Dua Lipa – IDGAF

“Radio 1 managed to put together a really good girlband.”

Tim: Dua Lipa, from the same group of musicians as Ariana Grande as ‘people who sound like typefaces’. This has been doing the rounds for a few weeks now but is still great, and you can probably guess but there’s a rude word in the chorus.

Tom: And it’s the seventh single from the album! Seventh! Do singles even mean anything more?

Tim: That’s the proper version, at least. But here’s the thing: I think the radio edit sounds better.

Tom: Interesting. Why’s that?

Tim: Well, have a listen. It’s not online as standard, but you can see what happened when Radio 1 managed to put together a really good girlband, made up of Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Zara Larsson, MØ and Alma (who I’d never heard of but is apparently off Finnish Idol and does actually have some pretty good tracks).

Tim: Now obviously there are some slight differences in the styling with the female backing vocals, but I do prefer that chorus. Not just because it sounds less gratuitously unpleasant, and more playable in a public space, but more because of the implications: she gives so little of a that she can’t even be bothered to finish the sentence.

Tom: I disagree there — it just seems unresolved to me. I accept there’s no other easy way to do a radio edit of the song, but there’s just too much of a gap there.

Tim: I don’t mind that it doesn’t resolve, because I don’t think it harms the song at all. And the rest of the song? Shouty, brash and enjoyable. I like it.

Alma – We Better Run

“Really quite listenable.”

Tim: Alma, 16 from Sweden, brings us this has her debut, and I’m hoping you’ll agree it’s really quite listenable.

Tim: Well, when the chorus comes along forty seconds in – admittedly the verses don’t have quite so much to them, but for me that’s more than made up for by the intensity and enthusiasm of the chorus.

Tom: Agreed: I got distracted during that first verse, which isn’t usually a good sign, but the chorus did actually pull me back in. Not the best of signs, that, but still.

Tim: We’ve a lovely couple whose circumstances keep holding them back, and so rather than fighting the world they simply better run, run, run, run, run, all the way to seemingly the edge of the solar system with the way she keeps wanging on about it. (62, if you’re wondering.)

Quite where the modal verb that should be in the title is, I’ve no idea – perhaps it just ran faster than everything else in the song.

Tom: Did… did you just grammar-pedant a song title? Mate. “We better” is a perfectly valid, if non-standard, construction.

Tim: To be honest, I’m not particularly bothered – basically, it has a great chorus, semi-decent verses that are there to pull to gaps and tell the story, and some lovely post-middle eight soaring vocals. I’ll take it.