cactus

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

content warning: language, references to depression, childhood trauma

Rundown

As always, we start the episode with our notable dropouts, 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: “Tití Me Preguntó” by Bad Bunny, “Plastic Cigarette” by Zach Bryan, “Zoo” by Shakira from Disney’s Zootropolis 2 (good riddance to that damn gazelle) and finally, “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush.

Then we have our sole re-entry: “Messy” by Lola Young at #72, which is in and out constantly recently. As for songs already on the chart gaining, we have “Release the Pressure” by Calvin Harris and Kasabian at #58, “MAYBE.” by SIENNA SPIRO at #52 (more on her later), “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls at #48 (I told you Steve Aoki would revive the Antichrist last week) and last but far from least (Hell, probably most), “Talk to You” by ANOTR and 54 Ultra at #44. Yeah, there’s not much to this week.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “So Easy (to Fall in Love)” by Olivia Dean up to #5, followed by “Stateside” by PinkPantheress gaining at #4, last week’s #1 “American Girls” by Harry Styles down to #3, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay at #2 and of course, “Rein Me In”. We only have four debuts, pretty evenly split between where they appear on the chart, so let’s look into those.

New Entries

#66 – “Doesn’t Just Happen” – James Blake and Dave

Produced by James Blake, Dom Maker, Jameela Jamil and YouthXL

If you’re concerned or interested by the Jameela Jamil credit, it’s actually a long-term credit on many of James Blake’s tracks since they first started dating over 10 years ago. Given the quantity of credits, she seems pretty involved on the production side of things alongside another long-time collaborator of Blake’s, Dom Maker. Speaking of collaborators, it only seems right – after Blake produced Dave’s The Boy Who Played the Harp – that Dave appears on Blake’s new record Trying Times, which debuts at #3 on the UK albums chart and if I’m somewhat side-stepping actually getting into the depths of what I think about that album. My favourite tracks are all in the back half: “Days Go By”, “Rest of Your Life”, “Just a Little Higher”, to name a few. That’s not to say the album takes a long while to get going or even that it’s inconsistent because I found the album really interesting all throughout but the restraint shown by Blake in some aspects here, especially lyrically, make it kind of tough for me to have a concrete “opinion” on it like I feel I should have for this show. I was in a weird mind space listening to Trying Times because if I acknowledge the reality Blake’s channelling, trying to accept, I too understand I’m being puppeteered along the slow, hopeless ride, falling for every trap that awakens a passion I can ache into only for that to leave me cold. Cold like the garage drums, cold like the looping vocal blips, cold like the murmured falsetto deflating over chipmunk soul that’s been throated of its warmth. I honestly found it kind of challenging and pretty similar to the depressing material present on some of his unreleased work with Ye, some of which ended up being reworked for “Through the High Wire” on this album. I think the album in some ways is brilliant but to be completely honest, it made me feel like shit so I can’t exactly recommend it. There are moments that are just ethereal if you’re willing to sit with the numbness for long, it’s rewarding.

On an individual song level, a lot of these tracks can be difficult to talk about – or indeed, around – because outside of the album’s personal narrative, some of it can seem very defeatist and just depressing to discuss. “Doesn’t Just Happen” is one of those weird middling tracks – my first listen had me describe it as a “hard beat, but only kind of” – and Blake’s entire vocal presence is a pessimistic, heavily-processed warble that falling and staying in love is not realistic, just doesn’t happen. Good things just don’t happen. Over a grime beat with a gnarly synth and a pitch-shifted vocal blip that seems to be yelling “stop!” amidst other indecipherables, Blake’s lack of energy is ghostlike yet not haunting exactly. Just a dead man walking, with ugly electric guitars added to the beat occasionally, including to introduce Dave, who takes the song a little straightforwardly as you’d expect. I like his “work done” wordplay and his bolder, direct delivery that maintains some of his breathy whisper from his latest album is definitely fitting for the song thematically, especially when the verse is mostly about moral goodness seeming both impossible and not even a goal. All money is blood money. There’s the really striking line towards the end, “I got the country’s sins on finance”, which you can feel in the (abruptly-halted) build of synths after his verse, almost like as Blake hovers across the synths, the nation’s misdoings are spoken back into existence, brought back from forgiveness, in a burst of synths that is quickly evaporated. In terms of displaying a kind of grey, uniquely British moral apathy in chaos, one that isn’t tied to unawareness and consumption but doomscrolling and dread-queueing, aimless work with no direction or hope for progression… yeah, the album and this song does a great job, even if it’s not something anyone wants to hear right now. I’m glad to see Blake on the chart – the last time he charted to any degree with a song from his album was in 2019, thanks to Travis Scott – and he typically creates albums that I revisit years after and enjoy more than I do in the first year or so, so this one may strike me later on. I somewhat doubt it, though. For all of James Blake’s music, not all of it I’ve heard I admit, this seems pretty stuck in time. Trying times, you could say, if you’re cheap. And I am. Good shit, James.

#60 – “All I Did Was Dream of You” – beabadoobee featuring The Marías

Produced by Josh Conway, Jason Vance Harris, Gianluca Buccelatti and Alessandro Buccelatti

Two of the most popular indie pop acts right now, Filipina-English beabadoobee and Latin American-fronted band The Marías, have teamed up for a transatlantic duet that, much like James Blake and Dave, seems like an easy and obvious match, though in this case, the two are working with each other for the first time. Releasing alongside a music video filmed in the deathly-freezing capital of Lithuania, the track seems almost too safe. You’ve got wet guitars spiralled under the tap of percussion in the intro that then fills out the track with little warmth, beabadoobee pleading for the ease of intimacy to last forever. It starts off hazier, builds into the electric guitars and a less passive vocal that aches of the insecurities connected to why the ease of this relationship means so much to her – it reflects everything she wants to feel about herself and her self-esteem would be at a loss without the partner if they can’t stay. If not for some mythical backing vocals that layer their coated whisper onto the lead take in María Zardoya’s verse, the two singers would be pretty interchangeable and I really dislike how little impact her verse, which takes the song into crisis point, actually has on the song’s tone or themes other than some crunchy guitars and a dreamy outro. I really like softer and sincere female-fronted alternative rock like this usually but this doesn’t capture me at all, seems like an idea for a great song aborted halfway through with less degree of lyrical detail or vocal character than I think I’d want from even a song trying much less to tug at the heartstrings. Really not a fan.

#19 – “Porch Light” – Noah Kahan

Produced by Noah Kahan, Aaron Dessner and Gabe Simon

Zooming all the way up to the top 20, we have Noah Kahan, recruiting folk go-to Aaron Dessner alongside his usual Gabe Simon for another single from his upcoming record, The Great Divide. The lyrical content on this one is pretty intriguing and definitely right up my alley of interest like a lot of Kahan’s writing (the execution is always my problem with him). A meta song singing from his family’s perspective, Kahan had not expected the fame that would come with Stick Season and its personal content that has formed a deal of baggage onto his continued success and performance, specifically from how his upbringing was treated in those songs and the effect it’s had on his mother, Lauri, who grapples with the previously private emotions she would know about her son being physically distant while he’s on tour and also “all over the Internet”. It’s like sending your kid to college except the effect some of that upbringing, maybe even some dirty laundry from childhood, has had on him is now on all sorts of radio stations. Kahan pokes fun at his own poetics here by saying from his mother’s perspective that after telling him what the weather is, he’ll run into some kind of tangeant (“eloquently ramblin’ mixed-messaging”) that is far detached from the comfort of the domestic which had now been opened up to a public that, coming from rural Vermont, isn’t always going to understand the sticks and its consequent sacrifices. Still, Lauri leaves the porch light on hoping for her son to truly come back home, not the “ghost” of a folk singer who can call from the road, even though Kahan as Lauri acknowledges that both Noah as a person and Noah as a celebrity is in some way her fault. Narratively, I find this a great way to break open some of the issues with becoming famous from personal, storytelling lyrics and having the fact blur into the fictive image, with this being something I would be super interested in hearing more of from people of his ilk like Zach Bryan who has painted some much less flattering pictures of himself than of people in his life. With how close and parasocial fans have been able to become in the Internet age and with super-confessional writers like Kahan in the public eye, this isn’t overdone territory, this is great insight into a perspective that we as an audience barely consider because of the producer-consumer dynamic we share with even our favourite artists. Kahan’s frailer, inconsistent voice breaks and droning refrains over more typical jangling acoustics sound pretty defeated, reflecting how his mother knows she can’t win over her son’s drive to succeed and that to some extent, she probably feels bad for being this far on the outside to someone who writes about her, to her, because of her. It’s a really moving song and one of my favourites from Kahan thus far.

#11 – “The Visitor” – SIENNA SPIRO

Produced by Omer Fedi, Michael Pollack and SIENNA SPIRO

Already juggling multiple hits, Ms. SPIRO has returned with her follow-up, written and produced with the pop veterans who were also partly responsible for her biggest hit, “Die on this Hill”. I haven’t been too into SPIRO’s hits so far except for “You Stole the Show” and I’m less optimistic with the involvement of people like Fedi and Pollack who don’t tend to emphasise their clients’ most interesting tendencies (quite the opposite, typically), but we’ve not heard much from SPIRO so how does the new hit stack up? Well, let’s start with the themes – SPIRO told her crowd at KOKO that she has always felt like “the Visitor” in her life, fearing temporality and wanting to keep such close hold and control over relationships in her life that she ends up losing them prematurely, breaking them, and you know, I can relate to this feeling. I wouldn’t describe myself as a “visitor” necessarily – fearing the natural expiration date of feelings is pretty natural, especially when you’re young and things are changing, and I think it’s interesting to frame this as the “visitor” popping in instead of having them all shift around you, making you the centre of the track. The thing is… I don’t think that’s the honest approach. Bear with me here: the chorus frames this ephemeral “visitor” as specifically in a moment of intimacy where she doesn’t feel worth the comfort in their arms, with this being explored further in the second verse wherein her reaction to wanting to make an impression on someone makes her baggage to forget (“I want to be remembered so I get hysterical”). The song, despite the use of the word “visitor”, does centre SIENNA, because the person who acknowledges themselves as “the visitor” understands that a visit is an event, it’s something you prepare for, it’s something you bring in the grand, largely unaccompanied strings and vocal belts for, it’s something you anticipate the slow build of. There’s a deep-seated irony in saying you’re the “visitor” to express that you have less meaning or value to people because yes, whilst that time could be amazing but you’ll inevitably have to part ways, you don’t know the long-lasting impact of that. When you’re removed from someone’s life, that impact could be permanent, you’re just not in the know about it. The visit can be as grand as this song or as mild as the James Blake track, but even “the visitor” doesn’t stop existing, they just stop being there. This ballad, sung with all her heart and strength, is the attempt to envision herself as permanent, to impose herself as more than the visitor, but it recalls upon small, intimate moments as dramatically as possible. As much as I’m not over the Moon about SPIRO, like “You Stole the Show”, this did make me think a great deal about its framing and how the song being somewhat barebones lends into that. I’m not going to say I’m a  big fan but I connected to it and really, what else would be the aim?

Conclusion

content warning: language

Rundown

As always, we start with our notable dropouts, which are songs existing 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: “Always Everywhere” by Charli xcx, “NUEVAYoL” by Bad Bunny, “What You Saying” by Lil Uzi Vert, “YUKON” by Justin Bieber getting a move-on and “Messy” by Lola Young.

Now as for our re-entries, we have a quite a few at the very bottom here: “Plastic Cigarette” by Zach Bryan at #75, “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan at #74, “NO BATIDÃO” by ZXKAI and slxughter at #73 (sigh) and “That’s So True” by Gracie Abrams at #70, followed by our notable gains, those being “Stay (if You Wanna Dance)” by Myles Smith at #66, “MAYBE.” by SIENNA SPIRO at #60, “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls at #57 (yep, one of those weeks, check out the new Steve Aoki remix if you’re not in the business of self-respect), “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone at #51 (I like the song, I can’t defend this still being around), “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers at #47 (oh, come on), “E85” by Don Toliver at #44, “Steady” and “The Sick” by Bella Kay at #49 and #33 respectively, “White Keys” by Dominic Fike at #19, “Into the Groove” by Madonna at #18 and finally, “Dracula” by Tame Impala at #17.

The top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with Harry Styles, whose album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally becomes his third to top the UK albums chart, with “Ready, Steady, Go!” debuting at #5, “Aperture” up to #4 and of course, “American Girls” is at the top. Meanwhile, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay is at #3 and “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean is at #2. Now let’s look into our smaller list of songs debuting below before we get to Harold.

New Entries

#67 – “God Was Showing Off” – Bruno Mars

Produced by Bruno Mar and D’Mile

That is not a typo, or at least not mine. On desktop Spotify, or at least whatever update version I’m on, the production credits list this song as being produced by Bruno Mar, with an invisible performer credit to the strings conductor Larry Gold. I don’t exactly know what’s going on there, maybe I’m just bugged, but either way, this is the fourth track on Mar’s The Romantic, in the mid-section of the record which generally contains its highlights. Though not my favourite, “God Was Showing Off” is very nice, though like the rest of the tracks from the album, don’t give me too much to discuss. You can read the last episode to hear more of my thoughts on the album as a whole but I am a sucker for horn sections and this is a warm, full-sounding set of horns for sure, with a Spanish count-in and Daniel Rodriguez on the congas giving it the Latin soul flavour present on The Romantic overall. The conceit of the song is incredibly dumb, really, and I don’t say that to make fun of the song, I mean that the content Bruno is selling is completely lovestruck, making goofy puns about how when God created this woman he’s singing to, he was flexing his… skills of human creation, I guess. It even has a corny spoken word passage that leads into a chant of “Hallelujah” in the bridge. It’s kind of adorable, you could probably make some kind of point about the religious angle if you really want to get into the weeds of a track that repeats the phrase “flexin’ up in Heaven”, but I don’t think that’s necessary. “I bet you could walk on water, can’t you, girl? And then you could turn that water into wine”. It may be a little derivative, it doesn’t really have a dramatic moment that really pushes it over the edge, but it’s a light-hearted track that Bruno could probably have sleep-walked but decided to full-send which I always respect with him, even when he’s making songs about gorillas. Okay, actually, I don’t respect that one.

