Kyle Reviews Addison Rae’s New Drop Because We Are Nothing Without Our Stereotypes

Kyle Galloway on 18 February 2025

You know me, Reader. I was lay (boyfriend’s bed, the Cuatro Torres just visible out the window, it’s Valentine’s Day, he’s at work, God it’s so hard), thinking (slightly hungover, freshly cut hair, 3 espressos deep, dodging the cumstain on my pillow) about whether to snatch an arbitrary line from Marx’s Grundrisse or Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet to feign informed sociological analysis of Addison Rae’s new single, ‘High Fashion’, and in doing so fraudulently intellectualise the fact that I froth-at-the-mouth-rabidly support this woman’s current trajectory. I was lay (I am lay) in these sheets, and you may think this introduction promises my resignation from this formula, BUT IT DOES NOT. Self-awareness does not necessitate moral puritanism, Reader. I am nothing if not a proselyte. And I might add: if any number of novels can establish status via epigraph, then so shall I. Without further ado…. Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel (one of my all-time favourites) is preceded by the following epigraph:

“The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”

This motif of “everything as it is now, just a little different” is echoed throughout the text, and comes to involve itself with ideas of intertextuality, representation, and authorship. To what point can anyone truly author anything, if the cultural artefact produced results from a centuries-long interpersonal means of production through which you learned the necessary skills and gleaned the necessary inspiration to be moved to make such an artefact? The Hassidic story itself is one Lerner says that he first happened upon in Agamben, but that is usually attributed to Walter Benjamin, who critics note heard it from Gershom Scholem. Maybe the sum of all things in the world-to-come, despite the new meshings of old influences and processes, is, as the story proposes, as it is now. Maybe, if we do not think of the “everything” as “every single thing” and instead visualise it as the holistic “everything of now” versus the “everything of then”, we realise that everything will indeed be as it is now, because the sum of all things will still weigh the same, in grams if not in cultural weight. All we do is reshape, remesh, rewind and press play. 

Stay with me. If we suspend our disbelief, this means that, no, your housemate was not the first housemate to piss himself in Wharf Chambers. No, the Leeds Swimming Society was not the first swimming society to play soggy biscuit. And I’m sorry, I really am, but you and your friends were not the first ones to find that bench on the hill behind Meanwood Valley Farm that overlooks the city. I know someone who shat there. But even if you and your group of friends were the West Yorkshire conquistadors that you imagined, my point is none of it would be really new! The soggy biscuit would simply be the incidental next iteration of thousands of years of rancid biscuit-based tests of character. I am sure that Henry VIII was the sorest loser of soil’d bisquite that 1503 ever saw. 

Circling back, though, you have likely inferred at this point that this is a setup for me to defend Addison Rae against plagiarism allegations. You wouldn’t be far off. “High Fashion”, a whisper-falsetto track that stings against a thick, layered synth instrumentation, definitely recalls “Fetish”-era Selena Gomez (2017) and Ariana Grande’s “Let Me Love You” and “Touch It” (2016). Likewise, Rae’s first and second singles from her upcoming debut pulled generously from pop of the last 20 years, with “Diet Pepsi” (2024) drawing comparison to early Lana Del Rey and “Aquamarine”’s (2024) glittery production pointing to Madonna’s Ray of Light (1998) and American Life (2003). And these are not baseless comparisons; Rae’s existing discography undeniably rehashes pop music as it has been established thus far, almost as an agenda. 

But in truth, I do not find it convincing that this makes her a copycat any more than it makes her a ‘student’ of the culture. The music itself, combined with the concomitant imagery she has released alongside it, betrays (at least to me) a concerted effort to be seen making a concerted effort to be a popstar. Whether it’s the performative, almost histrionic hypersexuality in her music videos; the ill-fitting, dress-up style outfits; the brownnosing of Charli XCX; the bubblegum-blowing on the cover of her debut EP; the OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES (2018) jumper; or the stylish, eyebrowless accessory that she has made of choreographer Lexee Smith, to me this rebrand screams popstar-plays-girl-desparate-to-be-popstar. It is the ouroboros!!! And dare I say it is, for the Aquama-ra-ra bitch, a foolproof ploy.

Medidate on this. A Tiktok darling of the universally-hated “Renegade” epoch, Addison had no doubt seen the vicious reception of ‘serious’ attempts at music by her fellows (colleagues? contemporaries?) and herself (see: “Obsessed” (2021)). She (and her team, I’m sure) would have known that a transition to popstar would be no mean feat, and to circumvent this, the (I’ll say it) genius move was to make her entire brand a satirisation of her own position in the media-sphere. If she were to play the part of a wide-eyed, fame-hungry protegé of Charli and Troye Sivan, both explicitly in the kitsch, frenzy, and referentiality of her music videos and more convincingly in paid-for paparazzi shots and dazed-and-confused red carpet interviews, any negative reception she received for the awkwardness of her reorientation towards music would be suffused into the self-consciously artificial, fawning persona she had marketed. She would set up a relationship with the public in which criticism is negated and instead relegates itself to fluffing up her own polemacy, and those on either cognitive side of those who criticise (those who consume the product without any level of interrogation, and those who enjoy the art of the charade itself) will praise her relentlessly (see: me). 

