Miley Cyrus
Midnight Sky
“See my lips on her mouth, everybody’s talking now,” muses 2013’s most wanted on this disco-tinged, post-divorce banger. The Milky Milky Milk hitmaker sounds suitably refreshed after the double-meh of 2017’s country singer rebirth and last year’s, erm, Cattitude. Midnight Sky is everything all that wasn’t: impassioned, energised and delivered by someone brave enough to sport a platinum-blonde mullet.
Dua Lipa ft Madonna & Missy Elliott
Levitating (The Blessed Madonna Remix)
For a homosexual man of a certain age, this ludicrous pop pile-up should be manna from G-A-Y at Heaven. A Madonna-assisted remix of a Dua Lipa bop that sounds like Madge circa 2005 and also features a delirious Missy Elliott rhyming “pants” with “dance”!? What’s not to love? And yet here we are, looking at a 6/10. Just another example of 2020’s endless disappointments.
Lupin
May
When Jake Luppen isn’t wasting time with his band Hippo Campus – very “second on the bill at The Bait Shop circa season three of The OC” – he can be found making excellent solo songs like this. Constantly teetering on the edge of implosion, with Luppen’s effects-drenched falsetto punctuated by weird gun-click percussion, the frantic May feels like rattling around inside a malfunctioning drum machine.
Peaches
Flip This
There’s not much to this really; a few synth presets marked “Berlin afterparty” and “low-grade poppers” and a load of protest slogan-ready lyrics like “Suck the lime, take the bitter”, “Build it up, wake up” and “Now is not the time to mumble”. But, like all of Peaches’ best moments, its sleaze-sloshed anger hits the target.
Future Islands
Thrill
Six years ago Samuel T Herring propelled Future Islands towards mainstream success after his performance on David Letterman went viral: imagine a sweaty, recently divorced estate agent gyrating wildly while attempting to pass a jagged rock. The plodding Thrill is too slow for Herring to dad-dance to, therefore ridding the band of its need to exist.
