There was pulsing, prickly anger but it was overtaken by melancholy even when the song eventually goes up a gear.
#GREAT SING ALONG SONGS FOR SUMMER LICENSE#
In a sea of sub-Swiftian young singer-songwriters, ex-Disney star Olivia Rodrigo’s poignant debut Driver’s License drove its way into our heads and hearts back in 2021 for its sad specificity. The drum’n’bass remix with Nia Archives, meanwhile, turbo-charges the BPM and takes Little Things from the house party to the festival. Smith is perhaps best known for her smouldering torch songs and it’s refreshing to hear her in this new light: fun, flirty and feeling herself in the run-up to her new album, falling or flying. Production by P2J and New Machine aside, this is a nimble-footed anthem for the summer of singledom, where Smith enters a room, spots a hottie and hopes for a quick fling with them before she heads home.
Its clackety-clack rhythmic workout is reminiscent of the glory days of UK funky (“ si-mi-nuh party hard”), while the jaunty jazz-piano flourishes could have come off any broken beat classic. But her latest single, Little Things, hones in on dancefloors closer to home. The British singer Jorja Smith caused a minor stir last summer with her track All of This, when accusations of appropriation were levelled at its take on a style of house music that originated in South Africa called amapiano. Critics of the song – and there have been many - call it “cringy”. His couplets can be clever in a Wet Leg meets Kim Petras’s Slut Pop sort of way – ie “Sex / It doesn’t hurt to try / Sometimes the hurt is why.” Or, “Sex, to me / It’s just a mystery / A lie we tell / Together we can prove it.” The music has some smart twists too, especially halfway through, when a putrid slab of synthesized something comes plopping into the mix with a fury that evokes nothing so much as someone taking a dump in the middle of the recording. Along with that cheeky salute to premature ejaculation, Smith’s blunt verse also includes allusions to incest, S&M, threeways and a hit-it-and-quit-it situation. “Sex, it’s what I’m thinking of / Some people call it ‘love’ / I might even finish way too quick,” deadpans Harrison Patrick Smith, the 27-year-old New Yorker who performs as the Dare. The clunking synth beat in the song is about as a funky as a metronome, the vocals about as erotic as a zombie, and the lyrics the precise inverse of pillow talk. While this hilarious ditty by The Dare has been seen by many as a throwback to the randy indie sleaze scene, it’s more like a wacky send-up of it. My pick for the best summer song of 2023 – a song that’s actually called Sex – oozes the virtual opposite. Some of the best songs of summer ooze sex. Adrian Horton Kylie Minogue – Padam Padam (Do not try to parallel park to this song.) Am I getting steamrolled by the commerce machine? Maybe, but Speed Drive is a high I’ll keep chasing all summer long.
Once you’ve rewired to the song’s relentless 174bpm, it’s difficult to come back down. No thoughts, just frenetic vibes on loop, thanks in part to a version of Toni Basil’s Mickey reprocessed for screen-addled brains. It’s also addictive, playful fun, the sonic equivalent of barreling down the highway with your friends, late-night adrenaline, temporarily impenetrable confidence, uppers. A hyperpop banger “ about just being hot” with its foot on the gas for all of one minute, 58 seconds, it feels potentially designed for TikTok virality – short, endlessly loopable, the soundtrack to a hot girl summer. Speed Drive, the pop chameleon Charli XCX’s contribution to the soundtrack, follows suit. It’s hot pink, tongue-in-cheek frivolity it’s the tip of a wave of revisionist IP. This summer’s Barbie movie/marketing campaign has been at once fun and sinister.
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