The proof is in the pudding – the numbers Addison is pulling right now are nothing to be sniffed at. On Spotify, “Aquamarine” sits at 32 million streams, and “Diet Pepsi” at a mammoth 292 million. Beyond this, Rae is fraternising with any number of established popstars (Lorde, Rosalía, etc.) while simultaneously gesturing at relationships with more esoteric figures such as Arca. She’s walking the tightrope well because she has erected neon billboards pointing at the tightrope and just how thin it is. 

As far as I’m concerned, “High Fashion” and it’s (anything but) coke-fuelled visuals has one foot (pun intended) planted in Addison’s hallmark please-don’t-make-me-sing! kitsch and the other firmly in an ambition to innovate, through however many layers of metacommentary. Disjointed, vapid lyrics (“I know I’m drunk, but…”) poorly solder a number of pop clichés together (‘couture’, libido, uppers, exhibitionism). They make the track fodder for off-the-bat criticism à la Artpop (2014), but the poor lyrical execution is juxtaposed against an unexpectedly complex, hazy instrumental which weaves in and out of the vocal performance and, during drops, cracks open into EDM-adjacent texture. The track’s video, too, plays with garish colour, visual allusion, and forced perspective, meshing together images of Addison as a chalk-covered gymnast, Oz’s Dorothy, and a closet fashionista literally playing dress up. It’s frenetic, but it’s notably more thought-out than the lyrics. The work put into the track’s music video and production problematise an assessment of the lyrics that dismisses them as thoughtless or manufactured. 

For if ‘manufactured’ is the intention, what is the logic behind it? Stirring controversy for publicity? Or holding a mirror up to the pop that we’ve been listening to uncritically for the last couple of decades? If Addison, the total newcomer to ‘serious’ art, she who is easiest to critique, decides to gut her lyrics of meaning, does this not reinscribe the words sung with words implied? Words that ask us how deep the lyrics of pop we admit as enjoyable actually are. The song she has produced, whether or not its lyricism is justified by the modalities attached to it, is just as the songs we accept are, but a little different. A little different in source, a little different in frankness regarding influences, a little different in its relationship with sincerity. But by writing a mirror instead of an image itself, this music encourages us to review what we consider good or original art, our acceptance of a world-to-come that does not invent its meaning machines but simply reboots them, and our own media literacy. 

Written by Kyle Galloway

A Dar(e)ing Foray into Bodily Fluids and Faulty Sound Design: Yes, I Went To See The Dare

Kyle Galloway on 28 November 2024

So it’s like 2pm on Wednesday and I’m one flask of instant coffee and two RAND cold brews deep in Laidlaw (mind: alive) toying with the idea of committing to read Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation for my dissertation when my phone chimes. My intestines clench – I wipe away an fading skidmark of hoisin sauce from my joul – I’m in the library – why is my Do Not Disturb off? I’ll tell you why: divine intervention. It’s an email from Warren Higgins at Chuff Media. “URGENT – RE: THE DARE TOMORROW NIGHT”. 

A tear forms in the corner of my eye, rolls down the side of my face. The sound of it hitting the floor reverberates off the cold, angular interior design of the library. The swathes of international students and Herefordshire finance bros in quarter-zips fall silent. They all know what has befallen Leeds… I will be present at The Dare’s gig at Belgrave.

Fast forward 29 hours. 19:00. My room laden with discarded jumpers. I stink of Versace Eros. I have toothbrushed away the red wine tidal mark from my bottom lip 3 times, but I’m starting to think it adds to my vampire-hit-by-a-car aesthetic. I have “All I Need” by Air on my speaker because I feel romanced by the air of the moment. I’ve used my honed research skills (a network of gay men on Instagram stretching from Scarborough to Southport) to recruit another twink to accompany me. I stub out my incense (“Tropical Lemongrass”) and saunter to the bus stop. 

20:30. Everything is red. Adult DVD is warming the crowd up. I turn to my compadre (“sebastiAn? Justice-y? Maybe.”). It’s pushing nine. He’s itching for the man himself to guess the colour of someone’s underwear. All the bodies in the room hold an abstract charge, part anticipation for an act whose USP is manifest eroticanostalgia, part awe of the negative space already held by a not-yet-present act whose USP is also a very rentable suit-and-sunglasses combo. We’ve been waiting: the crowd flicker like candles on the verge of burning themselves out, iPhone flashlights extend out between bodies in frenetic little blooming rings every time a sound technician comes to tamper with the synth. 

