TRACK OF THE WEEK
Rae Sremmurd
Perplexing Pegasus
They call themselves the Black Beatles, but the Fab Two are so much better than that. For a start, instead of She Loves You, they shot to fame with the far more relevant lyric: “She think she love me/ I think she trollin.’” Secondly, for the first cut from SremmLife 3, they’ve taken everything great about their mega-hit and magnified it: more spacey, more sinister, more playful and, if possible, more hypnotic – like a codeine nightmare in a branch of Laser Quest.
Alice Glass
Without Love
Ever since the Blackberry Messenger era’s Annie Lennox split from her Dave Stewart, we’ve been willing her to write her own Walking on Broken Glass. Sadly, the Crystal Castles co-founder’s new one isn’t even a Little Bird. Angling for the big emotional haymaker, her bawling actually ends up sounding like Purity Ring. Not a good thing.
Liam Gallagher
For What It’s Worth
This is comfort food, of course. But unlike Beady Eye, his previous solo work (“the cops are taking over/ While everyone’s in yoga”) and 74% of the tracks he managed to place on Oasis records, it is at least genuinely soothing. Featuring the usual plaintive apology due to be interpreted as “directed at Noel”, this is a winnowing of Liam’s Lennon-obsession into something as off-the-peg yet dapper as a Pretty Green shacket.
The War on Drugs
Pain
Like the Ramones of MOR, Adam Granduciel’s outfit has just one song, but it’s a really good one. The lashings of starry-wonder will keep the hater fraternity rolling their eyes like slot machines, and yes, it carries no surprises bar a guitar solo with some hoity-toity harmonics. But they’re still the one new act you and your dad can really bond over.
Pink
What About Us
Pink was one of the first pop stars to be “real”. Remember that song about divorce? Hey – she invented self-therapising navel-gazing as a trope of pop. But after a five-year absence, it is our displeasure to report that Pink stinks. This is like the worst sort of Katy Perry anthemics about how we’re all just “rockets pointed up at the stars”. Yet it’s the riots-themed video that’s the real biscuit-taker – a Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial of spray-on now.
