Music Roasts

“Eight months is also the length of every relationship Thomas's target demographic has had since 2019. He is not so much describing a personal experience as he is providing a piece of customizable software. That is either smart writing or accidental marketing. Both, probably.”

“Naming a track 25 Was Us in 2026 means committing to a piece of writing that will only fully land for people currently between 22 and 30. The song is going to age like a Polaroid. Beautifully and slightly out of focus.”

“Naming a song MDMA is a marketing decision before it is an artistic one. Every algorithmic playlist that touches party themes will pick it up. Every parent will not. Whether you find that funny or cynical depends on your relationship to streaming economics.”

“Naming a track Wild in 2026 is choosing to be findable by no one and discoverable by nobody. The algorithm will throw it onto playlists. The listener will not remember the name when it ends. That is a tradeoff Thomas has made consciously or accidentally.”

“Never Over is also a song that will be played on every "still not over them" Spotify mood playlist for the next eight years. That is a great revenue model. It is a less great way to be remembered as an artist.”

“The line 'don't waste your pain on me' is delivered with the emotional weight of someone who has never had to wait for a bus. Cruz Beckham singing about pain is like Elon Musk tweeting about loneliness. The feeling may technically be there but the context will never let it land.”

“Iceman is what happens when a generational talent decides that the safest version of his work is the version worth releasing. Drake at his peak made music that felt like a person was inside it. Iceman feels like a quarterly report.”

“A song called Silhouette in 2026 is a song that is trying to be evocative on the cheap. Imagery this generic should be earned with writing this precise, and the lyric does not quite get there. Production saves the track. Production cannot save the title.”

“The lyric is 'Mr Know It All, you didn't know me at all' repeated with slight rephrasing for three minutes. Teddy Swims has been given the gift of a generational voice and is using it to sing the same breakup metaphor every seven months. Someone at his label has to hand him a real song to sing.”

“A lesser band would have made an album about how their fans rediscovered them. The All-American Rejects had the discipline to make an album about the people they have become instead. That distinction is rarer than it should be.”

“A song called Too Soon will be on every Spotify "wish things ended differently" playlist for the next decade. That is steady revenue and an unmistakable signal that the algorithm has decided what kind of artist Thomas is allowed to be in 2026.”

“Two of the tracks are obvious Morgan Wallen pitch outtakes that did not quite fit the Wallen voice so they got handed to Ella and repurposed. You can hear them coming from the first eight bars. She sings the hell out of them, but they still feel like leftovers.”

“Echolalia is not made for streaming algorithms, casual listeners, or background play. That is its strength and the source of every complaint anyone will make about it. The album sets terms. You can take them or you can leave them alone.”

“A song called Your Eyes in 2026 is a song that was not going to be searchable, memorable, or culturally distinguishable from the 4,000 other songs called Your Eyes. Production saves it. Production should not have to.”

“There is still one Sam Fender feature and two songs about a specific boy who specifically wronged her, which is starting to be a genre unto itself. At some point the breakup songs have to start feeling like choices instead of obligations.”

“The mythological lyrical framework will alienate listeners who cannot follow her there. That has been true since 1992 and Tori has never adjusted for it. That is the entire point of being Tori Amos.”

“Kissed Her More is also a title that confirms Sally's long-standing thesis that all of Thomas's 2026 song names are tweet-length confessions trying very hard to look like art. They are tweet-length confessions that happen to be wrapped in art. The distinction is doing a lot of work.”

“Dave Grohl has been writing 'Of All People' as a song title since 2011. It has been waiting on the shelf for the right moment and the moment turned out to be whatever moment was free this week. The song does not know why it exists, which is why it exists.”

“She Did It Again is a perfectly engineered single that will earn its streams and disappear from cultural memory the moment the next Tyla song arrives. Both artists are operating at the floor of their talent, which is still well above most peers.”

“The title is Going Shopping. The song is about Going Shopping. There are no layers here. Julian Casablancas has spent 25 years gesturing vaguely at modern life from behind sunglasses and we are supposed to be impressed that this time the gesture involves a retail experience.”