21:07. He emerges and the aerated agitation of the crowd bubbles over into a boiling, frothing fever for what is to come. “Open Up” does exactly what it describes as the first track, leading into a breakneck back-to-back performance of “Good Time”, “Sex”, “Perfume”, and “I Destroyed Disco”, the last two interrupted almost comically by brief technical issues that somehow aesthetically align themselves with the sleaze and artificiality of the product The Dare has marketed to us. But the atmosphere is anything but soiled. The pot continues boiling over. There is a sense, in this room, of a unique catharsis. It feels like an embodiment of a deceased pop dancefloor, immortalised as something of the past, something crumbled into territories of other genres for about 10 years, resurrected by a man iconicised by his non-descriptness, his grand interpolation of a milieu of electroclash artists dragged unceremoniously into a prior unrendered present-future.

21:45. The People have been waiting for this. The setlist descends (ironically) into “Elevation” and “You Can Never Go Home”, after an electric interpolation of “Guess” into “Bloodwork” from the rocket-fuel debut Sex EP (2023), giving us a minute to breathe. We are ready for an encore worthy of such a gig, hair matted with sweat and eyes bloodshot, a bass-amplified forcefield pressing in on the room from its edges. He acknowledges what we’re waiting for after telling us we’re his first European show to mosh for him, we roll our eyes: continental Europe doesn’t understand what year-round drizzle and 14 years of Tory office make catharsis mean. 

Then the metallic opening synths of “Movement” lead us into a three-track fury, moving into “All Night” and then “Girls” as the crowd begins lifting dancers into the air, throwing bras onto the stage, screaming “I LOVE YOU!” à la One Direction fanfic. The bass hits, hypnotic, we all know the words, acrylics begin ripping panelling off the stages, scratching grooves into the floor, throwing vodka tonic into the sky. Boys are kissing! Tits are out! I can smell Kesha! Or a Jack Antonoff who never met women who write lyrics in diaries! The roof opens up to the pitch of the night. Maybe we’ll all be swallowed. Maybe swallowing is part of the commitment to the performance. After all, what’s a spitter to a swallower, and what’s a swallower to The Dare?

Words by Kyle Galloway

Why I sacrificed a goat for Charli XCX on Thursday: The BRAT Remix Review

Kyle Galloway on 27 October 2024

Sometimes I’m not sure how much I know about myself. In our age the self is punctured again and again by identity politics, late-stage capitalism, the cradle-to-casket conveyor belt we ride. Some nights I snap out of a haze and find myself staring into the steam-gauzed frame of my bathroom mirror. What am I looking for? I don’t know. Maybe a remix album. Because if there is one thing that is pinballing around in my ears as I’m stood, tears streaming down my face, looking for a reflection in the mist, it is this: I am a slut for a remix.

It’s true. At midnight on Thursday, 10th of October, Charli XCX’s long-considered-mythical, feverishly anticipated Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat dropped on streaming platforms, constituting the latest in a chain of acid green dominoes that have been falling since early June. Boasting an array of left-field features including Ariana Grande, Julian Casablancas, and Bladee, the 9 long months between the original BRAT drop and the remix album seem to have settled a receptive sweet spot online, with equal parts cynicism and diva worship infecting everything from Headrow House to presidential campaigns. 

Power lies in a remix. And let me clarify, by remix I do not mean Cardi B’s verse on Despechá (foul) nor Ice Spice’s… noises …on Karma (wheelie bin on fire). Power lies in the risk of an artist taking their own record, shattering it on the ground and reassembling it with chewing gum and reverbed air horns. If I’m listening to a remix album, I’m expecting more than a rap verse. I want record-scratching, screaming, disharmony, jangliness, broken glass, animal noises, clashing melodies, hype tracks refigured as piano ballads and piano ballads as nu jungle. In all honesty, part of me gave into fear, holed up in my house for days with my door barricaded and my windows boarded up to avoid the leaks that any outdoor time might risk me hearing. But how silly I was! Rejoice! Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat is really weird. My heart sings. 

From the first new track, “Club classics” with Spanish enemy of the people Bb trickz, the listener gets a sense of the space Charli is creating with this remix album. The track takes more from “365” than “Club classics”, painstakingly stacking sounds one-by-one until you’re smacked with the crescendo of a speed-increased, echoing verse which functions more as an accessory to the pace and rhythm than a Madonna-style “look! I am global!” token Spanish-language feature. But this is an album of dichotomies: in violent contract, “I might say something stupid featuring the 1975 and jon hopkins” takes shape as a subtle piano ballad that builds into a glitching, atmospheric thumper, an ode to loneliness that evolves the original record’s diary-style lyricism into layered, vulnerable curation. Matty Healy’s ‘I eat alone like a fly’ is pitted against Caroline Polachek’s ‘free bleeding in the autumn rain’ on a newly verdant and spooky “Everything is romantic”, against Casablancas’ ‘one for the abandonment’ on a risky, vocoder-heavy retune of “Mean girls”, and so on. The record unravels before you in a performance so erratically and perfectly brat that it’s difficult not to roll your eyes.

