Music Roasts

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”