#53 – “Talk to You” – ANOTR and 54 Ultra

Produced by ANOTR, Jackson Shanks and Hank Korsan

Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell are Anotr and 54 Ultra? Are those even people or Xbox usernames? So, ANOTR are a Dutch DJ duo who released this track alongside an announcement for the return of what seems to be some kind of festival project, No Art, whilst the song’s vocalist 54 Ultra is a Latin soul act based in New Jersey and turns out I’ve already listened to both of these acts, who both have songs in the millions of streams. 54 Ultra I only technically heard without knowing because he produced a track off of Kali Uchis’ latest album but ANOTR have literally been reviewed on this series before. I suppose they really must have been that anonymous, but “Relax My Eyes” with Abel Balder peaked at #33 in 2023 whilst “Paint the Town Red” by Doja Cat was #1 and yes, I did check out my old review. Get this: when I reviewed “Relax My Eyes”, I also said “Okay, I’ll bite: who the Hell are these people?”. I did not line that up, I promise, I just did not remember, though on revisiting that song, it’s a pretty nice song with more organic disco elements than you typically get in house. Given 54 Ultra’s a soul act, I expected the same for this and yeah, we get a super slick guitar riff making up the back of the track alongside a solid house groove. Despite the funk guitar not coming in at the start of the track, it’s still pretty immediate with the initial keys – what isn’t is 54 Ultra, who does some kind of Joji impression though much less laidback and closer to a kind of 80s talk-singing than the singer whose voice he just instantly reminded me of. What will take you by surprise is the brief vocoder break in the chorus, coming alongside a sudden sprinkle of super sugary synths, it’s basically bubblegum. Obviously, on a track like this, the lyrics are mostly just vague lines about love and dancing, but I do appreciate how the structure centres the track around a repeating verse between the two choruses, with quieter sirens and a lead vocal that gets increasingly filtered, eventually reaching full vocoder cheese as the drums pick back up into gear and none of that sickly sweet nonsense ends up back in the guitar rhythm that essentially just got Ctrl+V’d into the end to replace all the tension that had been made. It’s a super breezy track, almost reminds me of some classic French house, I really hope this sticks around. Hey,  maybe I should stop forgetting these guys exist and check out more of their damn music.

#43 – “New Religion” – Bebe Rexha and Faithless

Produced by Punctual, Neave Applebaum, William Lansley and Bebe Rexha

As you may have been able to guess from the co-lead artist, our story starts in 1995, but let’s stick to the present for now. Bebe Rexha described “New Religion” as her “love letter to music”, particularly the dance music that helps her during rough periods of depression by just making her feel something. One of her first singles since going independent, Rexha’s fans were who convinced her to include a bridge, the part of the song that gained some viral traction, because after her last project excluded bridges to fit in with the era of shorter songs, her fans complained and she retroactively added the section to the song. The track will appear on the upcoming Dirty Blonde coming in June, with music videos for all of its 13 tracks ambitiously filmed within just three days.

Rexha was on Faithless’ album last year so it makes sense they’d grant her the sample, which comes from their 1995 progressive house classic “Insomnia” from their debut album Reverence, written by the band’s members Sister Bliss, Rollo Armstrong and the late Maxi Jazz who, despite his memorable rap verses on the track, wasn’t actually an insomniac. He had recently suffered a painful dental injury and his electricity meter was going out but all of this will still make you lose sleep and it naturally struck a chord with clubbers. Personally, I find the radio edit super lacking but the original track over eight minutes does a much better job at reflecting a sleepless night, mirroring Underworld’s approach at the time which were super lengthy builds followed by a bit of an explosion by the end, as described by Sister Bliss herself. You can read more about the making of “Insomnia” here if you’re interested. It was a surprise hit for the group, peaking at #27 on its initial release, quickly disappearing then reappearing on the charts with a much higher peak of #3 upon re-release in 1996, whilst the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll be There” was #1. “Insomnia” would intermittently re-appear from 1997 onwards, with a long chart run from 2005 to 2006 (thanks to a remix tied to their greatest hits album… though not actually on it) and most recently appearing in 2015. It even crossed over Stateside during the 90s, which was impressive for a UK house act and across all versions, “Insomnia” spent 64 weeks on the UK Singles Chart… and now, technically, I guess a 65th.

How does “New Religion” treat the sample? Well, you’ll immediately hear the iconic synth melody in both the lead pads and the verse and chorus melody, wherein Rexha does an “I’m Good (Blue)” sticking in lyrics to the melody. Sadly, very little of the atmosphere from “Insomnia” remains though I can see why the song actually does a lot to respect the original’s themes. “I can’t get no sleep” becoming a bit of a signature line for club culture at the time exemplifies dancing as a release, even if that good time is just another reason why you’re not getting any sleep, though I think Maxi Jazz made a great decision not to include that in the original lyrics which are focused on the domestic, the final synth drop (alongside all the atmosphere preceding it) being a representation of the mental anguish that being sleep-deprived can come with. So what Rexha is doing is part taking the subtext into the text, part reappropriating Maxi Jazz’s sleepless suffering to reflect her own depression and I honestly love that conceptually. At the end of the day, though, it is just a clunky remix of a classic song that feels tailor-made for a UK club night and UK radio. The drums hit well enough and the vocals are super-processed with some really clunky lyrics – I understand the “new religion” conceit but it results in some choice lines like “I found my purpose in the churches filled with neon lights” that just seem a little on-the-nose in the way that, sure, a lot of house music is, but specifically not “Insomnia”. Maxi Jazz’s defeated rap is straightforward but it’s not really got a conceit or hook in the way Bebe Rexha’s song does so, for many other reasons as well, it ends up feeling a little realer. I don’t know, I like the concept of what this means for her, I like the goofy turntable-like vocal chop at the end which does bring some very 90s energy to an otherwise plastic, sleek house track. Without the “Insomnia” sample, it really would just be any old Punctual beat. I wish there was a little more to all of it but it at least does have an interesting enough connection to the track it’s riffing from – both outside and inside the lyrics – and I’ll take that over any old dance sample flip. Hope it works out for her on the charts.

#5 – “Ready, Steady, Go!” – Harry Styles

Produced by Kid Harpoon

I haven’t given Harry’s awkwardly-titled new record that many listens since its release but as someone who was basically never impressed with Styles’ dull throwback stuff – neither the 70s glam rock, disco or 80s new wave pastiches he lazily tried out in the past – I was pretty happy with his blend of progressive house, 90s alternative dance and even some Britpop elements. Now is that partly because I’m, as I’m going to eloquently state, an “alt-dance Andy”? Yeah, that probably plays a part, but I liked how the album’s arrangements built in a less conventional way, with the best songs pulling themselves in and out on Harry’s signature restraint and having slightly wonky progressions that help the gooey synths feel surprisingly subtle. The earlier section of the album particularly had some oddly rounded-out songs, including a few that followed the trend of “Aperture” of sounding pretty cool past the two-minute mark but having a rough way getting there and no idea what to do with the rest. That’s pretty much my opinion on the decent third track, “Ready, Steady, Go!”.

The song’s title points towards its narrative about an unpredictable relationship going much faster than expected and leading to some imbalances between the two in not just how they’re feeling about the relationship but how their brains are wired and hence how they react to the relationship. I don’t exactly know who “Leon” is in the chorus but having a friend to call and vent to or just feel more relaxed with compared to even the most freeing, euphoric moments with Harry, is probably really worthwhile to his partner for some downtime. Though they call Leon “only in [Harry’s] head” which I genuinely have no idea what that means. Leon is referred to as an “it”, assuming these subsequent lines are connected, meaning that “Leon” might just means a broader safe space that she tries to seek comfort in but regardless spends that time with Harry, a space where she can be free, joyous… but if the relationship’s going so fast, maybe not so safe? “You’ve got enough while we do too much” could also point to what the chorus is referring to, that the idea of “Leon” – the idea of his partner’s existing comfort and safety without him – only exists as a tension in Harry’s head, a paranoia that she will be… you know what, I don’t think he’s saying anything. Part of what I liked about the album were some of the subtle abstractities in the lyrics that are faced against minimal, bassy grooves and a plenty few stretched-out vocal fragments you can hear in the intro and chorus on this song. I was basing my transcription of the lyrics based on Genius which was based on the official lyric video, but the first half of the chorus is practically mumbled and the second half is distorted to shit, with neither fitting perfectly in even “official” interpretations. I think that this is the song’s greatest strength though! The unpolished murmur over acoustics are flattened immediately by his distorted vocal, Tom Skinner’s heavy drums and incessant beeping synth – I think the vocals are reflective more so of a blur that reaches to vague ideas of words, doesn’t really get there, because the relationship’s momentum has no time for articulating what exactly is happening. After the two-minute mark, the song devolves into a mantra of “ready, steady, go!”, incorporating some more faint yelling (panned across the mix) and some jaunty keys straight out of a children’s theme song. It’s an interesting little song though on its own fails to really feel complete, given the following track, “Are You Listening Yet?” (more on that in a little bit), has a more effective build and fits more solidly with the album’s themes. “Ready, Steady, Go!” is almost a first take for what some of the ideas across the album could sound like and it was too catchy not to leave on the cutting room floor.

#1 – “American Girls” – Harry Styles

Produced by Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson

This one… yeah, whatever progression or deviation from how I typically receive Styles’ records that was present in the rest of the album is just void here, this song’s the easy dud and also the easy hit. Described by Harry as “quite a lonely song in a lot of ways”, the track arrived with a stunt-filled music video and an explanation of the lyrics (not that they really needed any), being that Harry is still single and exploring – what he saw as “having all the fun” – whilst his closest friend don’t just hook up with American girls, they get married and settle down, prompting Harry to think about where and how he wants his life to develop. Now, I’ve never held much weight in Harry Styles being a compelling popstar or compelling songwriter, let alone person, and this song is therefore possibly the least interesting thing to me conceptually, though to be fair to Harry, the magic that people find with their long-time partners is an aspirational bond that isn’t far from what he looks for in some other tracks from the album though struggles to confront them. Hell, “Are You Listening Yet?”, possibly my favourite ever solo song from Harry, at its core has the same tension as “American Girls”: confront and reflect yourself and your own habits, don’t just absorb yourself in the wash, ask yourself questions about your life that you can’t afford to ignore. I think my problems here are twofold – firstly, the song’s just stiff as shit with those tistling drums, the chorus melody being so flat and sold in a register I don’t really like from Harry, the melodic elements being limited to some basic piano, wonky outro synths and a watery mix that drenches every lethargic moment. Secondly, the framing is focused specifically on the girls and trades any of the insight that Harry could have brought to the song (and has kind of done outside of the song itself) for frankly lazy lyrics that emulate the level of airheaded self-awareness you’d get from hair metal. The song, as described by Harry, doesn’t really exist in the same sense, it just flounders into nothing with a sorry excuse for a bridge. It’s not awful to me because there’s simply not much to it but it’s kind of close for also that exact reason. Give me something, Harold.

My other favourites from the album I hadn’t mentioned were “Taste Back”, “The Waiting Game”, “Season 2 Weight Loss”, “Pop” and “Carla’s Song”, and who knows? We may see some of these chart in the next few weeks if they become fan favourites with three-song-rule switcheroos, just like Bruno this very week, but for now, I guess we’ll have to stick with “American Girls”. If you want a song I like about the same topic – even with the same title – check out John B’s dated satirical synthpop tune from 2002 about the girls in California making him hornier. Following that, never trust my taste on anything again.

Conclusion

content warning: language, references to grieving, abusive relationships, trauma, sexual misconduct and existential dread

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: “ICEMAN FREESTYLE” by 2026 BRIT Awards nominee Central Cee, “Boys Don’t Cry” by The Cure (which, according to the Official Charts Company, has now had two separate six-week runs that peaked at #22 40 years apart), “A Couple Minutes” by British Artist of the Year, Best Pop Act and winner of both album and song awards Olivia Dean (more on her later), “Gone Gone Gone” by David Guetta, Teddy Swims and Tones and I, “You Stole the Show” by BRITs nominee SIENNA SPIRO, “Soda Pop” by the “Saja Boys” (the voices of Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Danny Chung, KEVIN WOO and samUIL Lee) from the BRIT Award-nominated KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack (their co-stars HUNTR/X performed), “TIT FOR TAT” by Tate McRae, “Folded” by Kehlani and finally, “WILDFLOWER” by Billie Eilish.