One thing which stands out in the remix record is the uncompromising and sometimes uncomfortable union of offensively experimental production choices and heartbreaking, cutting existentialism. In this sense, as far as I’m concerned, the remix record has only doubled down on the BRAT modus operandi. The self-abasement, the dirtiness, the anxiety, the intertextualism, the facade of languor distorting a sourdough starter of squirrelling creative restlessness, everything is amplified in a way where the testing the boundaries of ‘good taste’ that the original record represented is mutated into line-crossing, spasmodic creative freedom. 

It’s easy not to have faith in this type of music. The BRAT methodology, being the composition of sparse sonic elements strung thinly together like a scavenged tarp over a rainforest shelter, does not inspire a wealth of passion when its recalibration is announced. But listening to BAICDBSB, the sense of satisfaction I felt was sublime; my expectations were met and exceeded. Charli has taken the spaces between those sonic elements, cut, pasted, and dressed them up, and unloaded a record that, true to form, says exactly what it is. Completely different but still brat. The self-awareness is what makes it.

And truthfully, the backlash we immediately saw bubbling up in reception to this record is what defines it, too. BRAT was always about being uncomfortable, uncompromising, artificial. The lyrics face-value and the production scratchy and aching. A Bon Iver remake languishing in the face of time passing against a choral background and a brief, eardrum-raking reincarnation of what was once the album’s cinematic, voyaging closer “365” was the only way Charli could keep her claws in the wriggling, mercurial, sardonic caricature she’s carved for herself in the pop landscape. This remix album was never made for the fans, nor the public – it was made to elicit groans and criticism, to underwhelm, to offend. Charli XCX’s celebrity profile is one that cannot be sustained without the enfant terrible approach that manifests her. A nicotine-fuelled, rag-wearing, ephemeral djinn smirking from your peripheral in the corner of the club as you jerk to the music, to satisfy would be to desecrate what she represents. To dissatisfy, for her, is to please. 

If I could write a letter of thanks to this woman for this record, I would. I would fill an envelope with the blood of a sacrifical goat, and in the blood would be a Club Shy condom, and in the Club Shy condom would be a copy of Sartre’s Nausea I stole from my dead great aunt’s Bolton terrace, and on the contents page of Nausea would be a splodge of McDonald’s sweet chilli dip, and when you wiped away the dip there would be a shooting star and when Charli wished upon the star the entire world would dissolve into spacy metallic clanging and bisected guitar strings and whatever the fuck Henry Adams was writing about in The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900) and we would all learn what it means to love again. 

BAICDBASB is beauty. BAICDBASB is grace. And if one of you bastard trust fund baby DJs in Hyde Park don’t bump this at a house party this winter I will accidentally pour a pint over your Hercules Inpulse 300 and I will drunk shit in your ensuite. Take heed.

Words by Kyle Galloway.

Katy Perry and the Philanderer’s Tones: Why did 143 stink?

Kyle Galloway on 17 October 2024

In the words of esteemed Parisian food writer and primary antagonist of the rodent-themed Pixar classic, Anton Ego, “the work of a critic is easy”. Indeed it may be; to be a critic is to consume without the pressure to create. In this sense, we have all become critics in some realised or unrealised capacity. But to consume has its own dangers. Sometimes we are fed so well that when a massive stinker of an album rises like scum to the top of our Release Radars, the world becomes so incensed in the face of Bad Art™ that the natural response is to dogpile. We will return to this.

In stark contrast, you may be tempted to think that the job of an empire-building, platinum-selling, hardened popstar is easy. The brand has already been built! The fillers injected! The ghostwriters hired! Yet somehow, Katy Perry’s 143 makes a compelling argument that such a job is very, very hard. Why? Because the process of recruiting a vapid menagerie of (alleged) sexual abusers and otherwise jejune pop-house Youtube channel producers to craft such a hysterically awful tracklist, only to reap no adoration save that of a select few Brazilian Twitter stan pages (that likely will lose access to the platform by the end of the tax year thanks to Elon Musk) without doubt must wreak havoc on the psyche of a post-pixie cut pop princess.

Indeed it is that from the first fateful utterance of the opening words of “Woman’s World” [sexy, confident, so intelligent], Katy Perry had sealed her coffin with Gorilla Glue. The lead single is currently sitting at a feeble 38 million streams on Spotify, and Doechii and Kim Petras features have only garnered 10 and 3 million plays respectively. For context, the least-played song on Perry’s Spotify came out half a decade before streaming became the predominant way to listen to music and is sitting at a comfortable 800 million streams. Three other songs from the early 2010s have breached 1 billion listens. 

