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Posted by TSJ

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/harry-styles-american-girls/

According to the American Girl Wiki, American Girls have 4,003 styles…

[Video]
[4.67]

Julian Axelrod: The skirts have been traded for big ties and pants. The synths have shifted from high beams to a low hum. The reference points have downgraded from Haruomi Hosono to James Murphy. Harry Styles is done trying to make generation-defining anthems, and with the tempered ambitions come dropped shoulders, big ties loosened, a sigh of relief. These mid-tempo lopes are Harry at his best, and here he retrofits a “Grapejuice” groove with a single-worthy hook. If the video feints at anonymity, the song feels like a transmission from an alternate universe where this former teen star can blend into the crowd.
[7]

Claire Davidson: Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally has rightly been criticized for its evasive lyrics and Harry Styles’s nondescript delivery, but what I found most exasperating about the album was how atrociously it was mixed and mastered, taking already bland leftovers from the indie-aughts and distorting them into mush. “American Girls” begins with remarkable lethargy, tying its verses to a couple of plodding piano notes that don’t sound nearly as melancholic as their drippy, glassy-eyed production is meant to suggest. Why this foundation is paired with a gurgling synth-funk bassline on the hook remains a mystery to me; the only explanation I can conjure is that this choice is meant to infuse this song with a semblance of energy and ground Styles’s yelping with something tangible. The musical discord is at least more compelling than the song’s lyrics, where Styles vaguely mourns the illusory perfection of his friends’ American partners without giving the slightest hint of why his peers are attracted to this airbrushed elegance in the first place, or, indeed, what the consequence of indulging it actually is. Given how prefab Styles’s image is, though, it’s probably foolish to hope for any elaboration—that would require dishing messy details that are likely far too revealing for the industry’s reigning poster boy of soft masculinity.
[4]

Andrew Karpan: The girlfriends are saying this Styles era is a flop, but I think they’re wrong. This bullshit Bowie works: all the five good albums (just the important stuff) slammed into one song. It’s contemplative, full of grunts of distortion and signifying beeps that are just loud enough to largely ignore but noticeably there. It sounds just like how I imagined those Japan or Talk Talk records sounded before I actually put them on, and when I was staring at the dark-hued moody photographs of abstractly serious-looking men, thinking about the end of their empire. One imagines this is the sound of Styles tightening his tie, thinking about having to marry some model somewhere too. It’s hard work to look this good. Thank God for those American Girls.
[5]

Leah Isobel: As is his custom, Harry feints toward interesting ideas on “American Girls.” The repetition of “I’ve known you for ages” might refer to interpersonal love, or it might refer to the parasocial love audiences have for a singer they’ve followed since childhood. “American girls / all over the world” implies a sort of sideways perspective on cultural imperialism, a welcome complication from a close witness of the mechanisms of capital. Locating his isolation in girls is — well, we’ve talked about that enough already, but it remains a totally vague, enervating presence. The damp, squishy piano and plodding rhythm only bolster the song’s blankness. Still, the hint of bitterness is a little compelling.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I don’t understand this guy’s choice to sing “American Girls” as if it were “As It Was”: a wistful bit of wisteria. I suppose Harry Styles is more convincing in this mode than when he’s pogoing to his first DFA album.
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: He correctly identifies that one of the success states of DFA-core dance pop is to take a stupid phrase and repeat it until it achieves some semblance of profundity. He misses that, in that mode, you’re also expected to do something — anything! — interesting with your expensive synthesizers.
[4]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Smothers a would-be soaring chorus with a layer of thick, acrid smog. Deeply forgettable results.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: What is it about the drummers of forgettable songs like this who are doing good songs no one hears? Come on, y’all.
[4]

Ian Mathers: In retrospect, I think one of the reasons I gave “Aperture” a [7] instead of an [8] was for the very human reason that I’ve been burned before. Every so often, a big pop star I have yet to have strong feelings about — “As It Was” is pretty good, I guess — will put out a pre-album single that’s different from anything I’ve heard from them before, in a way that I really enjoy. But most of the time, if I’m overly enthusiastic about it, I will get slapped in the face with follow-up singles and an album even less compelling than their previous material. Well, I should clearly worry less about regretting such spates of enthusiasm, because on the basis of this, I really do need to get around to listening to the whole Harry Styles LP. The chorus is evocative, melancholy nothingness, but choruses like that are still not that easy to do correctly. And here it’s been done extremely correctly.
[7]

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/harry-styles-american-girls/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29809