I haven’t watched the BRITs ceremony for a couple years, honestly, but it’s evidently one of the most important nights in British popular music, if not much else, with performances, wins and nominations usually leading to at least some chart boost, especially if you release a single alongside a performance of it… which Alex Warren didn’t do for whatever reason (he did “Ordinary” with… James Blunt) but another British awards show is somehow still in the news cycle anyway and the single has done numbers regardless, as you’ll see. You can also see this year’s BRIT Awards winners in full on their website here. Also, for some reason, Ghostface Killah was there. As for what did return to the charts, this includes the presenter of the BRITs Breakthrough Artist award, Myles Smith’s “Stay (if You Wanna Dance)” at #74, the winner of the BRITs Breakthrough Artist award, Lola Young’s “Messy” at #73, “Eternity” by BRITs nominee and performer Alex Warren at #71 and, completely unrelated, “Into the Groove” by Madonna at #40. A childhood favourite dance song of mine, “Into the Groove” returns off the back of some viral success, though interestingly, the song it was a B-side for, “Angel”, was actually in the latest season of Stranger Things. “Into the Groove” was Madonna’s first #1 hit in the UK, spending four weeks there in 1985 and charting briefly again in ’86 before returning again in ’89 as a double A-side with “Who’s that Girl”, though any peak post-1985 has been in the lowest crevices of the chart until now. The classic 80s tune’s four weeks at #1 dethroned the Eurythmics’ “There Must be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)” and went on to block Madonna’s own “Holiday” (also a great song, though my favourite from this era is “Lucky Star”) and UB40’s duet version of “I Got You Babe” with Chrissie Hynde, which did end up dethroning Madonna at the top soon after. Though like most of Madonna’s hits, the song has been widely covered and sampled, only a few have reached the charts, namely Mirage’s medley of Madonna tracks re-sung by Tracy Ackerman including its titular “Into the Groove” peaking at #87 later in 1986 and Dannii Minogue’s 2003 hit “Don’t Wanna Lose this Feeling” which, whilst not sampling Madonna on the album version, featured a mashup remix on the single that brought it to a #5 peak whilst Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” was #1.

Meanwhile, our notable gains include “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac at #68 (Mick Fleetwood famously having fumbled his BRITs hosting stint in 1989), “Release the Pressure” by BRITs nominee Calvin Harris and Kasabian at #56, “E86” by Don Toliver at #50, “The Sick” by Bella Kay at #41 (more on her later), “Share the House” by Ewan McVicar at #38, “back to friends” by BRITS nominee and performer sombr at #36 (he performed a medley of this with “undressed”, including a scripted on-stage ambush, sigh), “White Keys” by Dominic Fike at #27, “Dracula” by BRITs nominee Tame Impala at #22 and finally, “Aperture” by Harry Styles, who did indeed perform the song at the BRIT Awards, at #10.

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “So Easy (to Fall in Love)” by Olivia Dean down to #5 and “Stateside” by BRITs Producer of the Year PinkPantheress at #4 followed by the big debut of the week: Alex Warren’s “FEVER DREAM” debuting at #3. More on that later, it’s an interesting move from him, but there’s plenty else debuting too so… “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay is at #2, you know what’s at #1, now let’s get into those.

New Entries

#72 – “The Moon Cave” – Gorillaz featuring Asha Puthli, Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Jalen Ngonda and Black Thought

Produced by Gorillaz, James Ford, Damon Albarn, Samuel Egglenton and Remi Kabaka Jr.

I don’t think there’s time and space in what is one #72 debut to gush about the new album from Damon Albarn’s virtual band Gorillaz, The Mountain. In what is both a tribute to their late collaborators and a spiritual successor to their earlier conceptual records, particularly Plastic Beach which had some of its unused material repurposed for the new record, The Mountain is the most pronounced, colourful and contemplative the output from Damon has been in a decade and change apart from brief flashes of brilliance across the last few records. It’s a slower listen, I can understand why it may not be to other people’s tastes – some people are just sick of the synthpop at this point, I understand, though this is the most textured they’ve been since The Fall and it helps that elements of Hindustani classical music and psychedelia surround the more signature, laidback electronics this time around. Personally, as a big fan of Gorillaz, this is the kind of album it feels like we’ve been missing, and I couldn’t be happier to have it, let alone see it debut at #1 on the UK albums chart.

“The Moon Cave” – the song featured in the album’s accompanying short film from Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett alongside the introductory title track instrumental and the closing track “The Sad God” – is the one top 75 debut from the album this week. The Mountain expands on what we first heard from the lead single “The Happy Dictator”, incorporating Damon’s personal losses in his family and collaborators into an album tackling the idea of a world, tragically close to how our own sometimes feels, with no “news”, wherein we are completely numb to tragedy, it may as well not exist, influenced by travels to unconventional countries like Turkmenistan. This isn’t a perfect world though, just one with no bad news. If it were perfect, it would mean something – Damon as the fictional lead singer “2D” has his voice cut and muted in this new “Moon Cave” (which you’d think would echo that voice). The chorus gazes upon “the vastness of the river” and how “they’ve done [him]”, made him empty and unwilling to do anything but succumb to the underwhelming world around him and… give up, just like those elongating the suffering want you to (the hook on “Casablanca” comes to mind too on this topic). Damon / 2D is bringing himself to the Moon Cave, wanting to face his fears and worries and the therapy-esque backing vocal of “You must wash all your perfume from your body” has the dual effect of allowing for calm and rendering him mute to what he came there with – the illumination of his childhood fears has washed away from him. This isn’t just defeatist though as Indian singer Asha Puthli sings in the second verse – “You will never recognise me again” – referencing the Hindu practice of Ahamkara, stripping the ego, losing your past self, before you can reach liberation. Puthli is one of many guest features on this song, though none as prominent as Black Thought, who initially builds his verse around fragments from the late Dave Jolicoeur also known as Trugoy the Dove from De La Soul (“I can float like a butterfly, give me any topic” – samples of Trugoy italicised). That approach to including small fragments of late collaborators’ voices across the album, echoing or implemented into the song’s structure, is one of its most striking features and the late and legendary Bobby Womack appears on the introduction in a similar capacity. Black Thought’s verse emulates some of the abstractness of De La Soul or even Del the Funky Homosapien on earlier Gorillaz rap collabs as he searches for where the source of his pain is – technology, religion, who knows and does it matter? – before realising, well, if the revolution needs voices, it may as well be him and he’s going to bring all this confused passion to it. The best moment in this song comes right after though, with a small speech sample of Womack saying, almost framed in response, “Maybe I should just wait, just a little bit… forgetting bothers me”. Not only does it put Black Thought’s verse into perspective (and put tears on my face) by evoking someone beyond their life, still looking down on his fellow musicians and taking his time up there, but it sombrely reminds the listener that sometimes it’s best to wait, even if the time you take to regain yourself is time that’ll be taken from you. You’d rather remember yourself than lose it fighting for a cause but every step you take back into acceptance is a stroll into the numbness that will eventually consume us all. Like most of the album’s themes, it’s a hard truth with no answers.

I should say the song just sounds great too, with the strings in the intro stretching out under Puthli’s mantra of “Love me” and Womack’s “watching” vocal, evoking his track on Plastic Beach, “Cloud of Unknowing”, forming from a Hindustani classical sound into a couple disco stabs to lead into the blockier synth-based instrumentation with a subtly tense beeping texture and layers of vocal surrounding Damon’s typically isolated and filtered vocal, whether it be the left and right channels both reassuring a kind of induced therapy through very different repeated vocal samples or the soulful chop of “again and again…” that builds into each chorus, which I think is Maryland singer Jalen Ngonda, who lends his chops to the shifting bridge that serves as the base for the first half of Black Thought’s verse. Once his confidence is less assured and he starts asking questions – “can it fit into the corner pocket?” – these vocals dissipate and a sterned, weedy synth leads in like an alarm ringing you’re too far from to bother getting out of bed to turn off. It’s honestly not Black Thought’s smoothest verse on the album but its chaotic nature lends to clunkier flows, ones he absolutely makes up for on the aforementioned “The Sad God” and “The Empty Dream Machine”. The flutes that end the track are phenomenal, it’s a warming presence to hear his friendly laugh at the tail-end, though one that’s pretty hallowing with the context of “Happy Dictator” succeeding it on the tracklist. Okay, yes, I know that was a lot, but this is my favourite album of the year so far and “Moon Cave”, though not my absolute favourite, demonstrates some of its strongest themes. As for what my favourites were… well, the Black Thought tracks I mentioned prior, “Sad God” with Ajay Prasanna and “Empty Dream Machine” with Johnny Marr (both also feature Anoushka Shankar), as well as the tear-jerking “The Sweet Prince” with Prasanna, Marr and Shankar, “The Shadowy Light” with Prasanna, Ashla Bhosle, Gruff Rhys and Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bhangash, “Damascus” with Omar Souleyman and Yasiin Bey, “Delirium” with the late Mark E. Smith and the perfect two-handed single of “The Hardest Thing” with the late Tony Allen and “Orange County” with Bizarrap, Kara Jackson and Shankar (which is at #94 this week). “Orange County” and “Damascus” are smash hits… only in the world with no bad news. Now for… everything else.

#66 – “My Loving” – Sonny Fodera and Chrystal

Produced by Sonny Fodera

Listen, I was surprised that BRITs nominee Chrystal got the BRIT-nominated “The Days”, even if I liked how sparse it was. I wasn’t expecting a #1 hit with MK to follow it up with in “Dior” and I honestly still wasn’t expecting her to keep appearing on the charts the year after, this time with Sonny Fodera who has produced many a dance hit I actually quite like. Chrystal’s previous hits have been somewhat minimal and lifeless – by design, and sometimes very effectively – but that isn’t exactly Fodera’s style, so I was interested in how this would turn out. Turns out that it, spoiler alert, is the best song this week that isn’t “The Moon Cave”. Yeah, I almost don’t know exactly why but it’s an incredibly simple song, basically copy-pasting itself and not even including a ton of effects or sound design that you may expect from a Sonny Fodera track, there are parts that feel that they might even be lacking something which is really great to hear after a chorus that holds a warbling bass synth against your ear alongside chopped, layered vocals from Chrystal that add up and nearly replace each other in an overlapping chaos that makes for a great, catchy chorus but tonally incoherent, with fragments of sentences and moments in this relationship splattered across the drums as it’s likely about to end and… really nonchalantly! Chrystal gives mixed messages, the verse saying she needs time and space and the pre-chorus saying that she can’t call this person her “boo” anymore because they left her when she needed someone, but those mixed messages likely come from a relationship that is that unstable, where the time and effort is fuelled into the wrong places. It’s a pretty profoundly sad song, really, especially when the main initial hook of that second chorus places “holdin’ me, kissin’ me” against the fragment “wanted to forget” (cut short at the start). This relationship isn’t a simple case wherein people drifted apart or there’s one villain, it seems like the accounts contrast each other, and Chrystal’s vocals are appropriately really limited. Despite being a piano house song, it feels a lot realer about how it handles relationships by allowing those questions to emerge. Possibly they really weren’t there when she needed them and has tried to compensate pitifully afterwards, possibly that person wasn’t who she needed, possibly she’s mixing up events, possibly these are separate accounts of different ex-partners – the only thing connecting everything is that it’s all in a song called “My Loving” which, I mean, that’s all her. The song doesn’t have a larger-than-life drop either, with that second chorus reaching an apex and then floundering a bit with generic pianos and those frantic drum fills. I love the airy backing vocals surrounding the pre-chorus against the driving bass and a piercing synth barely in the mix, with the outro further isolating parts of the hook, leaving them without resolve, as if they seemed like they were going to in the first place. The song sounds like the text messages sent in a panic, the thoughts of regret that surround them, the inability to retract what you’ve said and done leading to an insecurity that forces a restraint not even a club floor-filling beat can fully alleviate. I love this one, I recommend it even if you haven’t liked anything from Chrystal before.

#63 – “Steady” – Bella Kay

Produced by Idarose

On the 11th of February, Bella Kay released a three-track single “a couple minutes out”, consisting of “iloveitiloveitiloveit”, the closing “wonder wander” (my favourite of the three) and this track, “Steady”, the only one not in lowercase for whatever reason. Like “iloveit” (3x), this song was produced by Idarose, incorporating a very similar blend of acoustic guitars and reverb-affected vocals, with Kay sounding particularly like she could be anyone else in this song. It was the one dud of that three-track single for me because it seems the most ignorable, even if I love the harmonies in the chorus and the breathier moments of vulnerability picking at the stabler chorus and verse melodies do accentuate the song’s conceit that without self-love and improving how she thinks about and treats herself, she can’t effectively give love to anyone else and therefore perpetually thinks of herself as not prepared for a relationship. The problem here is just with unmoving production – I know, why would the production do much if that’s what the song is about? Well, life moves on even if you don’t move on from a gripe or insecurity. People stay single for a while and whilst one may feel in this situation that they’re unable to keep going or function in a society that expects them to be ready for relationships, especially since this song is seemingly about a person they’re already close with, the truth is that this can span a series of life events and that belief that she’s too immature for a relationship is likely spawned from those delaying her, not letting her have enough time to build that self-esteem. It would be great if something over than looping acoustics and faint drums soundtracked this kind of feeling, it just feels a little underdeveloped and not having that haunting effect “iloveit” (3x) does through its minimalism. It’s still fine enough, which is pretty much the theme of this week, but I do wish there was more.