I am far from the first to declare this rollout an epic tragedy, in which all players (e.g. Perry, Petras, Dr. Luke) lose some degree of remaining dignity. But this will not kill Perry, nor the appeal of her earlier catalogue. Choices are not endings; only portals. This portal may take Perry back to American Idol, to some paparazzi-shielded Barbadian hideaway with Orlando Bloom and Baby Perry, or maybe to the classic late career, apologetically confessional acoustic album. Alas, this is bigger than Katy Perry. 143 is moronic, but it represents something tectonic.

I don’t think it’s harsh to say that for a short while, the contemporary popgirlscape was looking dire. The cast whittled down to arguably no more than Dua Lipa, Doja Cat, and Billie Eilish. We might make a mark soon after the 2019 release of Ariana Grande’s thank u, next where the cast of really popular female powerhouses felt purged. After the heyday of this genre of musician that was the 00s and early 10s, dance pop’s hold on the charts gave way around the COVID era to the proliferation of acoustic, confessional pop albums and substantially less campy afrobeats and trap bangers. In the wake of Gaga’s transition to theatre whore, Selena Gomez’s kidney situation, the Mumford-and-Sonification of Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj’s marriage to a rapist, and many other such tragedies, a number of failures to transition stars-in-the-making (Camila Cabello, Normani, Olivia Rodrigo etc.) into household names left us with a poor set of players. 

An influx of minimalist, cinematic pop motioned by the success of Lana del Rey and sustained by Swift’s folklore and evermore (2020) tanked the necessity for drastic reinvention, shock value, and viral live performances. Thus, the VMAs became redundant, dance pop’s presence on the charts became almost entirely TikTok-sponsored one-hit-wonders, and true, campy, theatrical pop seemed to be relegated to online queer communities until they eventually found a new darling genre to mass-enjoy. This makes what we have seen in 2024 all the more shocking. 

Sabrina Carpenter, as I write this, occupies spots #3, #8, #9, #20, #55, #74, #97, and #100 on the Billboard Hot 100. Chappell Roan holds #4, #15, #27, and #72. Charli XCX has taken #53 and #64, and Tate Mcrae and Addison Rae have #32 and #96 respectively. Between these five women, all of which I doubt would’ve been considered A-list two years ago, nearly one-fifth of the spots on the Hot 100 are held. On this same week in 2022, I count six spots taken by female-led pop music, with only two or three of said songs being dance pop. So what is the common denominator? Why is the world interested again?

Well, although we can theorise about the effect of the pandemic, TikTok and other recent phenomena, the answer may not be that we lost interest in dance pop, but rather that dance pop ceased to be interesting. As said earlier, many of dance pop’s main players either stopped making music or found a new main gig around 2020 (cough cough, Rihanna). Many of them had careers spanning 20 years, their fingers in makeup- or fashion-related pies, or an army of label-funded producers that leeched the desperation for stardom from their sound. It wasn’t so much that dance pop’s audience had dwindled; the interest of its creators had. What results from a genre in this position is a life-or-death dichotomy; either the genre fades into redundancy, or its dynasty is usurped by a new line. 

And here we are! Sabrina, Chappell, Charli and the rest have undeniably been the popular mainstays this summer, rather than the usual cabal of established musicians that pass the baton back and forth between themselves every June. Furthermore, in them we see underlined what appeals to an audience with an appetite for dance music: stylistic consistency, tongue-in-cheek lyricism, playful sexuality, and some level of conceit. This is not new! In many ways, this music is no more than a rehashing of the waves of shiny new popstars we saw at the start of the naughties, and again around 2009. But in conversation with albums like 143, Chromatica (2020), and Pink Friday 2 (2023), we see that what is done away with is the echoes of what is already on the charts, the fear to play it dangerous, the diluted nostalgia of a better portion of discography. Chappell has declared herself a drag queen, Charli has peeled back branding to its bare bones, Addison Rae is playing the part of a nymphomanic virgin. It all feels a little tacky, a little performed, somewhat saccharine. But pitted against the polished plastic, echo chamber attempts by older popstars to expand their legacy without risking destroying it, the people have made their choice.


Pop music hinges on extremity, bloodlust, and bad taste. And this is the ouroboros, because nothing backed by a 28 billion industry can remain bombastic and desperate for long before the greenware is clay-fired. 143 was bound to fall flat, because it exists only in conversation with itself, conversations in writer’s rooms full of business-minded safe choices, not in conversation with the currency of the culture. The currency of the culture being the risk of self-destruction. What is on the charts now is that which will be redundant tomorrow. Duly, I might say 143 had already secured its “spectacular flop” classification from Pitchfork the second the first mouth was opened at the concept meeting. As much as the pop industry machine still has us in the palm of its hand, the general public has grown an incipient distaste for the illusion of authenticity, preferring sardonic self-awareness, a window to the scaffolding behind the facade. Should other legacy popstars not respect this shift in the culture, they should expect similar disasters incoming.

What’s wrong with New York? Skinny sexed-up white men in two pieces, maybe.

