This week at a screening of the new Jim Jarmusch zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, I was struck by something novel. When the film concluded, I could hear people all around me, for as long as it took for me to leave the building, talking about how bad the movie was. I’m not here to drag Jarmusch; I’d give the movie a solid three stars. But I do have to say it’s been too long since I saw or heard something that disappointed such a large part of the audience. There’s a certain flavor of camaraderie in befriending strangers by disliking a shared experience. So: if you hate these songs, please sound off in the comments!
BTS & Charli XCX: “Dream Glow”
Looking back on 2017, it’s safe to say “Boys” was that year’s version of “thank u, next”: a massive standalone single which tailed the terrific album its author had dropped earlier that year. Of course, both Charli XCX and Ariana Grande then followed up each album with another full-length within the year. And while Charli had A-list moments years before, 2017 was when she established a level of balanced mass appeal and critical adoration not seen since… well, Carly Rae Jepsen. That said, Carly didn’t spend 2018 touring with Taylor Swift.
A new Charli XCX album will be out later this year, and she’s now released “Dream Glow,” a collaboration with the biggest band in the world, BTS. There’s no rapping from BTS, as there often is, so the track feels relatively homogenous, but “Dream Glow” serves its performers’ melodic talents pretty well. It feels much more natural than “Crazy Crazy,” Charli’s collaboration with Japanese pop singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and J-pop production mastermind Yasutaka Nakata.
Bat for Lashes: “Kids in the Dark”
“Kids in the Dark”… even the title sounds like a great Bat for Lashes song. Songwriter Natasha Khan’s British dream-pop project checks my “I got into this when I was a college freshman” bias, but her catalog is full of terrific songs and albums. “Daniel” slaps as hard as anything else that dropped in 2009. And again, I was 19, so that’s really saying something about how good the competition was.
This ballroom-sized ballad will be the opening track of Bat for Lashes’ fifth album, Khan’s first since 2016’s The Bride. It doesn’t stray too far from the territory we’ve come to associate with Bat for Lashes. The lyrics revolve around an aching feeling of devotion to a lover, and those electro vibes are straight out of the Drive soundtrack or the turn-of-the-decade synth pop from the Valerie collective (for the real heads out there). Lost Girls is set for a Sept. 6 release.
Devon Welsh: “Faces”
The remarkably bare and emotional ambient pop duo Majical Cloudz, who I adored, broke up in 2016. Last summer singer Devon Welsh released his first full-length following the split. There was such a formal convention to Majical Cloudz — a ballad-based project devoted to sparse looped arrangements — that it’s been particularly interesting to find out what Welsh’s solo songs sound like. “Faces” uses what sounds like a whole chamber ensemble’s worth of long synth notes (and an articulate vocal melody with piles of reverb) to create its world. The song is a hopeful meditation on the now of a relationship, and though there’s uncertainty in the lyrics’ view of the future, it’s sweet expression of emotional warmth.
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