#48 – “Walk” – Skye Newman

Produced by Boo and Luis Navidad

One of 2025’s breakout stars and BRITs nominee Skye Newman is back with her first release of 2026, “Walk”, presumably a lead single for part two of the SE9 EP but perhaps for an entirely different project. “Walk” focuses on a toxic relationship chewing at her confidence and becoming an incredibly unhealthy tit-for-tat-like dynamic, one that she regrets letting get to this point even if there is some boost of confidence accrued from fighting back at the now exhausting aggressor of the relationship, with an exemplar back-and-forth being “So what you want to say now? / I ain’t really got that much to say”. The partner picks at her and she only has crumbs left to gather a response, threatening physical violence instead, and I do appreciate how she lets those rougher moments show on record – it’s all too true that abusive or at least controlling relationships can get physical based on just a constant stream of shit-slinging that’s unbearable at a given point. Toxic relationships aren’t unfamiliar territory for her and neither are the producers, who have been working with her for this entire breakthrough run of songs, though this instrumental specifically is right up my alley, with hazed-out reversed vocal chops and slow, plodding drums that doesn’t line up exactly with the melodic elements, though they’re not at odds, more just stretching out of alignment with each other, with a kind of defeated slumber that the song’s more straightforward lyrics greatly benefit from. Some more organic elements such as a guitar melody and pianos come in to bring some soul into the unstable production that almost reminds me of cloud rap, but they feel a little alien to the song, as if those normalities of relationships you might hear in a less honest song aren’t familiar to her, aren’t even worth keeping around (with that great warped cut in the beat in the second verse). Part of why the song works is her continuance in defending and sticking with this guy despite everything because there’s too much effort to have gotten to the point where the relationship even exists, so the final admission, the power she has to cut him off and walk away, is kind of a weighty one, and that drop into the chorus feels chambering for such an subdued song outside of Newman’s vocals. Newman’s lyrics are a bit clunky as they always have been and it’s that and the lack of a true outro that mean I can’t call this great. Honestly, I could have done with a completely unrelated ambient passage as the outro, maybe some birdsong, something freeing after this weight has been lifted, but I understand that the next track on whatever project this ends up on will probably show just how much this relationship still dents into her psyche so I’ll give the outro some grace. On its own, surprisingly good song, mostly on the back of a beat that is basically perfect for my taste, but still a sign of promise to come from Newman, who I’ve been a bit mixed on.

#47 – “Cha Cha Cha” – Bruno Mars

Produced by Bruno Mars and D’Mile

BRIT Award winner Bruno Mars’ new nine-track album The Romantic debuts at #3 on the UK albums chart this week and it is completely serviceable, cute perhaps. Mars sticks to a Latin soul throwback sound for much of the record, selling everything with the drama of a Las Vegas wedding singer even when there was no need and that’s part of the appeal. Personally, I found there to be only a few tracks of the already few on there I found to be all that interesting outside of just executing a romantic sound pretty earnestly, and our debuts here aren’t really my favourites (“Why You Wanna Fight?” and “On My Soul” were), but they’re far from bad and they’re designed to be perfectly inoffensive. The two debuts are the two opening tracks, “Cha Cha Cha” being the second, and are the most Latin-influenced, with this being a heartful request for an attractive woman to dance with him (I wonder why that’s familiar) over a bossa nova-style arrangement. If you thought it was all too wholesome and family-friendly, well… so did Bruno, as he decided to tack on a laughable interpolation of the late Soulja Slim’s hook from New Orleans rapper JUVENILE’s classic “Slow Motion”. I mean, I love that song, it’s one of the best Hot 100 #1s in my personal opinion, but it feels a little sly to interpolate the cleanest lines from a song that finds most of its appeal, at least to me, in allowing that grime and complications (sometimes quite creepy!) into the sensual scene but not stop it from being casual and fun. Though I don’t want to hear Bruno sing about menstrual cycles or “that outside dick [that] keep[s] them hoes sick” so maybe he had the right idea.

To be honest, the “Slow Motion” interpolation might handedly be my favourite part of the song, it’s the one daring moment in a track that gives me little else to talk about. I appreciate the sincerity with which Bruno sells this kind of material, but the second verse literally name-drops his own cocktail lounge and music venue in Vegas that opened in 2024 called The Pinky Ring. No, I’m not sponsored either, despite the link, but you could be a little less egregious with your self-product placement, especially for a high-end venue the general audiences for this song won’t ever see. Consider what JUVENILE raps on the last verse on “Slow Motion” – “the less money we spend on bullshit, the more for the weed”. Spending less money on bullshit would not only help your gambling habit, Bruno, but letting your perfectionism loosen up could help with the music too. This is fine, and I don’t expect that much from Bruno, but maybe something (or someone) is missing from the equation this time around.

#44 – “GO” – BLACKPINK

Produced by Cirkut and TEDDY

The less said about BLACKPINK’s dreadful “comeback” mini-album DEADLINE, debuting at #11 on the albums chart this week, the better, and for a multitude of reasons, the main one being that it just sounds so detached and careless. Whatever chemistry BLACKPINK showed in earlier material – I was never a fan but there was something there, whether it’s in the genre-shifting K-pop, girl-group harmonies or charmingly dumb lyrics – has been lost with a set of five soulless tracks seemingly made overnight. I think it’s best for all of them to pursue solo careers and whilst not every member of the group has shown as much promise or experimentation, it’s much better to have four decent singers working separately than segmenting each of them into a disconnected facsimile of what once was, especially if fucking Dr. Luke is going to be in the credits. I guess he got sick of how the Black and trans women he profited off in recent years had too much personality, so he’s having to carve his way into the Korean industry now. God knows he couldn’t revive Katy Perry’s career by having his mitts all over the 143 dumpster fire, so let’s just insert this predator into a different crevice of popular music. “GO” isn’t “Me and my” or “Fxxxboy”, at least, but BRIT Award winner ROSÉ couldn’t sound less enthused in that stock melody when she says she wants my body and my soul. Hold on, where’s yours? The cheap synth horns sound like a washed-out leftover from the Sega Genesis and there’s basically no effective build outside of the dreamy pink nothing “soundscape” before we drop straight like a brick into a hefty truck of nothing that is the bass beat absorbing some warped tones and clashing, metallic drum sounds into an almost industrial rhythm that could be interesting if the song was about fucking anything. LISA’s a guardian angel doing her go-go dance and everyone else is too non-descript to consider. You even get some truly heartless piano notes and trap beat come in on the second verse (and jangling acoustic guitar on the bridge for extra retching) to remind you this is a pop song and that any stiff attempt at eschewing convention, making non-moral transgressions against the genre or even just being of any worthwhile listening, is either a façade or something that’s YOUR fault for assuming products had purpose. There’s a single faint line of Korean and the entire outro is just repeating the name “BLACKPINK” ad nauseum like a broken Tickle-Me Elmo which probably somehow used less plastic than this mini-album. If the end result of a managed collaboration between the girls ends up sounding like an advertisement for a brand, suffocating the more colourful and camp parts of K-pop, which already lifted a heavy deal from cultures I don’t think Dr. Luke could pretend to respect, into a barely workable but still identifiably “BLACKPINK” that can be shipped off like a commiseration prize to the fans that still care, then I think it’s best for everyone who matters that they continue the solo efforts.

#20 – “Nightingale Lane.” – RAYE

Produced by RAYE, Tom Richards and Chris Hill

On a residential road near Tooting, an area of London that sounds like I made it up, you may see a plaque that reads: “British Heritage – RAYE experienced the greatest heartbreak she has ever known here. 27th February 2019”. Seven years later to the day, BRITs nominee RAYE releases a song about that very area, “Nightingale Lane.”, the second single from her upcoming THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE., which she performed alongside BRIT Award-nominated lead single “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” at the BRITs last weekend. First debuting the song on tour in Poland, the song paints the scene of the street her first love, drunkenly, “kissed her goodbye”, which helped her become resilient to future heartaches (though only after crying a flood). The conceit of the song lies in how she can’t help but think about him when she drives down and sees that area, making her reminisce about the “ghost town” she sees in front of her. If she stops at the red light, closes her eyes, she can accept it in a broader, reassuring sense – that love was real and not only is she able to find it again, she wants to believe she’s capable of giving love to someone else. The lead-in to the chorus dramatically mirrors that visual of driving slower (across the somewhat rote piano-based instrumental alongside spare, dingy drums) coming to a stop (with the rise of the strings and staccato tempo-shifting pre-chorus gasps) and finally releasing to a full belt as she can drive away from that area, because that reassurance only works when she’s not seeing it.

Now, the execution of this idea doesn’t fall flat for me but structurally, is arranged in a way that just brings us back to the initial scenario again which is perfect for both the song’s thematics (a narrative designed to benefit from pop song structure) but also… decidedly uninteresting, especially since that second chorus has some extra piano and string embellishments, a different, more overdone vocal take, but overall just seems like progress hasn’t been made, something she touches on in the bridge wherein she hopes for the walls built up by this event to be broken down by someone but acknowledging none of the lovers since have stuck. It’s understandable that someone “made of steel” would keep them and us as the audience at a distance, but without further details in the second verse, which is something RAYE is usually great at nailing in on, with the increased grandiosity of the song that just gets into cheap cinematic classical influences by the end, sounding more like an epic movie trailer for a romantic drama than the very real moment of driving and seeing a place that haunts you with bad memories and insecurities. Even the subtler moments have little dramatic vocal inflections, likely influenced by vocal jazz, that put me off of truly connecting with the song – there should be something a lot more human about that “oof” in the first pre-chorus than there is, it seems like everything’s a show here which, for RAYE, makes for a great performance because she can sing her heart out and is incredibly emotive in that range… but I’m still at a distance that builds and builds with no progress in the lane of emotional resonance. It’s like the song gets further and further away from me, which is an interesting approach maybe. Part of me wants to say that this reflects the increasing belief in RAYE’s mind that the first love she experienced is a fantasy unable to be recaptured but given “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”, I don’t think that she really is that pessimistic or at least I just don’t want her to be. I think what may be the case is that in wanting to put on a show – even at the intro directly stating the song is about to be about her greatest heartbreak and introducing its title, as if she were performing it live – RAYE just loses me in the spectacle, a spectacle that the mix sometimes flattens. I don’t know, I’m honestly still wrestling with this one, I hope it’ll make for a better listen in album context but for now, I’m not there.

#19 – “The Hardest Part” – Olivia Dean

Produced by Bastian Langebæk

Alongside winning just all of the awards, Olivia Dean performed “Man I Need” at the BRIT Awards last weekend though half a decade ago, she released the song “The Hardest Part” which is charting this week for the first time ever despite first releasing in 2020 and racking up over 300 million streams since. Appearing on a 2020 EP as well as her 2023 debut album Messy, “The Hardest Part” stands in contrast to her newer work and with some clunkier lines does appear as an evidently earlier song if you get into the weeds of it but thanks to her voice remaining as smooth as it was in then in all these years since, and the still palatable piano-based soul production being more in style now than it probably was then, it’s not surprising that fans of Ms. Dean still hold up “The Hardest Part” alongside her newer songs. It feels like almost a predecessor to “A Couple Minutes”, framed more at the crisis moment wherein the breakup has to happen, simply because the couple are different people, slightly estranged and distant thanks to the aging and maturing on both sides, with Dean only being 18 when the relationship started. Dean’s accepting of this relationship not working, with the titular “hardest part” in question realising not that the two are unfit for each other but that the change is too much for it to continue as it had before. Despite the second verse hinting towards a perhaps rougher, manipulative side to this relationship, she’s still giving the grace and forgiveness that you end up doing with a relationship from your youth because the positive memories are what will hopefully stick. Over the years, Dean has released multiple re-recordings of the song, including an acoustic version in 2020, a performance live at the Jazz Café in 2021, another live performance from KOKO as well as a duet version with US singer Leon Bridges in 2023 (itself standing at 100 million streams), with the latest being a live performance at Eventim Apollo in 2024. It’s a good song, one that feels like it’s always been there (partly because it kind of has been), and I’m definitely not complaining about it finally appearing on the chart long after it deserved to.

#15 – “Risk it All” – Bruno Mars

Produced by Bruno Mars and D’Mile

Leaning heavy into the trumpets, Bruno starts off his album with a ballad about… catching a grenade for her and jumping in front of a train for her. Yeah, this is what tipped me that the album was never going to bring anything new, if “I Just Might” wasn’t already enough, which is a shame because I actually liked his riskier collaborators like ROSÉ (with which he won the BRIT Award for International Song of the Year with “APT.”) and Sexyy Red (with which he won no awards) who forced him into sounds that required different modes, less of the party boy and lover boy faces we’re so used to seeing from do-it-all Bruno at this point. The Spanish guitar over the sandy percussion at least lends a certain sorrow to this, indicating that Bruno would risk it all for a woman who absolutely wouldn’t, with the bareness of the song (aside from those admittedly great trumpets) – until the great crescendo at the end – really punching that idea in, even if it’s never explicit. If Bruno’s commitment were mutual, he wouldn’t be singing his heart out on an instrumental that sounds less like a chill Mexican wedding (as the video’s mariachi band would have you assume) by the end and more like a man sending love poems to a woman who’ll never write back. Bruno Petrarch still sounds great and the song is way too polished to fail on a basic level of “how does it sound?”, but for me, that’s not always enough, especially with a song where there is just less to it to add the little details and flourishes Bruno would usually coat a track in. I can hear some great music, I just can’t feel much of it.

#3 – “FEVER DREAM” – Alex Warren

Produced by Adam Yaron

Alex Warren is here to stay! He performed “Ordinary” at the BRITs after releasing a completely different song, “FEVER DREAM” which struck me as an interesting choice, one I’m torn between respecting and thinking is a bit cheap. Sure, he’s not letting his subtly Christian stomp-folk balladry continue into 2026 for now, even though it would be easier and more boring to, but he’s also going into a trendy pop-soul direction, one we already saw Ed Sheeran hop on last year to bitter results, which maybe is just part of Warren and his new direction but runs a little contrary to the melodramatic adult contemporary Warren had found himself in, one that isn’t exactly subtle or ignorable (far from it in the case of say, “Ordinary” or “Bloodline”) but embraces its own goopiness to compressive levels. “FEVER DREAM” is something else entirely, though content-wise it’s still lovestruck and production-wise, it’s still got Adam Yaron behind the scenes, so it’s not that much of a deviation, especially with the drums still incorporating an egregious stomp even in the new soul direction which has a groovy piano that might sound better filtered under a four-on-the-floor house beat from the late 80s. Oh, and Alex is completely out of his element – he at least seems to have less mushy processing than on earlier tracks but Teddy Swims he is not, and whilst his gruffer tones may sound okay when balancing against incessantly catchy harmonies on the chorus, especially in that final build, the rest of the song has him stiff on the track. The pre-chorus especially should have so much more character than he delivers it with, but alas, he sounds to me like he was just trying to sing them off as well as he could to fit the exact beats and measures of the DAW. I don’t know if Alex Warren necessarily has the “swag” to come into the booth with but he needs it on a song like this. Hell, I’ve been dogging on Bruno the whole episode but he would treat this song like it owed him money and not the other way around like Warren ends up doing there. At least outside of that chorus, though, that’s a full send and it’s going to help it stick around for, knowing this guy, fucking eons. Or maybe even “Eternity”.