Kyle Galloway on 24 September 2024

If at this point in my tenure at Leeds I was having sex with a man and “Espresso” by Sabrina Carpenter came on shuffle, I think a harbinging shiver would pass through me and then my arsehole would instantaneously clamp shut and dismember him. Guillotine (viva la France). And as feminist(-adjacent) as the imagined image of that may be (see: Lorena Bobbitt), it would be messy and problematic and what if my arsehole, like the head of a snapping turtle or venus flytrap, never opened again? What then? How would I poo? Pressing questions like these keep me up at night, and move me to make use of the omniscient, disembodied voice of Real Journalism to investigate, interrogate, and ultimately protect. Dirty music is important! More so than clean music, in the same way that meal prep is not as important as PrEP pills. It sets you free.

Enter The Dare. Hot on the heels of his 2023 The Sex EP, we have been bestowed with his debut LP What’s Wrong With New York? (2024). Picture an anaemic twink in a trademark suit which says fun.’s “We Are Young” (2012), but hides under all that polyester something darker. Darker, how? Let’s ask the audience:

  1. Darker: as in a loose-belted, more meta iteration of the brash and fleeting electroclash genre that snake-charmed listeners around 2010 before being gobbled up by twee, banjo-thrumming pasture-synth à la Birdy and Foxes, never to be seen again.
  2. Darker: in colour. As in dark eyebags pigmented by the gaunt absence of post-2007 recession optimism and the obliteration of the UED (Universal Electropop Dancefloor) resulting in an irreconcilable polarity between tedious house ballads made too neurotic by the digital panopticon to just dance and camera-ban queer raves beleaguered by happy hardcore, wubby trance, GHB, and fisting. 
  3. Darker: he says if we try to stop him he’s gonna “fuck a hole in the wall”. Everyone hide.

Now what if I told you that the answer (DING!DING!DING!) was all of the above?! Armed with a vicious, breakneck arsenal of bass synths and a similarly breakneck libido, The Dare has managed to weasel his way between some of the alt pop vanguard’s most coveted acts. After landing fan favourite bonus track “Guess” as the only feature on Charli XCX’s party girl magnum opus BRAT (2024), he gave us a distinct and dirty taste of his mixing on July 13th at Charli’s Ibiza Boiler Room, showcasing a jawdropper (literally – see: 1:31:46 of the set on YouTube) of a “Mean Girls” remix to close out the night. Since then, he’s scored interviews with The New York Times  and GQ, a spot in the “Guess” music video next to Billie Eilish, and a horned-up cult of fans ready to indulge in the tongue-in-cheek rockstar-groupie charade that The Dare’s discography shoots through the aux.

His debut fulfils many of the expectations his first EP created. Carnal, club-ready, and cunt, it’s an identity record in every way, sticking to a trademarkable soundscape and hinging on “I” phrasing. Mr. Dare, what do you like? “Tall girls, short girls, girls with dicks, call girls.” Mr. Dare, what do you do? “Write the lyrics, bring the spirit, hear demos, make babies.” His vision is clear, and his vision is one constructed by scavenging off the bones of a Kesha-and-Justice-fueled late 00s dancefloor and building them into a speaker-blowing, slurring, sexy, suit-wearing Frankenproducer custom-made for the zeitgeist of today.

Now, I won’t sit here and hail this album as a groundbreaking ode to sex. It’s impossible to deny that we’re experiencing a erotic pop renaissance, between the likes of brat, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess (2023), and Short n’ Sweet (2024). I suppose what sticks out about What’s Wrong With New York? is its blatant eagerness to fill a role which has almost diminished into oblivion this decade. The Dare is a fittingly meta resurrection of the obnoxious, prodigal pop maestro that was once called Calvin Harris, or Passion Pit, or Caribou, or MGMT. He has taken the esoteric anonymity of the “man behind the music” that characterised the sweaty electropop producer of the late 00s and early 10s and turned it into a sort of sardonic drag uniform. Generic dark sunglasses and a two-piece suit embrace an emblematic bravado to match the bawdiness of the record, which kicks off with the testing lyric “it’s just rock n’ roll, you won’t die” on “Open Up”. 

From there we fly into a barrage of consistently filthy club bangers such as the pitch-shifted “I Destroyed Disco” and the bouncy, wind-tunnel track “Movement”.  “Elevation”, a standout and a shift in tone, pulls on the atmospheric late-night-wistfulness of the likes of Coldplay whilst staying firmly within the confines of the New York that The Dare paints for us. The LP closes up with the slower but satisfyingly grand “You Can Never Go Home” that ends the album smoothly whilst not alienating itself from standalone listenability. 

