TRACK OF THE WEEK
Banks
Fuck With Myself
Perhaps people haven’t connected with Banks in the past because she’s a bit posh, never smiles and her dress code is “Russian villain from a Matt Damon movie”, but this track should equal an automatic promotion to pop’s top tier. A song about self-empowerment, self-harm and self-love, it sounds like Hit Me Baby One More Time if it was produced by the Weeknd in 1983.
Justice
Safe And Sound
It is a little-known fact but French electro duo Justice are trailblazers in the movement to get more child choirs in trendy music. Their biggest hit, 2007’s DANCE, featured the London-based Foundation For Young Musicians choir singing its title. Since then, Kanye sampled Holy Name of Mary Choral Family, loads have people have resampled the Joubert Singers, and now child choirs have become the “featuring Sean Paul” of 2016. Still, Justice do brats in harmony better than most, and their comeback single sounds like Get Lucky being interpreted at a school assembly somewhere in the Triangulum galaxy.
Nelly Furtado
Behind Your Back
At best, Nelly Furtado’s new song could only politely be called a demo. I’m not sure the lyrics are even finished. One of them is: “You were one in a million, in my whole hotel hell/ I’m always never conscious, it’s a word I haaaa”. That’s the sort of gobbledigook people sing when they’re waiting for Sia to write them a topline.
Toothless ft Marika Hackman
Palms Backside
Break-up songs normally fall into two categories: a) “I’m going to Uber round to yours right now, wake up your flatmates and cry a lot to see if that gets you back” or b) “I am setting fire to all your clothes and I don’t even need lighter fluid because they are made of such cheap synthetic fabrics”. But Ed Nash, AKA Toothless, finds a sweet middle-ground in a Moldy Peaches-style back-and-forth with nu-folk darling Marika Hackman, embodying bitterness, nostalgia and misery with one handy image.
5 Seconds Of Summer
Girls Talk Boys
I came to 5SoS for a bit of light relief, maybe a few British weather gags. But this track, written for the Ghostbusters soundtrack, is low-slung 80s cock-pop that gives current kings of that genre’s revival, the 1975, a run for their money. It’s all synchronised guitar thrusts and pervy basslines, and shows that bands like this sound much better when working to a brief. We should tell Union J their next single is going to be the Watchdog theme, just to see what they come up with.
