects of this kind of song, down to the childlike singy-songy verses, charmingly stupid lines like “I’m freaky like this beat is”, the burst of synth that pre-empts the group going in full harmony, and pointless, quirky ad-libs and scratches. Those ad-libs are delivered by FLO themselves too, and not a guy like Timbaland, Diddy or Swizz Beatz, which is great for the conceit of the song as, even in all its lightheartedness, is still a semi-empowering song about cheeky female ownership of their own joy. The third verse drops an uncensored “fuck” (Judas!) right after referencing Michael Jackson and right before exploding into a drumless chorus with wavey emulations of the compressed dance-pop of the time it’s referencing. I can’t help but find this a joy to listen to. Again, it’s kind of a scrimblo genre for me anyway… let me have this one too. It’s better than what McRae and Ryan Tedder (he comes up later too) were doing in this lane.

#39 – “FYA” – BTS

Produced by NITTI, Diplo and Flume

A song co-written by experimental rap veteran (no pun intended) and petty Twitter shitposter JPEGMAFIA is in the UK top 40, that’s enough of a novelty to mention. He is among a group of nine total credited writers, including members of BTS and the producers, one of whom – Flume – has worked with Peggy and even has a whole, borderline satirical EP with him. Even if the Jersey club percussion distracts you from it – thanks, Diplo – you can still hear Peggy and Flume all over this. From the choppy distorted scream that serves as a pre-drop vocal and the heavy breathing of the intro to the half-whispered hook from RM and j-hope that slips off beat into clunky spoken ad-libs, the Auto-Tuned pre-chorus by Jimin and Jin with lyrics like “club go crazy like Britney, baby”… listen, you can practically hear the reference track. Honestly, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner – the bait-and-switch dynamic that emerges from awkward, abrupt transitions between the song’s sections can be heard in K-pop and Peggy’s music alike, with semi-ironic aping of mainstream rap convention and atmospheric builds that emphasise cloudy vocal layers laying down a foundation for intricate, clinking drum patterns, soon replaced by the industrial plod of the bridge section, it’s all super in the wheelhouse of experimental rap. I’m honestly happy something like this exists to show that the branch between rap and K-pop isn’t purely an appropriation of its “coolest” or most accessible depictions of Black masculinity. With that said, if you translate SUGA’s verse, you can see that he raps “So hot, so hot, vibin', totally hot, hot, hot”, so it’s not like you’re getting as much lyrical substance as you would with Peggy or his peers (a list somewhat interchangeable with his rivals). Overall, “FYA” is an explosive track that takes offense to the concept of having much meaning beyond simply being “the moment” and begging for more of that energy, reflecting a part of ARIRANG that turns a blind eye to its surroundings for immersion purposes. If it’s not evident from my somewhat mixed-sounding reception of this song, I found BTS’ comeback album utterly fascinating as a cultural piece and I love the shit out of it, even as someone who usually doesn’t care for BTS, so there’ll be even more gushing ahead. My bad, we’re getting an all-positive episode, basically. If only D-Block Europe were still around for an easy mocking.

#28 – “Body to Body” – BTS

Produced by Ryan Tedder, Picard Brothers, Diplo and Pdogg

This is the opening track to ARIRANG and I want to use it to explore my favourite element of the album, which is how all of the co-producers and co-writers, of which there are many, are able to use BTS as a vessel for their own styles and tie it into the global pop phenomenon that they represent. You get glimpses of a few different eras of Diplo on the record, for example, and you also get moments that sound like they could have come straight from some of their unconventional writers, like Artemas, JPEGMAFIA and for this track, Teezo Touchdown, a jack-of-all-trades in hip hop whose signature, unconventional style has proven incredibly flexible especially as a guest artist. In some ways, “Body to Body” could just be a Diplo song featuring Teezo that has some Korean lines. I’m a sucker for a chipmunk vocal chop already and the very obviously Diplo lead here quickly jumps under a metallic set of bouncy drums for RM to hype up the track and SUGA to, in Korean, denounce a kind of masculine violence that would usually be associated with this kind of jam, which places the song’s shift into pop-ready melodrama in the pre-chorus and Jimin’s begging for “somebody like you” over stuttered, half-time R&B percussion, in an interesting place. The pre-chorus doesn’t lead into “somebody like you” at all, so the phrase is left really vague, with the best hint at the song’s purpose being the change into “everybody like you” at the tail-end of the chorus, universalising the dancefloor body-to-body intimacy to a kind of general understanding found through music. j-hope evokes a similar idea with the second verse, “the spirit of our kin surging up”, hinting towards the implementation of a filtered sample of the album’s namesake, “Arirang”, the traditional Korean folk song placed under a jumbling drum line in a way that reminds me of some M.I.A. or even Pharrell production.

