Shame
Lampoon
Whether you’re partial to Shame’s Fat Whites-meets-Fall shtick is up to you. It isn’t innovative. Two chords is all you’re getting. If you ever try to dance to it, or have sex to it, or run to it, you will fall over and break an appendage of great personal significance. But there’s something thrilling about the way Charlie Steen spits words while guitars pulp your face like sweaty, smelly hammers. “Weeing in a bus stop at 5am” rock, if that was a thing. Which I’ve decided it now is.
MNEK
Tongue
You know what’s better than one idea? Fifty of them, smooshed together in a giant, sloppy meatfeast calzone of bloopy noises and smut. Tongue kicks off with some stale, Drake-ish preen-pop, then sashays into languorous Brit-accented rap that sounds for all the world like West End Girls by Pet Shop Boys. Before we’re done, we’ve had whiffs of tropical house and STD funk, with hooks cribbed from Bye Bye Bye by ’NSync and Missy Elliott’s WTF. Is it more than the sum of its parts? No. But, sometimes, being exactly equal to the sum of your parts is absolutely fine.
Sigrid
Raw
The last thing I won was a copy of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, so can only speculate what it’s like to win the BBC Sound of 2018. The pressure may in fact be like that of saving the land of Hyrule from the evil Ganon. The joy similar to that first, carefree canter on Epona, who is a horse (digital). The sniping whingebaggery of the press could be like that impossible Water Temple with those stupid iron boots. Releasing Raw might well be like finishing the game, because it’s joyous but also a little bit sad. I can’t go into any more detail than that, though, as I used up all that space talking about Zelda. Soz.
Diplo ft Lil Yachty & Santigold
Worry No More
Does the ability to laugh at yourself make your music any less appalling? This is the quandary at the centre of everything Diplo does. On the one hand, you see him gonking about merrily in a dance routine with Mø, and sending himself up in What Would Diplo Do?, and you think: “He’s all right, that Diplo. I definitely hate him, but he’s all right.” On the other hand, you have this, which is terrible by every conceivable measure, including height. It’s what I imagine death feels like, AutoTuned and sprayed like vomit into my ears. Ol’ Dippers doesn’t mean it 100% seriously though, does he? So is it actually terrible? (Yes.) Is it really, though? Really? (Yes, it is.)
Meghan Trainor
No Excuses
This is the worst song I’ve ever heard. The end.
