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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 06/05/2026 (Ariana Grande)

At last, Ariana Grande’s brand new single “hate that i made you love me” debuts straight in at #1 of the UK Singles Chart, pushing “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean back to #2 after a long reign at the top. Welcome back to this “snippy” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #ariana grande #petal ariana grande #hate that i made you love me #noah kahan #the last of the bugs #orbiter #silva bumpa #montell jordan

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 30/05/2026 (Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Charli xcx)

For a 13th week, “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean continues to sit at the top of the UK Singles Chart. Welcome back to this “regressive” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

#uk singles chart #song review #pop music #drake #charli xcx #olivia rodrigo #pinkpantheress #fancy that #girl like me #basement jaxx #iceman #sonny fodera #libianca #mac miller #ty dolla $ign

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 23/05/2026 (Drake's ICEMAN, Gracie Abrams, Eurovision Song Contest)

No more Nice Man. Here comes the ICEMAN. Let’s deal with this first, welcome back to October’s very own episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #album review #drake #iceman #gracie abrams #dara #eurovision 2026 #noah kahan #willing and able #the last of the bugs

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 16/05/2026 (Charli xcx)

An 11th week for “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean at #1, because that may as well be #1 forever. Welcome back to this “stream-of-consciousness” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

“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.

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.

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.

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?

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #charli xcx #harry styles #jazzy #calvin harris #prospa #murda beatz

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 09/05/2026 (Alex Warren, Madonna, Sabrina Carpenter)

Sam Fender and Olivia Dean are in the double digits with “Rein Me In” reaching a 10th week at the very top of the UK Singles Chart. Welcome back to this “apolitical” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

“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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #sabrina carpenter #madonna #bring your love #confessions ii #jackson 5 #inner city #alex warren #sienna spiro #the devil wears prada 2

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 02/05/2026 (Noah Kahan, Olivia Dean, Michael Jackson)

The week after Olivia Rodrigo debuted at #1 with “drop dead”, another Olivia, Ms. Dean, takes it back with “Rein Me In” together with Sam Fender returning to the top for a ninth week. Welcome back to this “thrilling, bad, dangerous, invincible, off-the-wall” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

“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.

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.

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #f3miii #michael jackson #michael biopic #ella langley #morgan wallen #olivia dean #noah kahan #the great divide

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 25/04/2026 (Olivia Rodrigo's "drop dead", sombr, Tyla, Zara Larsson)

Olivia Rodrigo crowns the UK Singles Chart with “drop dead”, her fourth #1 in the UK. Welcome back to this “deceased” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #sabrina carpenter #tyla #zara larsson #olivia rodrigo #drop dead olivia rodrigo #sombr #lana del rey #007 first light #lewis capaldi #justin bieber

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 18/04/2026 (KATSEYE, Lady Gaga & Doechii)

It’s much busier than last week, but Sam Fender and Olivia Dean still maintain their spot at #1 for an eighth week on the UK Singles Chart with “Rein Me In”. Welcome back to this “snappy” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #lady gaga #doechii #katseye #teddy swims #lonown #riserayss #ella langley #stella lefty #myles smith #my mess

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 11/04/2026

“Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean spends a seventh week at #1 on the UK Singles Chart. It’s a slow week so welcome back to this “slumberous” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

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.

#uk singles chart #song review #pop music #james hype #temper city

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 04/04/2026 (RAYE, Ye's BULLY, Andre Troutman, Central Cee)

For a sixth week, “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean continues its reign at #1 on the UK Singles Chart. Welcome back to this “documented” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #central cee #ye #bully #kanye west #travis scott #andre troutman #raye #this music may contain hope.#prospa #cloonee #malcolm todd #bts #miley cyrus #hannah montana #the long faces

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 28/03/2026 (BTS' ARIRANG, RAYE & Hans Zimmer)

BTS are back. They have the #1 album with ARIRANG, they have the #2 single with “SWIM” and hopefully Jung Kook has his military-prescription banana milk. Of course, they couldn’t quite beat out “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean at its fifth week on top the UK Singles Chart. Welcome back to this “nail-biting” (not quite) episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

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.

…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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #bts #arirang #bts comeback #bts swim #julia wolf #raye #hans zimmer #flo #tom did it #chris stussy #luke combs #niall horan

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 21/03/2026 (SIENNA SPIRO, Noah Kahan)

“Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean takes back the #1 spot on the UK Singles Chart for a fourth week. Welcome back to this “contemplative” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

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.

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.

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?

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #sienna spiro #the visitor #noah kahan #porch light #the great divide #james blake #trying times #dave #beabadoobee #the marías

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 14/03/2026 (Harry Styles' Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally)

Charts all the time. #1, occasionally – including this week! Harry Styles debuts “American Girls” at the top of the UK Singles Chart, becoming his fourth #1 single. Welcome to this “star-dazzling” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #harry styles #kissco #kattdo #kiss all the time disco occasionally #bruno mars #anotr #54 ultra #bebe rexha #faithless

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 07/03/2026 (Alex Warren, Bruno Mars' The Romantic, Olivia Dean, RAYE)

“Rein Me In” by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean, recently crowned the BRIT Awards’ Song of the Year, spends a third week at #1 on the UK Singles Chart. This is the week we see the impact of the BRIT Awards, held last weekend in Manchester (for the first time), so prepare for a long week. Welcome back to this “puzzling” series, REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 28/02/2026 (Twenty One Pilots)

For a second subsequent week, we get an Olivia Dean double on the UK Singles Chart with “So Easy (to Fall in Love)” at #2 and “Rein Me In” with Sam Fender at #1. Welcome to this “tepid” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

content warning: language, discussions of generative AI and trad-wives (I swear this is still worth reading)

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.

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.

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.

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #twenty one pilots #lana del rey #mumford and sons #gracie abrams #ewan mcvicar

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 21/02/2026 (Bad Bunny, Charli xcx's Wuthering Heights, Central Cee)

As Taylor Swift’s “Opalite” drops from its #1 spot last week to #8, Olivia Dean swoops in to take both the top spots – “So Easy (to Fall in Love)” at #2 and, on its 36th week on the chart, “Rein Me In” with Sam Fender at the very top, becoming Sam’s first #1 and Olivia’s second. Welcome back to this “chicanerous” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #central cee #charli xcx #fred again #jamie t #wuthering heights 2026 #j hus #slaughter #bad bunny #halftime show #luke combs #zxkai #slxughter

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 14/02/2026 (J. Cole's The Fall-Off, sombr, Myles Smith & Niall Horan, Calvin Harris & Kasabian)

Thanks to physical sales and a new music video starring everyone she met on her Graham Norton interview, Taylor Swift has returned to #1, this time with “Opalite” spending its first week at the top of the UK Singles Chart, becoming her sixth overall. She got what she pushed for, I’m not sure if she’ll get it in the US considering just how big Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was but we’ll see. This show is about the UK and our week is probably a lot less interesting than what's next for Billboard... but anyways, welcome back to this “germane” episode of REVIEWING THE CHARTS!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

#uk singles chart #pop music #song review #sombr #j. cole #the fall off #two six #tems #future #calvin harris #kasabian #esdeekid #myles smith #drive safe #niall horan #dominic fike

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