Now here we get into what “Arirang” means for Korean cultural identity. I don’t typically cite Genius as a great source for thoughtful musical journalism (more just press and info which is useful in itself), but Chase Karng’s article does give us a lot to look into. They dive deeper (though not as much as I would like) into specific cultural references on “Aliens” and in an accompanying documentary, but what’s important here is that “Arirang” both does not have a direct English translation and that the folk song has no clear origin point or authorship, being split between several variations across both Koreas, the song being a uniting force and sign of heritage that allows for different regions to express their specific version of the song. The way BTS’ co-writers form their own variations on existing K-pop (and even western musical) formulas and archetypes is a mirroring of that kind of collaboration, wherein BTS are their own “Arirang”, a cultural phenomenon that every audience and every collaborator has a different relationship with that regardless contributes to a more universal force. Now, you can criticise music as a universality or force for any peace or change, but if we’re going to consider how Korean identity has formed the album, one criticised by fans for not being as “Korean” as some had hoped from the title, I think it’s worth to see how BTS are being used to embody that universality. They are a globally massive band that are unabashedly indebted to specific forms of music, especially Black American music, for which they cannot consider themselves an appropriate representation of (or at least, should not), so the sonic and aesthetic lineage that makes up the eclectic BTS album effectively renders authorship about as important as it is to the folk song. Now is that a good thing when certain elements will be lost in translation or sugarcoated for a mass audience? That’s up to you and in my opinion, usually not, but the somewhat passive role of BTS in their own album being one of the most powerful building blocks of the BTS phenomenon overall is a super interesting dynamic to me and was an essential part of my enjoyment of ARIRANG overall. Now for something more than slightly different.

#18 – “Click Clack Symphony.” – RAYE and Hans Zimmer

Produced by RAYE, Hans Zimmer and Mike Sabath

This review may contain hope for RAYE’s newly-released album that is likely to have its own chart impact – I would be surprised if it isn’t the UK’s #1 album – by next week, with this being the final single. Arriving with a fantastic music video exemplifying the song’s themes we’ll get into and recruiting legendary composer Hans Zimmer of all people (this out-charting his previous chart peak, “Spider Pig” from The Simpsons Movie), this is a brilliant song that is likely a highlight on THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. (I unfortunately have not had a chance to hear it yet, I’m excited to). The five-minute track is a call to action though not for protest, in fact I love RAYE framing the track as sending the call out, like an SOS, when the aim is to celebrate life. Starting, like the video, in RAYE’s house, the intro contemplates a kind of apathetic anxiety that comes in the age of doomscrolling, a fear of perception that translates into an “I can’t be bothered to interact, to live rather than exist”, a rut that is so frustratingly easy to find yourself into. In the first verse, after a swift run-through of her morning starting in tears and laziness greatly opposed to her Hollywood ambitions, ones framed more of a “fuck it, might as well” than a chasing of her dreams (“I should try my luck in Hollywood and find some audtions”), because those aren’t her dreams, just an opportunity to bring her masking and succumbing to facades into a professional setting that rewards social performance, not unlike music, and aims to make constructed narratives seem real or authentic. That dynamic within Hollywood is particularly interesting to consider in terms of how the song constructs itself sonically as with Zimmer in tow, this has a cinematic string section building intensely behind RAYE’s satisfyingly multi-tracked and impossibly fast-paced thoughts flickering with no time to register what’s being sung, sometimes completely overshadowed by the roar of the bursting strings. At the same time, all of those inflections, all of those unclear thoughts, all of the rhymes that don’t quite resolve, all of the spiralling sing-raps, they’re bound to the titular click track and are processed perfectly to fine-tune that anxiety into a perceivably authentic but still impossibly perfect presentation that suffocates RAYE under bass hits and traps some of the catchiest hooks and deliveries she’s ever come up with into tiny capsules of the song that aren’t revisited nearly as much as you’d think they should be, or they would be in a song with less manic scavenging for hope and empowerment.