This is without doubt a record constructed with substantial direction, a clear target audience, and tactful production. If it falls short, it’s because the listener gets a sense that The Dare is so confident in his (undeniably smart) vision for his brand that he hesitates to step beyond its confines. Such a bawdily creative debut EP alludes to an even more flamboyant and unexpected debut record rollout, and whilst it makes for a comprehensive consolidation of The Dare’s identity as an artist, it fails to renew his reputation as an artistically recalcitrant enfant terrible of the pop scene. If the two tracks taken from The Sex EP were cut from the project and replaced with two riskier choices that fit more uncomfortably with the rest of the tracklist, the album might better uphold the skanky caricature The Dare is building of himself. Despite this, What’s Wrong With New York? constitutes itself as sex-fuelled dance record that finds value in the trifle of at once sounding like an LP that a three-person, suspender-wearing act fresh out of Goldsmith’s would peak at #8 with in 2009, falsely insinuating Mr. Dare is, in fact, a New Yorker, and actually making us move.

So, what is wrong with New York? Who am I to answer? The comparisons are many. Calvin Harris, Caribou, Justice, Joy Division, Gorillaz, LCD Soundsystem, and, if I dare say, even Peaches have bled into Comrade Dare’s work, and the People have not been deaf to this. The sky is falling, Big Brother is watching, the squalid city streets of Twitter have their opinions, and certain individuals who I’m sure are very busy are unhappy with The Dare’s iteration of Inexplicably Prodigal Kooky Sexed-Up Skinny White Man Music. But even if we put aside the fact that every rotation of this trend is leaps and bounds more creative than the bedroom pop epidemic, the trendiness of moxy-heavy Hedon-worshipper lyrics, and the blindingly obvious fact that The Dare’s entire identity as an artist belies a campy revival of “indie sleaze”, What’s Wrong With New York? proves Harrison Smith as a producer with a dab hand for mixing, a finger on the pulse of the culture, and another in… someone, somewhere, I guess. 

Jockstrap And Why Your New Favourite Celebrity is a Freak

Kyle Galloway on 2 January 2024

Picture this, Reader:

You gingerly take your first step out of your pee-stained Hyde Park flatshare, feeling the cold sneaking under your microfleece and instantly regretting choosing your 10am over blissful ignorance. You feel like a freshly birthed hairless kangaroo baby ripped straight from the pouch. The November air tingles on your tender skin and there is not a thing in your stomach but the bubbling forewarning of acid reflux. Your eyes adjust to the light and immediately a yellow-and-black smear tears through your peripheral. You jump! What the f*ck was that! A wasp? A swarm of wasps?!

No! Don’t get ahead of yourself. It’s four pairs of yellow-and-black Onitsuka Tigers on the feet of four girls wearing Adidas trackies in the worst possible colourways, football scarves wrapped around their heads Babushka-style, and 3 or 4 layers of Chaps or Carhartt knits. None of them look like they have washed their hair. They are all smiling at you, and as they move to hug you, you wipe the sleep from your eyes and realise there is a Celtic F.C. scarf around your own neck, peeling gold rings adorning your fingers, that stupid dead Arcteryx bird on your own chest. You are one of them. They love you… you love them.

You remove your Airpod Maxs, they ask you what you were listening to. You show them your lock screen: I<3UQTINVU, by Jockstrap. “It’s so rogue,” you hear yourself saying, feeling as if you might feint. “It’s, like, hyperpop, but folky. And some rap. With violin.” What are you saying? Why are you dressed like this? Where lies the body of the pre-COVID twink who only wore ASOS Design and listened to Halsey’s Badlands? Has knowledge of microplastics and La Roche-Posay killed him?

Let me explain. First, by introducing you, Oh So Confused Reader, to Jockstrap. Much like the underwear, Jockstrap (an English duo made up of Guildhall graduates Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye) has a fanbase consisting of a committed minority of aficionados (in this case music snobs rather than athletes) holding their own against a louder majority of queer people. After hurtling into the periphery of alternative pop with their bawdy and avant garde 2020 EP Wicked City, the duo hit the public with their debut I Love You Jennifer B in 2022. The debut record – complex, campy, and much brighter compared to Wicked City’s sound – was adored in experimental pop circles and far beyond, earning its spot as the 15th and 7th Best Album of 2022 in Pitchfork and The Guardian respectively and being shortlisted for the 2022 Mercury Prize. In the words of Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman, I Love You Jennifer B brings the thrill back to the “internet-accelerated obliteration of genre boundaries”.

So what if now we were to metaphysically mash another layer of contrivance onto the audio-
trifle Jockstrap gave us last year? Surely the only way I could do it justice in writing would be
by repeatedly smashing my keyboard off the wall until all the keys feel out and made a silly
word on the floor. Something stupid, Internet-age, redundant, and therefore implicitly cool.
Like I<3UQTINVU.

This regurgitation of I Love You Jennifer B hits you with 9 tracks that contain varying proportions of the original album tracks which they remix. I write hit as in wallop with a frying pan, as the album opens with ‘Sexy’, an aggressive retuning of the high-speed, club-ready closer of I Love You Jennifer B, ‘50/50- Extended Mix’. What follows is a similarly frenetic catalogue of rhythms, dissonant synths, and strings, under the seemingly elephantine weight of a second round of scrutiny and distortion. What this weight juices from the year-matured, sun-puckered fruit of Jockstrap’s debut is sweet and addicting.