“The surprise release strategy works artistically and fails commercially. The album is going to get reviewed in five places and played by their existing fans and nobody else will know it exists until someone makes a YouTube video about it six months from now.”

“The album is 17 tracks long because nobody at Death Row told him no. A good editor could have turned 10 Til Midnight into a tight 45 minute statement. What we got is 62 minutes of Snoop thinking out loud with the Pro Tools still running.”

“Four minutes is slightly too long for this song to sustain its own premise, and the final thirty seconds feel like they exist so the film's end credits have somewhere to land. You can hear the sync licensing in the song's DNA.”

“The 'pinky up like royalty' hook is the kind of line that gets written, deleted, rewritten, approved by four A&R executives and a focus group, and then shipped as if it came from a human brain.”

“Calling it EXPERIMENTAL RAP is a flex only if the experiment is still ongoing, and at this point Peggy has run the same lab procedure enough times that he should publish his findings.”

“Ed has finally made a solo album that sounds like Ed, which is a triumph until you remember Ed's whole job in Radiohead was making everybody else sound better.”

“The tragedy is not that the color of rain will be underheard, it is that the people who most need to hear it have been trained by ten years of Spotify to skip anything that takes longer than a chorus to make its point.”

“Ugly Duckling Union is the sound of a bedroom band realising the bedroom got knocked down, and trying to convince itself that the new open-plan studio with the post-punk pedalboard is what it wanted all along. Sometimes I believe them. Sometimes I miss the mattress on the floor.”

“A live album is supposed to be a document of why the songs needed to exist. This is a document of why the tour needed to exist, which is a completely different and much more expensive question.”

“Calling your third album "Florescence" when the songs themselves are mostly mid-bloom is the kind of title only a literature graduate would commit to and only a publicist would defend.”

“Calling your album Love Is The New Gangsta in 2026 is not a thesis, it is a tattoo you will quietly cover up in 2028.”

“You cannot produce half the pop charts and then act surprised when your own album sounds like a tribute compilation to artists you yourself invented.”

“"Blog Era Boyz" is what you call a project when the algorithm is your real producer and the audience you actually want is a 33-year-old marketing manager who still has a SoundCloud account he doesn't talk about.”

“The title track pairs confessional lyrics about IVF with references to the 2008 Adam Sandler comedy You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Robyn is the only artist alive who could make that work, and she barely does.”

“17 tracks. Seventeen. In an era where albums are getting shorter, RAYE looked at the streaming economy and said "absolutely not." There are at least three songs here that a braver editor would have cut, and the album would be stronger for it. But RAYE didn't fight her label for years just to let someone tell her to trim the tracklist.”

“The album title has an exclamation point. That's the kind of manufactured enthusiasm that defines Charlie Puth's entire career. He's the musical equivalent of a LinkedIn influencer who posts about 'hustle culture' while sitting in a home studio worth more than your house.”

“Two minutes. The song is two minutes long. Cyrus co-wrote and co-produced a two-minute song for a Disney special celebrating a show that ended 15 years ago. This is either beautiful restraint or a contractual obligation with a character limit.”

“Seven tracks. Released with guerrilla pop-ups in Shepherd's Bush and unannounced radio freestyles. Central Cee marketed this EP with more creativity than most artists put into their actual music. The rollout was the art. The EP is the receipt.”

“Four million copies in a week. For an album that most Western critics are calling "their most Korean record yet." BTS has reached the point where they can sell Korean cultural identity to a global audience and the audience buys it without blinking. That is either cultural diplomacy or extremely good marketing. Probably both.”

“The album title is "Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally." That is not an album title. That is a Tumblr bio from 2014. Harry Styles has reached the point in his career where no one around him will say "maybe that title is a bit much" and it shows.”

“Eighteen tracks about dystopia and patriarchal evil. Eighteen. Martinez looked at RAYE's 17-track album and said "hold my concept art." The lead single is called "Possession" and the second single is called "Disney Princess." The self-awareness is either brilliant or completely absent and honestly it could be either.”