Conclusion

Rundown

As always, we start our week with 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: “Stay (If You Wanna Dance)” by Myles Smith, “Waterfalls” by James Hype featuring Bobby Harvey and Sam Harper, “As it Was” by Harry Styles and some of the 80s oldies from recent resurgences: “Purple Rain” by Prince and the Revolution and “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. As you can tell, it’s mostly an inconsequential little week in terms of any dramatic movements.

Now as for our returns, we have “Run My Way” by December 10 at #68 because, well, sure, and “The Sick” by Bella Kay at #53 (likely related to how well her new hit is doing), but most notably, in part thanks to Emerald Fennell’s polarising adaptation (and Charli xcx’s companion soundtrack – maybe I should go see that movie just to see if it was actually any good), Kate Bush’s song based on the Bronté novel, “Wuthering Heights”, is back at #40. “Wuthering Heights” was Kate Bush’s debut single, noted for its bizarre videos and relatively irregular composition for a pop hit, none of which prevented its success back in 1978. After debuting at #42, it shortly hit the top spot for four weeks, dethroning ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” and blocking Blondie’s “Denis” from the top. Appearing on her first album The Kick Inside, “Wuthering Heights” spent 13 weeks on the chart that year before returning for one week in 2014 at #57 (whilst Robin Schulz’s remix of “Prayer in C” by Lilly Wood and the Prick was at #1) off the back of her concert residency. To my knowledge, this is the first time it’s charted – in its original recording or a cover (which has been done but seems unimaginable for this song) since then. Then the few songs already on the chart that boosted in benefit from a quieter week include Dominic Fike’s “White Keys” at #41 and “Babydoll” at #18 (…joy), “(When You Gonna) Give it Up to Me” by Sean Paul featuring Keyshia Cole at #33 and “Chains of Love” by Charli xcx at #12, though not finally because there are some notable gains in our top 10...

As for our top five on the UK Singles Chart, we start with “Homewrecker” by sombr at #5, followed by Bella Kay’s “iloveitiloveitiloveit” all the way up to #4! I’m a little surprised by how soon from when I first reviewed it that it’s in the top 10 though I’m hardly complaining, I really like the song, and the same goes for “Stateside” by PinkPantheress up to #3. Of course our top two is the Dean double so let’s dive into the songs debuting this week.

New Entries

#64 – “Badlands” – Mumford & Sons featuring Gracie Abrams

Produced by Aaron Dessner and Mumford & Sons

Big week for Mumford & Sons fans since you’re clearly out there somewhere – the folk rock group have bagged their 4th #1 album on the UK album chart with Prizefighter and naturally, the collaboration with pop singer Gracie Abrams, with whom they share a producer – Dessner – in common is the one charting, after the lead single with Hozier a few months back. As you may be able to extract from the fact that the episode starts with a song by Mumford & Sons featuring Gracie Abrams, this isn’t exactly an exciting week for me so alongside some tech issues, I may sound even grumpier than usual. Trust, I am an optimistic reviewer most of the time but there’s not much to chew on here – to quote a friend, it’s “a funeral with a DJ”, though this is meaner than I’ll be to acts who have shown to be capable of unique and intriguing approaches to their music (Hell, I’d call myself a fan of at least one – maybe try and guess who). This first song may just be the worst offender for me because I’m not a fan of either of these artists in really any contexts and “Badlands” doesn’t bring anything interesting to the table in its approach to the content about being a “wild child” and outcast who does things their own way, has lived life rebelliously, still perseveres, etc. with the first verse being basically a list of phrases you may want to use when writing this song. Microsoft Clippy may request you include the words “born wild”, “thin line”, “low tide”, “high wire” and so on. This feels a little mean to say but it seems apt that the unreviewed, fan-written song description on Genius reeks of ChatGPT. As for how the song sounds… well, it’s surprisingly minimal with its sombre pianos and percussion that barely chips at the mix against the layered vocals from Marcus Mumford and Gracie Abrams, both essentially always tracked with each other and not allowing for much interplay or dueting as much as just… always singing at the same time, stacking up space in the mix similarly to how one of the song’s co-writers, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, would go about it. I actually like that decision given the chorus’ line “run with me, we can still make it high” but that promise doesn’t exactly land without much of either a build or pay-off. There’s something to be said about a song about this kind of person just drifting in and out of existence rather than having a lasting impact, which wasn’t intended as a dig at the song’s chart prospects but I suppose time will tell.

#58 – “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” – Lana Del Rey

Produced by Lana Del Rey, Jack Antonoff and Drew Erickson

Lana Del Rey’s long-teased country album Lasso – I mean, Stove – should be out in three months, “give or take”. We had what appeared to be a rollout in April of last year that soon halted after her two ballads released and now it seems the cycle restarts with a long word salad title because it’s Lana and that’s nothing new. I honestly appreciate the transparency of this – she’s been playing some of the songs live, she’s never been too upfront about an album release, live your life, woman, you don’t actually owe these people on the Internet anything. It’s kind of refreshing. Anyway, onto the song.

As someone who’s not that attached to Lana’s career in terms of revisiting the albums (even those that I like) for lore like the superfans, I can’t say for sure if this idealisation of domestic bliss is anything entirely new from her, though fans and outlets alike are pointing out that it’s a bit of a shift from earlier directions to be this focused on her domestic life with husband Jeremy Dufrene, a Louisiana tour boat captain, or as Twitter / X as been telling me for the past year, “alligator guy”. I wonder if you could point towards earlier songs and see this sentiment forming because there are definitely elements of Lana’s character still popping out in some tongue-in-cheek lines, familiar imagery (summer, bones, her father) and of course, her smoky voice over Jack Antonoff production which is decidedly spooky to start off with, sampling Ella Fitzgerald’s 1964 recording of “Laura”. It’s interesting to evoke that song given its dreamlike temporality – “the laugh that floats on the summer night that you can never quite recall”, the train that’s passing through (the acoustics and percussion on the Lana song don’t half sound like that either) – but the sample is quickly out of the question, replaced with similarly eerie folk instrumentation that has Lana’s voice situated interestingly. She’s basically half-rapping the verse with a misty layering that still centres her voice in the mix with piercing, onomatopoeic sibilance. Lana brings a theatricality to the fantastical chorus too, playing a bit of a fairy grandmother though not one that’s going out of her way to make magic for anyone but her husband, whom she’s started cooking for and uses that as a… well, I don’t know what she’s using it for, really. It’s presented as a strange, new, perhaps even rebellious act for her given her relationship history (“Everyone knows I had some trouble”), but whether she takes pride in that is obfuscated by draping whatever morally neutral framing is there with that whispered multi-tracking (especially in the final chorus) and the feeling that all of this is looming over her. Surely you can’t settle into a “normal” life like this, surely life has told you this is a fantasy, surely showbiz has made you repellent to this life, surely one of the apples dangling off of this branch is rotten. Surely. It’ll be interesting to see how the album deals with these themes and whilst I can’t say I’m going to be relistening to the song often, it’s for sure unique.

#54 – “Share the House” – Ewan McVicar

Produced by Ewan McVicar

Ewan McVicar is a Scottish DJ who had teased this track on sold-out shows in Dublin. You might recall the name if you have been reading this blog since… 2021, geez, when he had his first chart hit “Tell Me Something Good”, a flip of the Rufus & Chaka Khan song. You may also not recall the name even if you’re my number-one fan because I had to relisten to realise what this even was, despite it peaking at #15 and staying on the chart well into 2022. McVicar is no stranger to remixing and exploring older songs for his tracks – the article I linked earlier references his flip of Joe Goddard’s “Gabriel” and this very song itself is a flip of “Share this House”, a 1988 garage house track by Members of the House.

One thing I noticed on revisiting McVicar’s first hit was how indebted it was to classic and underground house and techno sounds, not really placating to mainstream sensibilities despite the recognisable sample. “Share this House” seems like a natural fit then for his style then and yeah, this definitely has some remnants of that, with a rougher mix, swivelling percussion, stray turntable sound effects, a snare that sounds like hitting a table tennis ball, stretched-out and stuttered vocals from the sample that lead nearly straight into the drop, pretty much just filling in time by fucking about with the track. I do like the synth bass, I would love for it to be more prominent in the song, but I think the main appeal of this – especially, I imagine, at his live shows – is the bridge wherein seemingly out of nowhere, everything surrounding the lead vocal comes to a screeching halt, with an echoing, filtered vocal repeating “Mama said, ‘Turn down that music […] don’t play that radio loud’” ad nauseum. When I first heard the pay-off to that break, wherein on the second “don’t play that radio loud”, the fluttering hints of the piano seep away and form a new lead right in the front, I felt so good because everything clicked into place to why this song even got released. This would otherwise be a completely ignorable, part-modernising flip in the midst of a DJ set that was just released for the sake of it – this really needed that moment to launch it into something else. I love the fake snap against the kick and MIDI piano, but it’s the cheap throwback crashes and builds that really sell me. Unfortunately, it returns to the original hook not long after which makes for a full-circle moment and would be really effective in the set, especially with the added elements that fill out the mix a lot more – the playful percussion especially, which is just everywhere, I think I even heard a whistle – but part of me wanted this to ditch the first half entirely and just morph into a new beast. I understand it probably wouldn’t be charting if it did, but wouldn’t it be fun? As it is, it’s fun and shines a light on an older house track that didn’t get the time of day on the charts. I wouldn’t be surprised (or upset) if it sticks around and gets 7000 remixes.

#23 – “Drag Path” – Twenty One Pilots

Produced by Tyler Joseph and Paul Meany

Our story here starts, kind of, in 2010 with the release of Tobias Gundorff Boesen’s stop-motion short film, Out of a Forest. Tyler Joseph – Twenty One Pilots frontman and lead writer-producer – reached out to adapt the film into a video for “Drag Path”, a song initially released as a bonus track for a digital deluxe they released last year for their album Breach. Joseph shared that they wanted to respect the fans who purchased the song digitally and not release that version, a longer cut that ended up going viral on TikTok, on streaming services until a little later, with the single edit released last week being a little different. I suppose the virality is why this debuted so high – this near the top 20 surprised me a little bit considering I knew from a friend that this was just a bonus track reissue – but I just don’t see much in this personally and that’s quite literal in this case. There aren’t many lyrics here, though many have metaphorical purpose I can dig into – I like the idea of a “drag path etched in the surface” being a reflection of past mistakes that don’t add up to substantial improvement, just further awareness of those mistakes that weigh burdeningly on Tyler. The problem is that the song isn’t necessarily about Tyler, it seems to be about Clancy. Don’t ask me who that is, I don’t know, but whilst the song is vague enough in execution, to really connect with this on the level I’d want to, I’d have to have been following lyrical references to the in-universe Twenty One Pilots lore (which may all be fan-speculated bullshit for all I know but the duo seem to lean into it especially in the videos). I have this problem with a lot of TOP material but with a ballad like this, it becomes especially apparent, which I think is why it was probably left as a bonus for the fans initially. When it came to the last TOP ballad I loved, “The Craving”, the reality of the situation being about Tyler and his wife really helped me resonate with it, but without that added insight – if I haven’t found it, feel free to message me with an interviews, I know you fans are on Tumblr if nowhere else – I don’t feel that much catharsis along the militaristic drums that build into a somewhat compressed climax.

I can get why the kids and the fans like this one but I rarely connect to content that sounds this self-absorbingly pessimistic and hopeless in the first place (which isn’t a jab at the people behind it, obviously, just how that character appears to me in the music), and Josh Dun’s great drumming overlapping the melodic elements (like that Christmas music-esque bell) towards the end doesn’t really help things for me. The overwhelming power of a percussive track in a slow-building track can be very well-implemented but I’d like to hear some more of the melodic dynamics or a belting performance from Tyler, some louder strings – go full power ballad mode, don’t be afraid to be cheesy. I don’t know, it’s interesting for me that this song ends up running against a familiar reaction I have to Twenty One Pilots runs up against one that I’ve never had with them until this album’s singles which is that they’re not reaching as far as they could be. I had a similar, though definitely not identical, review for lead single “The Contract” if I recall correctly. I also am aware that they’re hanging up the Blurryface story to dry a little bit with Breach being the final act so maybe this restraint is demonstrative of a newer approach, we’ll have to see. For now, I’m just ambivalent to this one… I mean, it’s a bonus track from a band I don’t particularly like, it wouldn’t even be something I know about without it being at #23. It feels a little strange to even consider it in the context of being a hit song as a result. That’s what this show is partly about, though! We’re all listening to our own worlds of music now and getting some insight into what’s going through a lot of the country’s AirPods is worth some time.

Conclusion

content warning: language, discussions of gang violence, abortion, generative AI

Rundown

As always, we start our episode with the notable dropouts, those being songs that exited 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 adieu to: “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” by Bad Bunny (more on him later), “Plastic Cigarette” by Zach Bryan, “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac, “Eternity” by Alex Warren, “wgft” by Gunna featuring Burna Boy (lasted way longer than I expected), “Locked Out of Heaven” by Bruno Mars and “Messy” by Lola Young.

