Bow Anderson
Sweater
Twenty-six years after Weezer’s Undone (The Sweater Song), the humble pullover is – finally! – back in the pop milieu. Here, newcomer Anderson heals her heartache by wearing synthetic fibres to the club and mainlining the post-Back to Black retro-soul sound that every 00s female artist was contracted to dabble in. Luckily, the Paloma Faithness is scuffed up by a rollicking, tear-stained chorus that lifts you up by your ears, screaming: “My heart is broken, get me a bloody drink!”
ITZY
24HRS
This K-pop girlband anthem is essentially a checklist of its producer Sophie’s most brain-tickling fripperies. So the blankly intoned verses are tossed around by a moist beat that replicates wet tissue hitting a wall, while a delicate-as-a-petal piano figure plays hide-and-seek with ghostly, computerised yelps. Then, just as you’re settling into the pep rally-energy of the chorus’s cheerleader chant, a sinkhole-sized bassline cracks open and swallows it whole. A glorious headache.
The Killers
Caution
In 2006, Neil Tennant took issue with Brandon Flowers’s goatee, claiming he’d only grown it to please the anti-pop brigade. The Killers returned two years later with the decidedly moustache-free, majestic synth-pop explosion Human. Now they are back with a gloriously OTT track aiming for that middle ground between guitar-heavy rock anthem and svelte, snake-hipped pop explosion. An immaculately manicured, well-oiled beard of a song.
Yaeji
Waking Up Down
Like an introverted wellness coach high-fiving weakly through exhausted tears, here’s house music experimentalist Yaeji ticking off the life skills she’s mastered so far. “I got waking up down, I got cooking down,” she whispers over tactile electronics. This is the humblest of humblebrags, a frazzled ode to tiny victories at a time when peeling off the duvet takes huge doses of willpower.
Ava Max
Kings & Queens
It’s the question on everyone’s lips: just what do we do with wonky wig wearer Ava Max in a post-Stupid Love world? What use is a Lady Gaga-circa-2008 replica when Gaga herself has swapped that dusty pink Stetson for a return to dance-pop ludicrousness? Here, Max mixes metaphors over a re-hashed RedOne beat to mildly amusing effect, but in all honesty this is Artpop-level Germanotta.