Whether it is Ian Starr’s mouth-frothing performance on ‘Red Eye’ processed á la 10,000 Gecs (2023) or the gushing, pitchy rework of ‘Glasgow’ on the breakdown of ‘I Touch’, I<3UQTINVU sound terrible (foul!) by all prior established conventions of pop music; but its allure is potent and undeniable. And not just in a freak show, Don’t-Touch-The-Glass way, either – it’s seriously, stickily enjoyable. If I Love You Jennifer B was a glistening and sterile performance piece that won its fans through its one-step-ahead, almost precocious intricacy, I<3UQTINVU throws its glitching, TV-static body onto the stage and kidnaps the lead actor. A scene-stealer, if you would.

The record sounds messy, debaucherous, and cathartic. Songs are distilled down to primitive doing-words for their new titles (‘I Touch’, ‘I Feel’) and listeners’ patience is tested by laborious, gargling vocals on ‘Pain is Real’ before they are crushed by the noise of ‘Red Eye’. The listener is interacted with in invasive new ways, expected not just to passively experience tracks but to be pulled, pushed, and tested by them, their notions of what “sounds nice” battered and bruised and their interest peaked. The only thing made explicit here is the idea that the most valuable art is that which is never tired or “finished”. And it is these words, picket-fence words like “finished” and “nice”, which provide the antithesis to Jockstrap’s music, to Babushka scarves, to Julia Fox, and to dirt-wash jeans.

You see, I saw a TikTok some weeks ago which broached the idea of the dissolution of (fashion) trend cycles. The TikToker (who I would love to cite and who I have sourly and unsuccessfully scoured the internet for whilst planning this article) proposed that while, historically, Western fashion trends have mimicked themselves in 20-year intervals (see: 70s does 50s; 90s does 70s; 2010s does 90s; also Neda Ulaby for NPR), the recent dominion of short-form, TikTok-ified media over our cultural intake has null-and-voided this 20th Century routine. The youth’s overexposure to fashions emancipated from their source era and culture by short-form media has incited style-on-style cannibalism. As in, Uroboros-esque consumption of new trends which has ushered in the era of the microtrend (boo) and the concomitant microtrend critic (yay?).

The microtrend critic is the cynic, (s/t)he(y) who sees the trend and ‘debunks’ it, most recognisably on an eco- or socially- conscious level but, more deeply, as a new manifestation of the anti-trend. Anti-trend not necessarily coming from the same rebel-without-a-cause angle as punk or grunge, but instead loudly signalling that in such a culturally over-saturated landscape, the only way to be “cool” is to deny “finished” and “nice”, reject what looks and sound “good” (a.k.a. that which is coughed up every 20 years and fed to the consumer) and instead embrace the gross, uncool, and memorable. Consequently, we get it-girls like Julia Fox (queer, single mother, intentionally sweaty makeup) and it-boys like Timothee Chalamet (scrawny, sleepy, plays heroin addicts and gay men instead of soldiers and heroes). The culture has begun choosing these quirky, dirty, or otherwise wonky it-stylings for the limelight as the people have had their appetite for perfection sated. That’s what happens when you see 1000 examples of Perfection Manifest on your For You Page by the time you hit 17. You get bored.

All of a sudden, it may seem, the modern youth has become an audience of individuals more socially and globally conscious than ever, and equally conscious of the redundancy of perfection. Perfection is composure in a savage world, and therefore perfection is ignorant (or just cheugy). Perfection is “nice”, but “nice” just doesn’t cut it. To cut it is to be weird, to be nonsensical and confused and dirty and X-rated and still be hot. Distracted enough by the chaos of the human condition to not wash your hair, but not enough to stop posting on Instagram. Coolness is now defined by a global tribunal of hyperaware, cynical Twitter-users, and the only way to survive under their watchful eye is to exist in the celebrity-space ironically. To recognise the ludicrous irony of being human whilst sat atop an inhuman pedestal, and to make fun of it. Because this is something that such a youth populace can
imitate.

Alas, casual fashion becomes an excuse to don netting and bleached eyebrows and Margiela goat hooves, online humour becomes abject nihilism, and commercial music begins to eat its own tail and sh*t out dog-barking, fizzing, wailing compositions under monikers like “Jockstrap”. And we eat it up, because it feels good! It feels amazing to throw inane rubrics of coolness, sex appeal, and style into the gutter so we can worry about the world burning and still feel sexy. So if you do happen to find yourself listening to I<3UQTINVU and finding it unsettlingly amazing, maybe it’s because you are finally loosening your grasp, turning your back on the apocalypse, and sinking your teeth into a slice of oh-so-sumptuous Uncool Pie. Or maybe it’s just great music.