Then as for our re-entries, we welcome “Purple Rain” by Prince and the Revolution back again at #74 alongside “Stay (If You Wanna Dance)” by Myles Smith at #73 (it peaked at #32 last year) and “Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac at #70, with Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights album revitalising the single “Chains of Love”, which only lasted two weeks initially, to a new peak of #17. Songs already on the chart receiving boots include “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 #65, “White Keys” by Dominic Fike at #56, “Zoo” by Shakira from Disney’s Zootropolis 2 at #42 (how is this still here?), “(When You Gonna) Give it Up to Me” by Sean Paul featuring Keyshia Cole at #38, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay at #26, “Babydoll” by Dominic Fike at #23, “Just the Way You Are” by Milky at #14 and finally, “Homewrecker” by sombr making for his fourth top 10 at #7 (and his third song to specifically peak at #7 thus far).

Our top five on the UK Singles Chart starts with “DtMF” by Bad Bunny at #5, followed by “Man I Need” by Olivia Dean at #4 and “Lush Life” by Zara Larsson all the way up to #3, with Ms. Dean taking up the two spots at the top. Now to take a look at what’s new on the chart – it’s a bit of a handful, not too inspiring, but let’s see what OCC has for us this week.

New Entries

#71 – “NO BATIDÃO” – ZXKAI and slxughter

Produced by ZXKAI and slxughter

So, firstly, this song has fanart – and/or a Photoshop – of Shadow the Hedgehog as its cover art. Specifically, it is an edgy, red-eyed edit of what appears to be Shadow from the live-action movie series (wherein he is voiced by… Keanu Reeves) and, after running it through three AI image-detecting models, it seems that results are inconclusive? I won’t bore you with the screenshots and percentages, but one said it was – to some but not full degree of confidence – and the others did not, but these models have room for error and AI generation is improving frequently. To their credit, I used the same model for another ZXKAI single and Hive was even more confident that it wasn’t AI – I’m not an expert and like I said, the technology moves fast. With that said, the song was released in September of last year by DJ ZXKAI and producer slxughter who, like many in this lane of Brazilian phonk music, like to remain pretty anonymous, there’s not much on these guys. The song itself consists of heavily-processed vocals under a simple, thumping beat and annoying bassline which quickly, with little build-up, becomes a cacophony, though at least they have both male and female vocal samples this time? Also uncredited (unless they’re also AI, I guess), the male and female vocalists don’t exactly do much interplay, with the two repeating the same lyrics (translated, seemingly just being about a girl on the dancefloor) over synths that sound like an NES sound chip and what I can only describe as a brain-rotting rhythm section. I’m as much an expert in this genre as I am in AI image detection but I have heard stuff at least a little better than this. It seems primed for TikTok virality on the basis of being overbearingly loud whilst somehow completely indistinct so maybe there are kids who genuinely like this stuff… it’s just never going to be me.

#54 – “SLAUGHTER” – Central Cee featuring J Hus

Produced by Fumes Beats, io, OHNINE, Yjay and Aaronorage

We have two debuts from Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack, as you’d probably expect, but we actually have a duo of duos here as Central Cee has also debuted two songs this week, which are grouped together on Spotify as one single, conveniently in charting order. “SLAUGHTER” has Cench link up with J Hus for an upcoming EP, ALL ROADS LEAD HOME, which presumably will include this track when it releases next month and maybe not its B-side (more on that later). “SLAUGHTER”, whilst barely running over two minutes, does have some grit to it with washed-out strings you’d usually hear behind a drill beat being rubbled behind a driving Afrobeats rhythm that caught me by surprise at first and is pretty nasty… much like J Hus demanding that his girlfriend both not have an abortion and also not trust any man. That’s firstly gross but secondly confusing, it reminds me of the riddle about two people, one being a liar and one a truth-teller, guarding two doors that could be safe or unsafe. To be honest, the watery vocal mix and delayed “mm-hm” ad-lib refrain that punctuates each line makes J Hus’ verse already a little sleazy, so the contradiction – followed by him admitting to giving his girl (or daughter) a negligible amount of his revenue and spending the rest on guns – feeds into the song being relentlessly criminal. It’s called “SLAUGHTER”, after all, and Cench comes in with a typically staccato, faster flow that actually starts during J Hus’ last, long-held note, a cool decision to make the song move smoother than it otherwise would have been just being two verses from very different rappers. After going off for a while on some shameless and egregious threats of violence, Cench circles back to J Hus’ original flow, Auto-Tune included, in a moment that I think works great with the fading out of the drums and focus on the eerie strings, especially after Cench’s flow does what it typically does – parade around the beat in a Big Sean-esque style of losing control. It may not be much in the grand scheme of things but it’s a convincing menace, at least as much can exist in two minutes, and Cench really runs away with it by the end so… yeah, I’ll say it’s good.

#49 – “Lights Burn Dimmer” – Fred again.. and Jamie T

Produced by Fred again..

Sigh, it’s getting pretty sad to have the routine, greyed-out USB loosie from Fred that just doesn’t move me the way his more vibrant stuff does. I feel like a broken record even reviewing the songs, but we still do have a new track from Fred here, this time from Jamie T, a singer largely known for his 2000s run of indie pop and rock that included prominent influences from punk and rap, with a big comeback in the 2010s that produced his last charting single before this, his 2014 top 40 hit “Zombie”, though I personally can’t say I’m familiar with Mr. T’s work. Okay, maybe let’s not shorten his name to that. This new track is, firstly, not too new, being a staple of his live shows since last year but being released just in time with Fred’s return to London for a series of special shows, Jamie T’s unabashed Englishness reflecting Fred being closer to his old stomping ground.

“Lights Burn Dimmer” a remix of Jamie’s 2023 song “Hippodrome”, a bit of an indie pop self-portrait with sing-rapped verses using the framing device of the titular London venue, with the moment his lover looks at him one night in the Hippodrome being a representation of a youthful, careless lifestyle he partly reminisces on even its uglier aspects. Frankly, the song’s too short to work for me in what it’s doing – the final release of the bridge isn’t that cathartic and I’m not over the Moon on Jamie’s delivery, which becomes particularly more egregious when filtered and echoed over minimal, static production using some field recordings and loose, though weightier, synth noodling as background noise. Jamie being very quickly drowned out by the synth line and being chopped into a mantra of the titular line “The lights burn dimmer / any which way I turn out, the lights burn dimmer” actually gets across some of the lyrical content of the original a little more effectively to me, as if this time is truly gone in the past and there’s no way to relive the brightness of those lights ever again, not giving Jamie clear space in the mix, repeating some of the sadder lines like “I hardly ever turn up to see my mates”, it’s an interesting way to fully delve into the subtler melancholies of the original. This is especially with the filtering on his vocal applying to the group harmonies that sound shattered under this production and the stray “Yeah” sampled from 070 Shake (one that Fred likes to use) that feels like a hesitant, echoed acknowledgement of Jamie’s life never becoming what it used to be. With that said, the fact the song is still very danceable, 070 Shake’s “Yeah” still being an affirmation (even of a negative), how his friends are still there in those fragmented vocal moments despite him not going to see them, the way the track wires into a metallic, glitched-out period of reflection (a repeated “feel it in my blood” among some of the only decipherable vocals) that builds back into a second wind, it’s all subtly reaffirming that despite times being behind him, the euphoric feeling will never be lost and is not impossible to recreate. When the synth lead came back in on the second build, I felt that life-affirming feeling I got with Fred’s ten days album and haven’t experienced with his music in a long time. The progression is still less confident, more meandering, but it serves very well into the themes, reminding me of a sound collage or video montage of patches of a life spent clubbing. The colour’s back in this one, though it’s a colder, alluring blue than the sky Fred used to paint. Brilliant song, I hope it means a return to form going forward.

#47 – “Be by You” – Luke Combs

Produced by Luke Combs, Jonathan Singleton and Chip Matthews

We have another single from Luke Combs’ upcoming album The Way I Am, set to release next month, this one not-so-coincidentally coinciding with Valentine’s Day. The song was written by Dan Alley, Nick Walsh and Sam Banks, who are apparently outside of Combs’ songwriting circle but still had the song resonate, which I can understand. It’s got an acoustic-led brand of slow, inoffensive romance that doesn’t succeed in being too intimate – partly because of Combs himself and a rough, Morgan Wallen-like vocal mix that turns his verse into an amorphous murmur that sounds downright terrible in the verses and pre-chorus. It gets better in the chorus when he’s got some double-tracking and can let free with his wishes to simply be with the person he loves, wake up to her in bed, etc. It’s a kind of homely love I can appreciate even if it doesn’t do much outside of some organic country guitars to take me into that warmer environment. I love the melody in the bridge, which seems closer to being an outright pop belter than the attempt at mild-mannered classiness for the rest of the song, but because the song doesn’t let itself soar at that moment and then pretty much stops trying, reshuffling back into the laidback acoustics after only two lines, it feels a little stifled, stuck in a mode Combs couldn’t convince me on already. I understand that for some, Combs may bring a country grit or homespun acoustic vibe to mainstream country, but this song may have been better if produced even less organically. I don’t think it needs to escape the country realm, but it’s begging for a 90s unabashed Nashville-pop treatment that it looks too inwards to recognise. I wish I liked it more.

#37 – “ICEMAN FREESTYLE” – Central Cee

Produced by Harley Arsenault, Chris Rich and AyeTM

Now despite being the second track on the “SLAUGHTER” single, this initially had the bigger push, with a Peaky Blinders-inspired music video and the obvious (still unfortunate) Drake connection, given the track is named after his upcoming album, partly for search optimisation and partly, or fully if you’re in the business of being optimistic about the artistic and/or financial intents of Drake, because it was previewed on Drake’s ICEMAN series of livestreams. Regardless, he’s got producer Harley Arsenault on the boards, who’s worked a lot with Drake in recent years and my main hope was that this wasn’t just going to be a Drake rip-off. It’s nothing like his idol, however, mostly for the better, as the build-up into the UK drill beat is genuinely great. Completely instrumental outside of some non-verbal choral vocal loops that come in alongside a winding string loop that, alongside the first, more graceful pattern, seems to lack a bit in fidelity, Cench is silent until around 30 seconds in, right after the beat hits with its first growl, alongside a melancholy vocal effect ingrained into the drums that signals his arrival.

Why they released “Which One” over this baffles me because whilst it may not be a Drake type beat, he would sound great over it if he tried, not that Cench needs any help. He goes with his signature flow and subject matter but this time, using more whimsical vocal inflections and occasionally going really out of his natural line structure to land the rhyme. There are subtle changes to the approach that I really like, especially with how the first verse uses a back-and-forth dynamic between Cench’s outward macho posturing and slightly quieter admissions of his thought process. It may drag a little but committing to it for that long is worthwhile because of how the verse basically implodes right after with the line “We don’t spare no-one, even mums and dads”, which leads into a sloppy, drunken-sounding interpolation of Drake’s “NOKIA” and several failed attempts to recoil back into the flow that resolves itself just in time for the bridge. He also hints towards his obsession with the Lamborghini Urus but doesn’t fully commit to that easy, expected rhyme – it’s a small, Drake-like tongue-in-cheek reference to his own public image that he somewhat expands on in his second verse with lines like “I’m conflicted, beef is bad for business” and “I'm tryin’ to leave my man six foot under and fuck up his health insurance”, showing just how connected his financials are to a life he has wanted to leave behind. He has to continue the posturing, he has to appear tough, but that’s not where his head is at and as long as he still has street connections, he’ll end up being rattled between the two perspectives, with a couple ending lines like the closing “Everything’s gonna make sense in the end when we all get out of the streets” and a small clause of “I ain’t got real enemies” (referring to the weakness of his “opps”, his position making him too big to really engage with the violence and even potentially a glimpse of forgiveness) highlighting an exhausted Cench that is still much more collected than the first verse’s clutter of thoughts. Sometimes because of the memes, repeated lines, egregious sampling or generally weird approach to women, I can forget that Central Cee has the capability to get in the booth and deliver a relatively substanceful set of raps that paint a vivid picture of where his head is at, which is what he did on… really both of these tracks, even if this freestyle may be “realer” than the violent character on “SLAUGHTER”. That EP might have some more to it than I would have otherwise anticipated.

#33 – “Always Everywhere” – Charli xcx

Produced by Finn Keane

On my first listen of Charli xcx’s companion soundtrack to the Wuthering Heights adaptation in cinemas now directed by Emerald Fennell, I can’t say I found much to enjoy. Now this comes with some caveats – whilst I am a Charli fan, I wasn’t interested in the singles (you can see my thoughts on “Chains of Love” a few episodes back) and unlike many who have studied literature, or really read any books to begin with, I don’t have that strong a connection with Emily Bronté’s original novel. Critics, both professional and online, will have long ran a lot of the criticisms of the film’s (seemingly intentionally disrespectful) adaptation of the novel, particularly in regards to race, into print and into the ground, but I can’t care enough to have a dog in the fight, especially since I have not seen the film. I’m going to see The Moment, for what it’s worth, but I’ll stick with the soundtrack on this one and though I do think I may enjoy it more on relistens, I found myself pretty disappointed with the lack of depth to the songs’ progression. Whilst in concept, Charli’s Auto-Tuned drone used to electropop instrumentals from A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, being slathered against orchestral music including, on this track, viola from Laurie Anderson of all people, should be intriguing on its own, I find the amount of reverb Charli’s voice is given throughout most of the album doesn’t allow that contrast to flourish, especially not with a simple chorus like on “Always Everywhere”, instead just flushing with a blankness that I don’t connect to. This song particularly focuses on the weather and the reflection of its instability on the characters in the film, it’s not a badly-written song when it comes down to the poetic verses, and the song doesn’t need to progress that far beyond where it goes to be a convincing representation of the novel’s characters… but the story isn’t just melancholy and representative of an eternal love, it’s destructive and more sonic obtrusion in the album – especially in solemn moments like this – would make that haunting feel Charli aims for feel a little realer in my opinion.

