It’s the promise of EDM fully realized through a sound that isn’t really connected to EDM. DLĪs the Range, James Hinton has a knack for melding vocal samples to his original music in a way that elicits shocks of pure emotion, and then follows that emotion up with some sort of cathartic release. Pretty Girls Like Trap Music is fast becoming my favorite 2 Chainz album with every repeat listen. There’s nothing I want more from this kind of Atlanta-bred sound than a murderous beat (bless you Buddah Bless) and a grocery list of humblebrags delivered any way but humbly. Our first taste of Villains sounds like what the bluesman Slim Harpo might have put out if he’d grown up in the age of energy drinks, MTV, and Adderall - and in Palm Springs. A recent NME interview quotes Homme as saying that this track is “ all about screwing.” But that doesn’t fully capture the spirit of the song I’ll bet you anything that the word he actually used was “fucking.” -Gabe Cohn )Įven if “Trap Check” didn’t sample Jeezy’s “Get Ya Mind Right” and T.I.’s “ASAP” - two songs dear to my trap-loving heart - it would still tick all the boxes for a great trap standard. Queens of the Stone Age’s announcement that they’d enlisted Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars producer Mark Ronson for their follow-up to 2013’s excellent …Like Clockwork has had some diehards crying “pop!” But front man Josh Homme sounds as badass as ever here, singing about fever dreams and the world exploding over maniacal guitar riffs and cheeky hand claps (the man loves his hand claps). Queens of the Stone Age, “The Way You Used to Do” “My Smile Is Extinct,” the latest single from his upcoming Two Hearts and No Brain, is another song in the Kane Strang mold, meaning he approaches a basic idea - in this case death/sadness/breakups (well-worn territory to be sure) - and then elevates it to creative new heights: “I said kill me now / I want to die / I heard there’s a chance at an afterlife / I might not get in, but at least I won’t be living.” I promise it doesn’t sound as bleak as it seems when you read those lyrics. It was charming and melancholy, and I come back to it often. The first time I heard New Zealand’s Kane Strang was on “The Web,” which was about meeting someone on the internet and then pretty much just living a hermetic existence without ever interacting with that person in the real world. I want Danielle to sing to me about getting just a little of your love over a hand-clapping beat. I want to swan dive into a pool of Wilson Phillips. witches is a function of that corniness, because I really enjoyed old Haim. The question was recently asked: Is it corny to like Haim? The answer is increasingly yes, but it turns out my enjoyment of these L.A. That doesn’t mean the work can’t be as perfect as “Hard Feelings” truly is in the face of that hard truth. Now, here’s the criticism: “Hard Feelings/Loveless” is just as mathematically imperfect as everything else on Melodrama that Max Martin probably can’t stand, and that’s especially true of its second half, the spiteful “Loveless.” But the process of letting go will always be imperfect there’s no other way to do it.

That’s why when “Hard Feelings” implodes into a severe cacophony of Jack Antonoff noise, you can’t just shut it out. Getting to the point where you’ll “care for myself the way I used to care for you” takes longer to put into practice I’m glad Lorde thinks she has it figured out already, and, hell, maybe this acutely self-aware prodigy does. Sudden change, change of any kind, gets harder. Breakups are terrifying when they happen later in life.

Thank god it happened to her in her teens and not, say, at 25 when you thought you’d cleared that hurdle. Lorde fell out of love and this is how she coped.

“Hard Feelings” (and I’m only going to praise the first half of this song) will bulldoze the heart before it even knows what hit it because it was written from the place of a heart that’s already been flattened. I’m going to break the apparent rule that criticism and the personal should be kept separate because Lorde didn’t make Melodrama expecting people to hear it and feel nothing. Read our picks below, share yours in the comments, and subscribe to the Vulture Playlist for a comprehensive guide to the year’s best music. If the song is worthy of your ears and attention, you will find it here. Every week Vulture highlights the best new music.

Dej loaf no fear meaning