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Posted by TSJ

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/ella-langley-be-her/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29807

H.E.R. did get all those Grammy nominations, yeah…

[Video]
[6.33]

Alfred Soto: With “Choosin’ Texas” an official smash the likes of which I didn’t expect last September, Ella Langley chooses “her” as a target, with conventional results. Another list song: references to “lover, sister, wife,” she only smokes on vacation, sez just what she thinks, needs no validation.” The chorus has no muscle — the hook and melodies don’t complement the lyrics’ tell-don’t-show approach. This song is all kick drum and attitude.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: After “Choosin’ Texas” became an enormous chart hit, Ella Langley clearly believes a full pop crossover is within reach, so she’s trading her rowdier (and better) Southern-rock material in for a lite, bedroom-pop-adjacent sound, and trading familiar country tropes for familiar pop tropes. Langley’s written frequently about her struggles with insecurity, but songs like “Could’ve Been Her” are basically classic country storytelling arcs, while “Be Her” is something more modern: the conceit of envying that girl. And I don’t think it’s going to work as a crossover, because as is frequent in country, the whole conceit relies on cultural context that is very different for mainstream pop and mainstream country audiences. Here, it’s the nature of the idealized woman. Langley: “She drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle.” Tate McRae: “She’ll wear a tight mini black dress with all her friends around.” Langley: “She’s a lover, a mother, a sister and wife.” Laufey: “Her siren’s kiss will send you straight into abyss.” Langley: “She knows being rich is just a state of mind.” Olivia Rodrigo: “In your daddy’s nice car, yeah, you’re living the life.” Both archetypes are unattainably put-together, but where one girl is unattainably down-to-earth and free of vice (indeed, explicitly Christian), the other is unattainably privileged and sexually alluring. (Unlike “Lacy,” “Amelie,” or “Sympathy Is a Knife” — or “Jolene,” “Girl Crush,” etc. — “Be Her” has no romantic subtext whatsoever, but even by platonic-girl-crush standards it’s astonishingly chaste: there’s literally one word here about what this woman looks like, and it’s a reference to “heels.”) With songs like these, the music contributes less to their popularity than their relatability — how well they intervene in how many anguished hours, and how few lyrics you have to ignore in the process. And put bluntly, “Be Her” assumes an audience for whom “she stays talkin’ to Jesus” is a universally enviable trait, which limits its reach dramatically. (But check back in a year.)
[5]

Al Varela: A new entry in the “do I want to be her or be with her canon. I have no doubt that Ella Langley is straight, but a gender envy song is still a gender envy song. Really big fan of the breezy country production that still has the structure and tightness of a catchy pop song. I can hear the Kacey Musgraves influence, and I’m thrilled! Ella herself is what sells the song though, with a great dejected performance ;you can feel the desperation and exhaustion that leads to this train of thought.
[8]

Claire Davidson: My reluctance to embrace Ella Langley has always come down to her morose vocal timbre, so it’s nice to hear her on a track that actually allows her to brood with real potency. Lyrically, though, “Be Her” is pretty thin, even by the standards of country’s clean-cut folk wisdom. Langley’s narrator envies a woman who seems to have it all together, yearning for a life defined by contentment instead of the “drama” that seems to dominate her own. The song invites comparison to Langley’s fellow leading lady in country: “Be Her” is essentially the inverse of “Bells & Whistles,” a duet between Kacey Musgraves and Megan Moroney that appeared on the latter’s album Cloud 9 not two months before this song’s debut. But where “Bells & Whistles” delighted in its willingness to flout (male) expectations of unassuming pleasantries, “Be Her” sees its protagonist yearn for a brand of womanhood defined by inoffensiveness—quite the choice in 2026, where everything from the beauty industry to the American political landscape writ large is demanding that women shrink themselves for the public eye. Troubling lyrical subtext aside, though, what’s more trying about this song is the dead-end approach to its composition, grounded in a two-note guitar lick that’s more evocative of banging one’s head against the wall than any sort of introspection or depth. Unsurprisingly, Ella Langley doesn’t have the energy to convey the desperation of the hook, but given that refusing to call attention to herself seems to be the goal of this song, perhaps she accomplished exactly what she wanted.
[4]

Jessica Doyle: If you put this up against Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” the latter feels more full, musically–Ella Langley’s chorus gets a little repetitive–though that’s not the reason I thought of the comparison. The plural of country song is not data, obviously, but it does feel like progress of a sort when even not-subversive women from Alabama are tormenting themselves not with the question of how to be a better wife, but how to be a better person.
[5]

