2023 is beginning to take shape a little with new songs occupying the top five of the Hot 100, but so far there hasn’t been a great deal of action lower down. Proving this we have just seven new top 40 arrivals for February, with Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen poised to rip up the charts with their new albums dropping next month. Vamos.
“Love Again” by The Kid LAROI
Peak #40, Current #54
Following a big breakthrough in 2021 and then a fairly quiet 2022, this feels like a bit of a make-or-break year for Kid Laroi, with this being the lead single for his upcoming debut album. I can’t say that I’m holding out much hope for his career if this is the strongest he’s got to offer. It sounds like a mix of the acoustic whinging of his biggest hit Without You combined with Lil Nas X influence in the deeper vocals and pluckier tempo.
The result is mind-blowingly generic and forgettable. It might not be as irritating as Without You but it’s also significantly less engaging and catchy. Barely two minutes, doesn’t build at all, basic lyrics. Sounds like album filler at best to me.
5/10
“Players” by Coi Leray
Peak #17, Current #17
Nope, we’re not doing this again. I never really bought into the backlash against Latto’s Big Energy last year. I mean it wasn’t a good song but there was a hook there and it was substantially different from the song it sampled. So just about the worst thing you could do is try the same formula with an even more overused sample, a hook that a three year-old could’ve come up with and an even less charismatic rapper.
Yeah this just sucks. Sample culture has gone way too far to the point where artists will take a 10/10 beat and put in a 2/10 performance over the top of it and think that’s good music. It isn’t. Just listen to The Message or even Check Yo Self instead, anything but this. And no, flipping it to “girls is [sic] players too” isn’t clever or interesting, it’s 2023 not 1993. For the record, there’s a sped-up remix of this which is viral on TikTok and is a fair bit better, but I’m not here to judge that so this is still ass.
2/10
“Last Night” by Morgan Wallen
Peak #3, Current #5
So Morgan Wallen’s new album comes out this week and it has 36 songs on it. Thirty six. Not a double album, not a deluxe, it is just straight up 36 songs long. He’s released another trio of songs from it to go with the three he put out back in December, and this track has quickly become a hit.
As a fan of Morgan’s general style I don’t mind this but it’s another single that doesn’t jump out at me. The melodic hook is quite tight but it’s basically the same melody as the verses and there’s no real change in the instrumentation either, meaning that the whole song kind of blends together with Morgan’s growling, the incessant snaps and the dense guitar lick. It all sounds rather miserable and lacking the space in the arrangement that songs like You Proof or Wasted On You have to compensate.
Look, Morgan has clearly found a style that works for him and he’s become very consistent and successful in this lane but I can’t help thinking that something has been lost along the way. Singles like Chasin’ You, More Than My Hometown, even Whiskey Glasses, they felt way bigger and more important than this, with memorable stories and air for the core song to breathe and flourish. I just hope his upcoming album has at least a couple of songs like that buried amongst the filler and pop crossovers.
5/10
“Boy’s a Liar, Pt. 2” by PinkPantheress & Ice Spice
Peak #3, Current #3
This is the biggest story of the month and marks the inevitable arrival of Ice Spice in this column. But truth be told, PinkPantheress is the bigger and more interesting story here. She’s a 21 year-old English singer and producer who has quietly achieved a fair bit of success in the past year and a bit with her eclectic musical style, which incorporates all sorts of pop, dance, drum & bass and garage influences. All her songs to date are very short but she has a cool musical aesthetic which mostly compensates for the lack of structure.
This song is not really one of her best in my opinion, mainly because it abandons the exciting fast-paced drum rhythms of her To Hell With It album for a more straightforward pop song that reminds me a lot of Charli XCX with the goofy twinkling synths and faint vocal performance. It’s alright, not great.
And then we have Ice Spice, who isn’t the worst thing ever but she’s had the sort of meteoric rise that her music is nowhere near good enough to justify and has people screaming “industry plant”. The result is publications like Pitchfork will give out a ridiculous 7.6/10 for her debut album which by all accounts was mediocre at best, meanwhile the online response to her music looks like this.
She’s probably a bit overhated but her music is pretty boring and I don’t care for her passive delivery. It’s not like her flow or wordplay are worth caring about either. As far as I can work out she’s only popular because she has distinctive hair and a fat ass.
Anyway, she sounds pretty out of place on Boy’s a Liar with a very mediocre verse. So there we are, an unwanted remix of a song that wasn’t that good to begin with. Oh well, at least it’s cool for PinkPantheress to get a hit and I’m sure at the end of the year various publications will call this the best song of the year in an attempt to sound like they’re in touch with the musical zeitgeist as this is certainly a very Gen Z song. Whatever, it’s still mid.
5/10
“Lost” by Linkin Park
Peak #38, Current #74
Linkin Park’s classic album Meteora turns twenty this year, and to celebrate this fact it is being reissued including this song which didn’t make the original cut. Meteora was one of two Linkin Park albums along with Minutes to Midnight that I owned on CD as a child and listened to numerous times, so this track had a lot to live up to.
It certainly does it’s job of fitting into that album, but maybe does it a little too well to the point where I get this weird feeling like I’ve always known this song. The intro is extremely similar to Numb, and it then goes into this big chorus which reminds me of What I’ve Done among various others in their discography. Still, an album track from peak Linkin Park is certainly a high benchmark of quality and whilst it is obviously very dated to the nu-metal era, it’s fantastic to hear Chester Bennington’s vocals in 2023 and it overall goes equally hard as pretty much anything from the original album.
I can see why it didn’t make the original album considering how similar it is to a lot of the other material, but it’s a nice treat to get years later when the group are perhaps thought of more fondly than they were at the time. Linkin Park were a damn good band and this fucking bangs.
8/10
“Love You Anyway” by Luke Combs
Peak #15, Current #38
The most consistent man in music gives us a look into his upcoming album Gettin’ Old with this being the lead single. It’s naturally tempting to call this another Luke Combs ballad and move on, but there is something that makes this one stand out a little more. The way the fiddle line runs through the song and allows just itself and the vocal to carry the tune without a reliance on percussion or even acoustics results in a really captivating core melody.
Luke’s vocals are of course always great, but this tempo and arrangement allows him to sound his absolute best, still raspy but soulful and smooth as well. The lyrics aren’t anything too crazy but it’s still a wonderfully sincere and romantic number. I don’t think it’s quite as perfect as Beautiful Crazy which remains his best song in this lane, but I’d still say it’s the most I’ve liked one of his singles since at least Forever After All. Another one for the ever-growing greatest hits compilation.
7.5/10
“PAINTING PICTURES” by Superstar Pride
Peak #34, Current #34
We end with a track by the lowest profile artist to appear in this column for some time. This American rapper appears to have fewer than ten songs in existence and none of them have any streams apart from this one, which is moderately viral for some reason. Given that, and the fact that this song clocks in at two minutes flat, I had zero expectations that this would be good or interesting.
That was appropriate. Superstar Pride’s vocal delivery is a little more engaging than I expected with a kind of cool, gruff delivery but the very spare beat and minimal melody does little to support him. It’s also another one of those songs where the “hook” takes up most of the song with just one verse, which is actually shorter than the hook, in between and no flow switch between the verse/chorus.
In other words it makes for a very forgettable song, although the singular verse does give us the line “been hard on a n***a since I came out the womb, yeah the pussy hole” which raised a small smile from me just for sounding stupid. But otherwise there’s nothing much here and it’s hard to see this lasting.
5/10
February average: 5.4/10
Worth listening to: “Lost”, “Love You Anyway”
🙂
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