#27 – “Dying for You” – Charli xcx

Produced by Finn Keane

I see Wuthering Heights described as a 180 for Charli and whilst it can seem unexpected, it isn’t exactly that loose or unflattering of a fit for her and the album doesn’t go that far in straying away from her usual content or sound. This isn’t to say the album sounds like BRAT or Pop 2 but the unhealthy longing in “Dying for You” is part of the same playbook that allows for a track like “party 4 u” and the strings filtered as heavily as her own voice on the track over minimal kicks essentially emulate the synthesised feel of much of her catalogue. Parts of the album felt like the string section was dressing or creating a sense of cinematic importance that wasn’t exactly present in the lack of ambition with how the tracks progressed or how Charli was delivering the vocals, especially on the speak-singing verses during the verses on this track (though I do like the echoed backing vocals through the pre-chorus and chorus that are selling the drama more appropriately). The outro doesn’t sound bad in how it strays off into a stuttering vocal drop and a broken, atonal Sega Genesis loop that has Charli echo “Pain and torture” over – it’s somewhat interesting, but that’s just where the song leaves us. Again, I’m going into this album wanting to like it but understanding I will be kept at some level of distance from it – if the album was going to resonate with me, I’d have second thoughts about my own relationship with Wuthering Heights. I might even want to watch the Fennell adaption. Okay, fat chance on that second part, but I do think there is a power of soundtracks and adaptations to, even if you don’t agree with the artists’ interpretation of a work you care about, to revitalise your interest in it and I’m sorry, on initial review, the album was pretty forgettable for me. I understand that for many people, this will hit so much stronger and I fully respect that, it’s just not committed to its direction enough to my ears to really compel me.

#18 – “Tití Me Preguntó” – Bad Bunny

Produced by MAG and La Paciencia

We end our week with a song that has pretty much become a modern classic from Bad Bunny’s 2022 album Un Verano Sin Ti and resurged globally thanks to his Super Bowl half-time performance, which is also on streaming and charting itself as a medley on several Billboard charts, that’s how massive of a moment this was. I probably don’t have to go too in-depth about a song with a billion streams already (and no sign of stopping – it’s closer to two billion), let alone one that I had a total déjà vu moment with and thought I had already reviewed, which isn’t true as far as I know, but I’m still familiar with the song since it was massive in the US on release. Whilst it’s not my favourite on the album, it’s still great, starting with that careless, tropical guitar lick before dropping into a minimal trap dirge that returns alongside some sirening keys at the end of the track, with much of the song consisting of an infectious, frenetic dembow rhythm. Benito’s delivery also makes the song, with his flow on the refrain meshing with the plodding of the bass notes and the tongue-in-cheek representation of his player lifestyle, using his aunt asking about his love life as a framing device, with an audible chuckle. The post-chorus has the title of the song stutter in line with an alarming synth effect that leads into a voice memo from a woman, perhaps his actual aunt, I don’t know. I love how there’s a thematic reasoning for the second beat switch, repeating the guitar intro under another messaging telling Benito to settle down with a “serious woman”, which he responds to with a playful “Nah” – he’d like to have that experience of falling in love with “the one” like anyone else, but it’s just not in his nature as a heartbreaker. There are plenty of songs from Bad Bunny’s catalogue that are much more earnest in their approach to relationships, especially on his most recent album, so it is kind of funny that this one is charting but it was thanks to the halftime show, which uses a wedding ceremony as its main set-piece in part to reference the music video for this track. I can’t imagine this second wind will stick around for too long, at least not in the UK, but the halftime show has more longevity – thanks to memes, controversies and its elevation of catalogued output already familiar to audiences – than just an album release or TikTok virality, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we got this to five or more weeks. Either way, I can’t complain. For the record, my favourite song off of that album is “Ojitos Lindos” with Bomba Estéreo, which is one of my favourite songs of all time and for a different, but similar record, Un Verano Sin Ti spent one week on the UK albums chart in 2022 at #62 (a little interesting to see it not returning alongside DtMF). At least we end on a great note, huh? See, Benito brings the people together. Except Fox News, I guess, but I did say “people”.

Conclusion

content warning: language, brief discussions of trauma, grief

Rundown

As always, we start our week with our notable dropouts – 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: “Opening Night” by Arctic Monkeys and War Child Records, “Internet Girl” by KATSEYE, “CHANEL” by Tyla, “Purple Rain” by Prince and the Revolution, “Talk of the Town” by Fred again.., Sammy Virji and Reggie, “What it Sounds Like” by “HUNTR/X” (the voices of EJAE, AUDREY NUNA and REI AMI) from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, “People Watching” by Sam Fender, “undressed” by sombr (more on him later), “That’s So True” by Gracie Abrams and EsDeeKid’s whole catalogue, damn near, as “4 Raws”, “Century” and “Phantom” with Rico Ace are all out this week, though more on him later too. Honestly, I can’t say that most of these are much of a loss for me.

Then we have our re-entries and notable gains, for songs clawing back to the chart and others climbing up. Of the first section, we see some great post-Super Bowl returns for Bad Bunny as Benito reaches new peaks for several tracks from his GRAMMY Album of the Year DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, namely “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” at #20 and “NUEVAYoL” at #15 – the two songs originally peaked at #72 and #58 respectively this time last year and got pretty lushing reviews from me. You can watch his performance at the Super Bowl here, I’m far from the right person to analyse it but it’s a joyful watch regardless and to celebrate Puerto Rican culture to the largest audience possible is something meaningful even if you’re not aware of all the easter eggs. Our other returns include “Waterfalls” by James Hype featuring Bobby Harvey and Sam Harper at #74, “Soda Pop” by the “Saja Boys” (the voices of Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Danny Chung, KEVIN WOO and samUIL Lee) also from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack at #72, “Eternity” by Alex Warren at #67, “YUKON” by Justin Bieber at #29 (after peaking at #12 last year) and, most oddly, Dominic Fike’s “Babydoll”, a 2018 demo that first resurged in 2023 for a #63 peak (whilst Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” was #1, I reviewed the track back then). The song is back another time at a much stronger peak of #30 and we’ll talk more about Mr. Fike later on.

As for gains, we have boosts for “(When You Gonna) Give it Up to Me” by Sean Paul featuring Keyshia Cole at #46, “Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter at #41, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay at #39, “Dracula” by Tame Impala up to #25 (thanks in part to a remix with JENNIE that… doesn’t really work for me, just a few weird, slight production choices made to a perfectly fine song that, lyrically, doesn’t call for another vocalist), “Just the Way You Are” by Milky at #23 and finally, “Stateside” by PinkPantheress at #10.

Now as for the UK Singles Chart top five, we start with “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean at #5 and continue with Bad Bunny’s biggest song this week, the amazing title track “DtMF” at #4 getting its Super Bowl boost. Before “Opalite” at #1, we see “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” by RAYE at #3 and “Raindance” by Dave and Tems at #2, as well as – of course – our new tracks, so let’s sift through those.

New Entries

#75 – “Omens” – EsDeeKid

Produced by Cppo, Toom and Wasa

Scouse jerk is here to stay, ladies and gentlemen. Just kidding, EsDeeKid has ditched jerk – though, really, not all of his best or most popular work was in the microgenre anyway – for a Chicago drill sound not too different from what we heard on his last single “Century” which shares some of the producers. We have two hooks and a sole verse from EsDee on a beat that sounds a bit like a Game Boy Colour. I wish Cppo repeated his producer tag throughout the song, it was honestly the most interesting aspect of the track when it floated across the intro melody like that. The distorted bass is just expected but unlike most other EsDee songs, all of which refuse to build, the energy isn’t nearly as well-translated, primarily because of two reasons: firstly, the beat, whilst having some bouncy 808s, doesn’t call for any approach from EsDee that takes him out of his comfort zone, despite not being in his usual style. It’s just kind of stale, especially when we circle back round to the hook, which is half about him going on a sort of crusade, evoking medieval imagery that… well, it’s something to make the song unique but I feel like he drifts too close to being pure fantasy here. It was kind of funny when he had absurd lines amidst mostly hedonism or threats but here, the two are fully aligned and as a result, it comes off more of an advert for EsDeeKid as an idea and cultural phenomenon than a real song. It leans into novelty, it’s not very good.

#63 – “White Keys” – Dominic Fike

Produced by John Cunningham and Dominic Fike

As opposed to The Black Keys (who are white guys), we have the “White Keys” from US indie-pop-rap-rock draw Dominic Fike. This is typical Fike fare, with a sing-songy half-rap over rote acoustic guitars and lyrics about a woman that isn’t interested in him, this time being a track that he previewed on Kevin Abstract’s Geezer Radio and sticking to a stop-and-start rhythm that… actually works for him, to be honest. Fike is corny and condescending as usual as he observes this woman’s social status and lifestyle, acknowledging how he’s simply not a fit for how she composes herself and coming to the toxic post-breakup conclusion that it was all her fault, obviously. “White keys ‘cause she’s too major for everything” is the dumbest title drop possible but I don’t know, this one kind of works overall. I really don’t know why either. The wood block drums in the minimal chorus piss me off, Dominic Fike’s vocal take is as obnoxious as he always is and the second verse where he returns with too much cash to fit in his Prada jeans is giving that “Beat it, chick!” meme more than any real catharsis. Hell, it’s even produced by the guy who was behind a lot of XXXTENTACION’s less inspired work and Ye’s “Def Con 3” anthem. This should be so unlikeable that it’s painful but I think it just ends up kind of laughable, which may even have been the point here. I mean, listen to how he barely stuffs the words in the meter and tries to keep up with himself, listen to how the chorus goes up and does what the zoomer equivalent to millennial-whooping is. “White Keys” sounds like it knows it’s a terrible song and I kind of admire it for barely even trying to improve on itself. It’s like the person described in Tame Impala’s “Dracula” but an indie pop song instead of a real individual. Curious little track, wonder how it’ll do.

#59 – “Bunce Road Blues” – J. Cole, Future and Tems

Produced by The Alchemist

Listen, I’ve been a consistent J. Cole hater for the vast majority of his appearances on the UK Singles Chart and that definitely extends to his full album experiences and… honestly with the whole Drake-Kendrick Lamar scuffle he apologised for, his public image also bothered me though only to the extent that it distracted from his ability in his own music and prevented him from doing what he is really damn good at: rapping, especially about his love for hip-hop. The Fall-Off is that. I don’t enjoy the entire album – I think the more ambitious, overproduced pop-adjacent tracks that include more singing from Cole like “The Let Out” or “Life Sentence” kind of fall flat just based on who Cole is, because even on his best work, Cole can’t stretch himself too much before his talents run thin. What Cole can do, however, is play into hip-hop narratives and extract what resonated with him the most from the artists and releases that most inspired him as a child and then as an up-and-comer to create a double-disc that, to me, at least on relisten, doesn’t even really drag and that is also because of who Cole is a person – for as much as that can disinterest me, he splattered the legacy of hip-hop and its impact on himself all across the record’s two sides. It’s simply hard to hate a rap album that sounds so explicitly that it came from a love for rapping and what rap music has done for Cole and people like him.

It helps that Cole has some excellent wordplay across the album and what he lacks in insight he will pull into more aggressive, exact deliveries of lines that don’t always hit but at least form the most secure image of Cole we’ve probably ever gotten. I love the album conceptually too – Hell, I relate to it a certain way in how I also like to try and connect the dots between events in my life and box my years into eras or ideals they may not exactly fit in. I think having the two discs focus on two important years 10 years apart, stringing together elements of his attitudes towards rap and life in general that have changed or stayed very much the same, is a great concept and allows him to speak on what he knows best: himself. That’s not to say he has a massive ego – or at least not more than other rappers – but rather to say that he has done a lot of thinking about his position in other peoples’ lives and particularly his own position in his home city of Fayetteville, or “the Ville” as he says on the record. It’s when he looks back to his home that Cole is most interesting to me. It also helps that even on the tracks I care less for instrumentally, it ends up being a cohesive and detailed sonic project thanks to a large group of producers including Cole’s frequent collaborators Wu10, DZL, Omen and T-Minus among others who help Cole’s vision of The Fall-Off being an admiration of hip-hop as much as it is an evaluation of his own life, using a large array of samples, interpolations and subtler metatextual references like embodying  classic rappers’ flows for the purpose of a song’s narrative or sound. The only reason The Fall-Off isn’t a great album for me is probably my own fault: I don’t know if I can carry that much mental weight for J. Cole and I don’t often find what he says compelling or insightful but, for the first time in a good while, Cole has executed it so cleanly and effectively that I can look past that a little and respect it for what it is.

