Tim: ‘A pop tribute to the Berlin club scene’, this is, so, erm, yeah.
Tim: So that’s, for me, the second track in just four weeks that’s (a) brilliant and (b) coming with a dollop of “yeah, I guess we do have to put the folk stuff in, don’t we, it’s kind of our thing”.
Tom: You’re not wrong. Has the gimmick reached its limit? Because this has a really great chorus melody, and then… then there’s some traditional singing too. I think this might well be better without it. (It’d also be better with a rewrite of that awful “looking like a snack / no way back” lyric couplet, but never mind.)
Tim: This is, according to the notes beneath the video, “the first pop-banger that includes traditional singing from two indigenous cultures; Sami Joik and Inuk throat singing”, the latter of which is what Charlotte provides.
Tom: I actually thought the throat-singing worked well: because it’s so unlike anything I’ve heard before, my brain treated it as almost like a new synth or other vocal sample. The joik, on the other hand, just sounded out of place.
Tim: It is odd: both this and Colours are two great tracks that have just had the folk element shoehorned in, and a tiny (teeny teeny tiny) part of me wonders if the two of them that aren’t Fred (the Sámi rapper) might be happy enough without it. On the other hand, KEiiNO without that would be like Scooter without HP Baxxter: a bit more mainstream, perhaps, but really just not the same at all.