Can the world make him into the star the industry wanted Azealia Banks to be? Let’s hope so, ’cause if there’s any style that can shock NYC out of its memberberries level nostalgia, it’s this. Son Raw: I was dreading Peaches, but she’s just decoration to draw in newcomers – this is 95% Cakes and he’s in his element, drawing on club production without ever compromising that flow. The performance is better than the song, but that leaves you happy to hear whatever the next song is. I’d pretty much forgotten to exhale until that moment Cakes throws you a bone and instructs, “Breathe.” (8)ĭaniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Cakes has always been a dope rapper but this is truly a showcase for him, breathlessly careering over a beat that deserves to become something more than a straight-ahead thump. When Peaches comes in and Cakes’ flow switches up right after, they swarm around you just emanating pure kineticism. Tayyab Amin: This is so hard, so raw and so heavy! Relentless bars, rollicking beats I think you could pull me back out of the grave with this one. But here we are: in the club with a vogue rap track (the kind with which Azealia Banks always found success) that finds Cakes as fierce as ever, with a co-sign from one of the great queer provocateurs of our time. Peaches – ‘Up Out My Face’Ĭhris Kelly: As much sense as it makes, I never thought I’d hear Cakes Da Killa and Peaches on a track produced by Jeremiah Meece. Tayyab Amin: I’m actually dizzy from the way the Weeknd veers between incredibly corny and graceful, hard-hitting lyrics: “Girls get loose when they hear this song / A hundred on the dash get me close to God.” It’s not how I thought this collaboration would turn out at all – it’s slicker, punchier and more considered than both artists’ typical offerings, and all the better for it.
(6)ĭaniel Montesinos-Donaghy: There’s the sense that Daft Punk appear so infrequently that we should treat their presence as a present – let’s not overpraise whatever multi-billion dollar shininess they did on this slo-mo Scarface-soundtrack take on a Sade club mix. But while Tesfaye has swapped the gross lyrics of his mid-period for standard issue sports car purchase orders and ivory-on-ebony drug metaphors, I still find him as vacuous and – worse yet – boring as ever. The ‘Starboy’ beat puts this a notch above anything on Beauty Behind The Madness, and it’s the best thing Daft Punk have done in ages (does anyone think about Random Access Memories anymore?). (6)Ĭhris Kelly: The Abel Tesfaye that used to reside in the House of Balloons is long gone, yet even after ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ I’m still having trouble reconciling his mainstream pop career. This screams “album cut turned into a single cause we roped in Daft Punk”, whose contribution remains fairly opaque.
The problem here is that this is too clean, and not in the A1 coke ‘high kind of way.
Son Raw: Let’s give Tesfaye credit for being consistent: a switch to in-vogue social consciousness would have been both predictable and ridiculous considering his rep as R&B’s king of debauchery and bad behavior. Meanwhile, the Black Beatles are popping wheelies on the zeitgeist, rapper Cakes Da Killa is on the cusp of breaking out, and we rate the return of Simian Mobile Disco and Dirty Projectors. This week we squint into the blinding horizon of a new age to digest the first ever pop song written by artificial intelligence, and we hear the sound of everyone’s favourite robot duo teaming up with the king of pop debauchery. Each week on the FACT Singles Club, a selection of our writers work their way through the new music of the week gone by.
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