Unfortunately, the songs that debuted this week genuinely are the worst for explaining why I like the album. My favourite tracks mostly consisted of the soulful rappity-rap tracks because I guess I’m old and dusty but overall, “Poor Thang”, “Drum n Bass”, “Run a Train” with Future, “What If” with Morray, “39 Intro”, “Man Up Above”, “and the whole world is the Ville” – those are what I’m taking from this album in terms of absolute gems. I honestly think a shortened version of the album might create a perfect J. Cole project in terms of songs I personally enjoy, but to shorten an album like this makes it impossible to be the perfect J. Cole project – it’s in his artistry to be a little long-winded and backwards-looking and that’s not always a bad thing. Hell, if you’re reading my blog, you know what long-winded looks like. As for the songs we have here, they’re mostly just decent, not too exciting. As for this track, at least we have Future on an Alchemist beat charting in the UK, that’s pretty unique. Cole’s first verse is super intense Fayetteville and the dichotomy between a faster-paced flow and aggressive delivery over the Alchemist’s lounging keys against the more nostalgic moments Cole reminisces on is great, with the difference in mixing between the two modes allowing for some even comedic moments like when he sings about his mother rushing him to get a move on in his love life and how he’s probably spoken about his “Wet Dreamz” enough on record at this point. I also like how he mirrors his public image and the sense of wanting to destroy it and rebuild with the paranoia that comes with going back home to Fayetteville and knowing that to police, that status doesn’t matter – his name “J. Cole” only matters in cases wherein he isn’t going to be the victim and if anything, going to be framed as the aggressor. The song slows down for me when it gets to Future, who is brief and completely disaffected, and sadly, Tems’ verse, which meanders a little in a way that really does gel with the Bas writing credit. I like Bas but you can hear his clunky approach to song structure in how the Tems verse repeats lines, breaks for a J. Cole interlude, walks through some tired metaphors and applies them kind of strangely (“if the walls where you once talked, would they ‘fess up?” – this lyric is about secrets coming to light but just doesn’t sound natural, it’s kind of weird to personify the walls further than the original saying… massive nitpick here but the verse is just off in that way sometimes). It’s difficult to really know what Tems’ perspective is here for me, it kind of blends between a few, but taking it as Fayetteville itself talking to Cole and asking about his loyalty is what I found the most interesting approach though I still don’t exactly like the execution. The song’s still pleasant enough, of course, it has an Alchemist beat and great Cole verse, I just wish the energy it started with transformed into something more material.

#51 – “SAFETY” – J. Cole

Produced by J. Cole, DZL, Wu10, Sucuki and Powers Pleasant

Given I already talked about how I appreciated The Fall-Off as an album and how I finally got where Cole was at, it is a shame that some of the tracks are less interesting or highlight traits of Cole’s character and lyrical style that don’t gel too nicely with the rest of the album. “SAFETY” is one of the more mediocre introspective tracks and I think part of that comes from him taking the perspective of his friend group and detailing how people he grew up with ended up, with the tragedy being that a lot of them couldn’t really thrive in the way Cole did before he came back to the Ville at age 29, or even survived. Starting with J. Cole voicing a fake baby (sure), “SAFETY” is found in both the community of Fayetteville wherein they understand the danger of their environment and connect amidst all the pain, as well as the distance that Cole now has from this situation thanks to his wealth and status. Cole, through the perspective of his friends, catches up with the Ville just like he did when he returned there 10 or so years back, from the seemingly mundane – referencing the same “bad bitches” he rapped about in 2009 – to the deeper connections – like Cole’s friend playing his music for his daughter because his voice, though only familiar to her parents, is still comforting across generations (this one’s really sweet). The problem to me is, well, “SAFETY”. Later on the album, he addresses another Fayetteville rapper, Space, who – no pun intended – Cole has no time for except for that one verse where he repeatedly calls him a “punk bitch”. The second verse briefly addresses this but it’s worth going into more detail that not everyone in the Ville is going to have this casual “hit me back when you get the chance, Cole, I know you’re busy, we have no problems” relationship. Hell, it’s just not real to think that all your homeboys back home actually still fuck with you in this surface-level way – I think part of how the track actually succeeds is that we only get these small, distant catch-ups, but it would be even better if it could address that dynamic in some significant detail, even as an outro. In the third verse, mostly about death and how so many people from the Ville have passed away too soon and Cole is being invited to wakes, has the quip “Shit was wild, but anyhow”, which might honestly be the saddest line in the whole song. It may be purposeful not to explore that more, but some reflection on if that “SAFETY” is tangible within this track and not on those that follow in the album would make the lengthier runtime of “SAFETY” feel more worthwhile when taking it as an individual track. It isn’t an unpleasant listen either – I’m obviously partial to some jazzy pianos and boom bap drums – but I kind of want it to be. I want that discomfort to show more clearly. It just seems a little too focused on Cole’s assurance of his own “SAFETY” to examine the concept as closely as it should. Still a decent, casual storytelling track, I don’t skip it when revisiting The Fall-Off.

#45 – “Two Six” – J. Cole

Produced by T-Minus and Omen

Apart from “29 Intro”, which is a fitting interpolation of James Taylor’s “Carolina in My Mind”, this serves as the striking intro to J. Cole’s The Fall-Off, which debuts at #3 on the UK albums chart this week. The darker intro track pairs Cole’s whispers with gunshots and watery strings (probably the weak link) that succumb to the heavy sub-bass and flittering trap drums for a pretty serviceable banger to start off the record, with “Two Six” referring to 2-6, code for an area in Fayetteville, North Carolina that has become known as “Fayettenam” to locals thanks to its military base and high crime rates, which is the background to where Cole was raised. Interpolating late Alabama rapper Mr. Bigg, the 2-6 mantra makes for a great hook but some of the verses falter away from the best aspect of Cole’s writing by not focusing on Fayetteville and the kind of people that specific area code produces. I feel like he had the opportunity to make a more effective anthem if he didn’t go full hedonistic about his own expensive standards in the verses, though there are fragments of each verse that stick to the 2-6 theme. It’s a good beat with an energetic rapping performance, but it’s only the outro here, wherein Cole sings about finding a glimmer of hope in the smoke of his upbringing, making it out from the place and its culture that had him lost, that really remains relevant to the album’s core themes beyond this track. Like most US rap, I can’t imagine the Cole tracks sticking around but we might get a switcheroo with a fan favourite or maybe the track with Burna Boy in a few weeks if people are still revisiting the record. For myself, I can say that The Fall-Off is genuinely worth the time you have to invest in it if you want to sit through its entirety. I’m not a Cole fan and it was rewarding – maybe if you’re already more accustomed to what he has to say, it won’t be, though on that same point, you’ll also excuse some of the worst singing moments or clumsier bars. If this is truly his last album, I think there’ll be a lot to say about the kind of character J. Cole was throughout his career and the farewell record touched on pretty much all of that, which is how it should be. Sometimes, even I have to hand it to him.

#37 – “Release the Pressure” – Calvin Harris and Kasabian

Produced by Calvin Harris

Kasabian? Okay, sure, well, the Leicester indie rock band, mostly known for their run in the 2000s, last charted on the singles chart in 2017, with a song that peaked at #62 but their most recent #1 album is from 2024 so they are still around and doing quite well. I can’t say I’m a fan but it’s unique to have them on a song with Calvin Harris and the weirdest thing to me is that it’s seemingly an original song! I’m not familiar with Kasabian’s back catalogue but it does not seem that across months of teasing the song on festivals and social media before unveiling the limited edition physicals on his store (hence the high debut), that anyone’s picked up on a sample so props to Calvin for experimenting genre-wise without going the lazier route. As for the song itself, well, it’s not “SMOKE THE PAIN AWAY”, mostly because it doesn’t take the incredibly dumb risks that one did, and instead just transposes Kasabian’s lead singer Sergio Pizzorno onto an existing speed garage template that he meshes with a little better than you’d expect but not in any way that brings out an interesting side to this kind of instrumental you wouldn’t have heard, unless you’re into that squawking synth before the drop. Since it’s Calvin Harris producing, it has more texture than a lesser DJ would care to add, particularly with the bass synth, it gets a bit gnarly and I can respect that, but most of its surroundings are non-presence synth pads and the non-extended cut has some just bizarre structural ideas that come off as mistakes. After the first drop, there is a lot of empty space wherein the instrumental plays with little development as if that’s where the verse was supposed to be, before cutting out entirely for Pizzorno’s first verse to replay over just wiry percussion and nothing else, with how affected his vocals are in the mix making for a bizarre moment where it sounds like he’s speaking into an air vent and awaiting a response that never comes. He kind of wraps it back around by doing a strange structural choice that actually works for me in the end, delaying the introduction of drums in the build to allow for a swell that does work fine enough, though the drop isn’t inspired and you’re still working with Sergio Pizzorno who is just not that great a vocalist for a song about escape, freedom and release. He still sounds like all of those emotions are foreign to him because he’s not giving the song its all – I don’t know if he can belt, maybe some Kasabian fans can tell me what vocals he’s capable of, but he’s definitely not showcasing them here.

#27 – “Drive Safe” – Myles Smith and Niall Horan

Produced by Will Bloomfield and Peter Fenn

Yeah, it fits like a glove, really. All of the One Direction members have gone in different but, if you look into it, remarkably similar directions that, outside of maybe surface-level turns or Harry’s last single… or maybe the very uncomfortable “Slow Hands”, don’t experiment outside of a comfort zone that most adopted pretty quickly. It look Tomlinson – who had the #1 album just a few weeks ago – a while to catch up with his pop rock but Horan’s form of “safe” is in mostly folk and rock-influenced pop, Styles’ form of “safe” is in pretty deadpan throwback pop and glam, ZAYN’s form of “safe” is staying out of the public eye and then dropping some middling R&B. Myles Smith is almost too good of a collab for Niall that it’s semi-redundant to have them on the same track unless, of course, their duet was actually put to use and had some thematic reasoning to it which, given how pop music collaborations sometimes work nowadays, isn’t always in the realm of possibility but for these two, it really should be! Smith said that the song was a natural result of their friendship and that the two had grown close – whilst the One Direction boys are pretty much all in the public eye right now, a sincere little collaboration with a new star releasing is a great idea for Niall. Do I personally like the song? Well, I enjoy the sentiment, which isn’t a first for Myles Smith, he tends to sell pretty agreeable platitudes, with the amicable relationship ending here one that’s kept decently vague, can basically apply to any extended parting of ways, except ones that imply or promise any form of reunion… and I really like that exclusion, actually! Smith is singing about a relationship that ends there and thanks to their history, they know this person will be fine without them and whilst it may be a bit of a self-centred way to look at things to think that matters that much – firstly, it’s his song, of course, it’s going to be – I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If you’re not in their life, the only perspective he can truly understand is his own and from what he’s saying, it seems like he’s just happy to tell them to take care of themselves like he knows they will. Niall’s verse ruins that sentiment entirely by saying “I’ll always be your home”. I’m not happy about Horan’s contributions here, even less so than I am about the bog-standard stomp-clap and muddy mix on Smith’s more murmured vocals going into the splatted kick and compressed, cinematic swooshing that this kind of pop often relies on instead of a stronger hook or any lyrical drama. What really salvaged this song for me – and it kind of needs it, the transitions between the chorus and the second verse is really rough and abrupt – was Myles Smith’s sentiment and whilst like I said, I would enjoy two different perspectives that interact with each other so it has thematic reason to be a duet, nothing happens with that. Niall and Smith harmonise on a bridge about wanting to see their face and know it’ll be okay during their own struggles, but these two perspectives (the first of which is at least uniquely hands-off for this kind of song and the second being cheap, tired platitudes of love) do not interact in any meaningful way that gels the two together and it’s just a shambles. Honestly, it’s the worst kind of shambles because it sounds like (and mostly passes as) a well-meaning pop song, which it is, but on a production and narrative level, it’s not even close to neatly put together and doesn’t embrace any of those faults either, just kind of crushes them with effects and calls it a day. Not a fan of this at all.

#14 – “Homewrecker” – sombr

Produced by sombr and Tony Berg

Who the Hell are “Quenlin Blackwell” and “Milo Manheim”? Wow, I’m even more out of touch with actors than I thought I was. Anyway, they star in Gus Black’s video for sombr’s new single “Homewrecker” as after his big year for 2025, he has finally learned what the shift key does judging off of the song title. The article I linked claims, like a press release (which it pretty much is), that sombr “documents young love with a smoldering vulnerability and depth” and I want to use that approach to really show what I don’t enjoy with sombr’s singles so far in that I don’t really hear the depth (sometimes young love doesn’t need it) but I also don’t hear the vulnerability as much as I hear a defensiveness that centres the relationship around him. That’s fine, of course, but it doesn’t click with me and you can dig for my reviews for “back to friends”, “undressed” or “12 to 12” to really get into that, but “Homewrecker” isn’t too different. In fact, it retreads the coated multi-track falsettos and disco licks from “12 to 12” in a fusion that sounds a bit dated to a decade or so before sombr blew up, though of course, in 2014, the drums would have been stomps and we probably would get different lyrics than the chorus begging for a lover who chooses another over him but he can just do SO much better… he doesn’t want to be a homewrecker, though, surely, he promises, he just wants to express this with no ulterior motives (see, it’s a weird defensiveness). To me, this isn’t vulnerable, and I know why because sombr describes being vulnerable in the second verse – “I open up to you about my wrongs”. I think this is a super telling demonstration of the song’s coercion, wherein a surface-level reference to him being earnest about mistakes he’s made (though of what gravitas or relevance we don’t know) passes as “vulnerability” and therefore, must be a step towards lifelong love. I understand, unrequited love is hard, you end up making fantasies in your head, especially when that person is taken, I get it, but sombr demonstrates a weird insecurity, especially in how physical his descriptions of and demands for love are, that doesn’t feel truly vulnerable but has yet to cross over into a sleaze that this kind of grey, tropical disco schlock could probably work to back. I want to enjoy some aspects of this guy’s music – I don’t mind his melodies or even his voice nowadays – but I’m still struggling to get past lyrical conceits and attitudes I can’t buy into. It’s still a little slimy, sorry.

Conclusion