Fiona Apple
I Want You to Love Me
Right on time, Fiona “This world is bullshit” Apple returns to claim her throne as generational soothsayer with her miraculous fifth album, mercifully rushed out mid-pandemic. Cheap as it is to link a song potentially eight years in the making to this current moment, lyrics about time being elastic and needing love to soothe the roiling currents within happen to be the perfect thing for it.
Charli XCX
Forever
X weeks into lockdown and what have most of us got to show for it? A weird, yeasty smell (neglected sourdough starter, obv) and an intense familiarity with the back of the fridge. Meanwhile, Charli XCX is making a whole album from scratch. This first taste rattles like a metal shack haunted by a lovelorn sprite, a far more accurate rendering of the nation’s mental state than the corona-ballads doubtless to come.
Kiesza
Crave
While you should probably question the judgment of someone trying to prove they’re not a Canadian one-hit wonder by emulating the sound of someone who pretty much failed to prove they’re not a Canadian one-hit wonder, Hideaway hitmaker Kiesza turns out to be extremely good at Carly Rae Jepsen’s brand of a) high-intensity earnestness, and b) taut chart pop straight out of 1986. And in this economy, who’s complaining?
Tones and I
Bad Child
Speaking of one-hit wonders, Tones and I takes the wearying, serious artiste route with the follow-up to Dance Monkey. She’s savvy: singing about troubled children hitting back at their haters doubles as her own retort to anyone inclined to suggest that Rag’n’Bone Man will probably be wanting his big stomping boots and EDM basics patch back.
Alesso ft Liam Payne
Midnight
Well, the sex man act worked out poorly for Liam Payne, didn’t it? Five months after his all-time stinker of a debut album, he has followed Bieber in pivoting to devotion, and boy, he’s a natural. “Time enjoyed wasted’s not wasted time,” he sings at his paramour, undoing his own, er, logic with a lyric that takes three times longer to understand as it does to sing. A perfunctory banger in every sense.
