tl;dr: does this sound like the best thing you’ve ever heard? If you answered yes, read on. If it doesn’t, kindly fuck off or listen to it again, you feckless wank.
So here’s the good news: it’s the album you wanted because you listened to “It’s Okay To Cry”, “Ponyboy” and “Faceshopping” already. In fact, this review is most likely an abject lesson in the fatuous; there’s no record to buy here and if you’re already sold you’ve already listened. I didn’t get a promo and I don’t think such a thing exists. If you’re not already sold, I refer you to the first sentence.
If you’d find an ancillary tl;dr useful: KN 4 S 4EVA IDST.
So I’m trying to imagine the hypothetical person I might know who somehow managed to miss all the queers we know going “OMG WHOAH FUCKING WHOAH YEAH OMG YEAH SOPHIE YEA”. I’m possibly not even bothered about that person, but they’re subject to a caprice so: basically SOPHIE is astonishing. Apparently [TW: yawnfest #musicjournalism], she’s big on creating sounds out of nothing rather than sample packs and that and so there’s [TW: journalism] a sense in which she’s a nuance of tone and timbre that’s as much about, like, concréte and noise as it is FUCK ME FUCK ME poppers o’clock hoover synths. But basically let’s be entirely real here, you and me: if you weren’t on board already, I had you at poppers o’clock hoover synths, right?
I’ll take on board Iotar [of this parish’s] perspective — this is about as good as English language pop gets. That’s good. I mean, this deserves to be Girls Aloud, Britney, Carley Rae big. It is not, if you’re looking for it, BIS, or TWICE or f(x) levels of CHRIST THE SHITTING POCKET THAT IS NOT EVEN HUMAN, but it is literally better than pretty much everything you’re likely to hear this year. So that’s a bit fucking unnecessary as a fucking critique, but we’ve already established that you’ve already decided this is a fucking amazing album or you’re mysteriously reading on like some great onanist of my naïf prickendery.
“But what does it shitting sound like, you absolute putz?”, I hear you cry. So basically you’ve got a fuck load of PC Music / pop tropes sort of exagerrated — plenty of crunchy noise, plenty of banging bangerson sounds, gorgeously artificial and absolutely about pop. And sounds. And being fucking amazing. Basically I don’t really want to carry on talking to you. You’ve read this far, you either agree or you’re a prick.
Oh, but, like, if you’ve heard the bits that have been online already you really need to listen to “Immaterial”, which is basically the best thing that every happened, and then “Whole New World” / “Pretend World”, which is basically what Madonna would make if she weren’t fundamentally [[[[[[[]]]]]]], probably.-Kev Nickells-