Nortey Dowuona: The Tyler Perry/The Undertaker mixture who made this song also helped write this lush, pining song about trying desperately to become someone admirable. I was going to say something trite, like “this is unexpected,” but this makes perfect sense for both Langley and aforementioned mixture. Miranda Lambert, look out!
[8]

Julian Axelrod: I appreciate the specificity of Langley’s vision; even her idealized (other?) woman feels grounded in reality. The longer she sings the unembellished hook, the more shapes it assumes: “I just wanna be her” becomes “I just wanna be heard” becomes “I just wanna be hurt” until it loops back around. It doesn’t sound like a world-beating chart-topper, but neither did “Choosin’ Texas.” Maybe Ella’s just having her well-deserved moment.
[7]

Ian Mathers: My primary problem last time was the lyrics, and at least they’re better here. More pop country could stand to look back at the whole countrypolitan sound, rather than just adding drops and autotune or whatever (not that I doubt modern production has graced this record). The result is fine. It’s just fine!
[6]

Andrew Karpan: I was falling in love the other day, and it really opened me up to the bold and brassy possibilities of these Ella Langley records, the monumental acreage her voice occupies, the way it shines like the glimmer of the springtime sun. In some ways, it reminds me of my favorite Miranda Lambert records — those really annoying ones where she repeats something asinine over and over again in her honey-soft voice — but when Langley does it, it feels like something I’ve never heard before and have also been somehow listening to every day of my life, in a low rumble, never able to make out, right above the street. And that bassline? Kevin Parker, you can fold up your bangs and go back home.
[10]

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/ella-langley-be-her/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29807

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Posted by TSJ

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/alex-warren-fever-dream/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29804

It’s nice to have dreams.

[Video]
[4.10]

Al Varela: I’m glad that Alex Warren didn’t decide, after “Ordinary,” to continue making sleepy love ballads for all eternity. He clearly has more of an interest in propulsive, adventurous love bangers (however far that reaches for you). I like this one a lot! Not as fist-raising as “Bloodline,” but a solid groove with a good hook. Gives me the impression there’s more to Alex Warren that we have yet to see. I like having him around for now.
[7]

Andrew Karpan: It has been some six or so months since I’ve had a proper dream at all, and I think these nights of blank and dreamless nightmares are somehow more pleasant than this growing, growling all-encompassing migraine of a record, evocative of the experience of listening to the clonking of large rubber boots, on the third floor of a fragile pre-war apartment. A true monument of unpleasantness, the likes of which will likely haunt the SUV-driving purveyors of soft rock radio programmes on the LA freeways for months to come.
[1]

Alfred Soto: An answer to the question, “How would Alex Warren sound mimicking Mumford & Sons?”
[3]

Katherine St. Asaph: Reminiscent of Adele! Specifically: The video, which cuts from genial TikTok skit to labored megachurch gospel, reminds me of the vast gap in goofiness between Adele’s persona and Adele’s music. The difference with Alex Warren is that only one of those is enjoyable.
[3]

Ian Mathers: Even beyond the mediocre chorus, the bridge where the dreaded stomp/clap/woah-oh trifecta rears its head, or the truly pointless music video, I just don’t like Warren’s voice. It’s like his style and the processing are trying as hard as they can to reach Michael McDonald heights, but plunge into the uncanny valley instead. But here, the valley isn’t creepy; it’s just shitty.
[2]

Harlan Talib Ockey: “Fever Dream” does sound like something Cold War Kids might have released 10 years ago, but 1) I liked Cold War Kids ten years ago, and 2) the four-on-the-floor-ish beat goes a surprisingly long way toward making this fun to listen to. Although the bridge is not very good, it’s more of a laughable cliché rather than a genuine misstep. (You cut the piano and added gospel choir backing vocals? Groundbreaking.)
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Mr. Yaron has a good track record with Alex, but the way the drums hit on this track have everything to do with Adam Sterling, producer of much more memorable songs than this.
[4]

Julian Axelrod: Mammas Don’t Let Your Alex Warrens Grow Up to Be Teddy Swims
[4]

Hannah Jocelyn: Alex Warren tries his own “12 to 12,” and it’s not terrible, but for the first time I’m asking myself, “how would Sombr do this?”
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Seen in the context of Anglophone pop in the mid-2020s, this is the exact center: would be the worst Dua Lipa single, or the best Teddy Swims one.
[5]

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/alex-warren-fever-dream/

https://thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=29804