The reference to a music industry professional (Carly Plunkett) being a genuinely reassuring and close personal friend of RAYE’s, thanking her for “having a sixth sense”, ties into the second verse’s lamenting of her designer fashion – name-dropping the brands – gathering cobwebs with underuse that comes from RAYE’s discomfort with wearing any fashionable dress, making her feel “alien”. Firstly, the tie into the line about Carly is that she detects a sixth, unfamiliar sense in her interactions with Plunkett that she deeply values and dissipates her depression, whilst in this verse, she adopts a limited understanding of more familiar, less abstract senses, using sound to cover sight (“Sigh, let me turn my music louder and pretend it’s fine”) because the feelings we’re most familiar with, especially the depressed, stressed, exhausting ones, will overlap and vocalise in detrimental ways that can only be faded with the overdoing of a conflicting sense, though the thoughts of alienation aren’t mentioned, leaving a contrast there that is what made me think deeper about this line. RAYE has much less of an understanding and comprehension of the senses she finds from other people that make her feel valued. When touching on empowerment, she is constantly in other tenses that de-emphasise her own experience especially in the chorus deploying the third person but also on the recollection of her relationship with Carly. The isolated moments, the intimate and self-reflective moments that hypothetically build a further understanding of self, are really separating RAYE from herself and preventing her understanding her own senses – freedom comes from the collective here, it’s “we” that doesn’t “settle for depression on a Friday night”, not just her. It’s honestly not that different from what BTS are trying to do, really, and whilst we’re on ridiculous comparisons, she’s got a Big Sean flow on half of this song. The second way in which I find these lines to be super interesting in consideration of each other is the reflection of the least fun, the least affordable and least fair elements of musical performance – industry and keeping up appearances – being used in relation to empowerment because this does what a lot of songs supposedly about the power of music won’t do: acknowledge that that universality and freedom is sometimes coming from unlikely and damn ugly places, people or reflections of a stereotypically consumerist bastardisation of the artform that is so commonly associated with pop music. It’s what the entire sonic conceit of the song is: a click track creating a symphony, breaking through the straightforward, mind-numbing percussive consistency to create an elaborate performance of humanity. I may have done enough already in terms of drilling into specific lyrics and the multitudes of meaning that compose this wonderfully nuanced, cautiously optimistic song – seriously, don’t get me started on the spoken word passages unless you want a dissertation – so I think for now I am going to leave this review here on the hopeful note the song ends itself on: “the cold never lasts, my darling, it just teaches the heart how to burn”… or at least we all hope we can thaw through like that and find ourselves. I haven't even touched on the red heel-clicking sound effects and the Wizard of Oz connection, augh. I love this fucking song so much. Let’s just talk about BTS again.

#2 – “SWIM” – BTS

Produced by Tyler Spry and Leclair

There is a compilation album on streaming services called KEEP SWIMMING, consisting of “SWIM”, its instrumental and seven remixes that all designate a specific member of the band with a subgenre, from as broad as V’s “electronic” remix to more specifics like RM’s chill hip hop, j-hope’s Afrobeat mix (a misnomer), SUGA’s melodic techno version and Jimin going for the slow jam R&B style. I always raise an eyebrow to these genre parades of single remixes because to me, it undermines why the song is in its particular style to begin with whilst not having the chance to express a producer’s signature style or make a meaningful transition between genres. If a drum and bass remix exists of an R&B song, which has not uncommonly been the case, there’s often purpose – thematic, practical and/or sonic – to that decision and it can be really interesting to see how elements of the song are recontextualised. If you just make seven different versions in seven different genres to hit a couple demographic bubbles, that seems like cheapening the value of your own art, unless the song is specifically made to be this flexible which “SWIM” doesn’t seem to be.

Of course, I still like the song a great deal. Arriving alongside a high-budget video with the boys setting sail and actress Lili Reinhart… being there too, I guess, “SWIM” is one of the clearest analogical hooks on the album in regards to how the love song addressed to a girl really encroaches on being about fame. After the hiatus enforced on BTS by military service and solo efforts, the appeal of getting “lost” and swimming with no goal in sight seems like an appealing way of escaping the overwhelming global popstar routine, an escape that they were able to catch a glimpse of but can never fully distance from (“Gone away and I still wake up in this mad world / Name a place that I could breathe on this map, world” from RM’s verse). Unlike most synthpop pastiches, Spry and Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. take some interesting decisions with the lead synths, particularly how texturally, we switch from the percussive sprinkles of colour in the verses to the deweighted, phased-out chorus lead synth, accentuated with violin from Lecair. Like most of the album, it sounds massive, especially when the bass intermittently kicks into gear and with how drenched in reverb and echo the boys’ vocals are, j-hope’s especially basically sounding underwater. Hence the name, I suppose. Most interestingly, the track comes after “No. 29”, a drone track that strikes a historic Korean bronze bell and does not end until it’s completely rung out. It completely halts the album’s momentum and once we come back to “SWIM” from the more hip hop-oriented tracks, we get a BTS much less activated and dreaming of an escapist fantasy, launching off a stretch of melancholy tracks about this same subject like “Merry Go Round” and “NORMAL”. I could talk about a lot of other tracks – plenty I haven’t mentioned like “Hooligan”, “Aliens”, “2.0”, “Like Animals”, “One More Night”, “Please”, “Into the Sun” are among my favourites from the group. I understand the mixed reception given how maximalist some of it is, how some perceive it as overly Westernised, how unabashedly pop it is in sometimes egregious ways… but if I want anything from K-pop, it’s probably that. I loved this album, I’m curious to if any of this will last.

Conclusion