The SLP ft Little Simz
Favourites
Finally, the very modern dilemma of turning up for a Tinder date to find that your PhD Channing Tatum is actually more Asbo Ricky Gervais, and they’ve charged you twice for the woo woo, has its own anthem. Over crackling Beck-hop breakbeats, Kasabian’s Sergio Lorenzo Pizzorno – SLP, see? – plays the bill-quibbling date flake and Little Simz the Insta-obsessed motormouth on a First Dates car crash where she ends up paying. On paper, there’s no chemistry, but sonic sparks fly. A keeper.
Summer Camp
Love of My Life
How come romantic comedies never have a post-credits scene in which the happy couple, 10 years later, sit silently in front of Line of Duty drinking individual bottles of supermarket wine and farting? Because, like the heartbroken protagonist of Summer Camp’s first single in four years, we prefer to linger on the heady, unsustainable fantasy, when eyes caught across a northern-soul dancefloor. Still, three spins in, I’m just a reviewer, standing in front of a single, asking if it has any friends who want to join in.
Slipknot
Unsainted
“You killed the saint in me!” yowl Slipknot, previously renowned, of course, for their selfless charitable works and miraculous healing of lepers. Judging by the new masks, they’ve gone more Phantom than saint, though, even roping in an operatic goth choir to add lurking-in-catacombs menace to the rather great melodic bits. Otherwise, as usual, Satan furiously masturbates.
Charli XCX ft Lizzo
Blame It on Your Love
Let’s be generous and assume that Nasa scientists have been hard at work unscrambling Charli XCX’s 2017 mixtape Pop 2, stripping the digital distortion, alien babble and bits that sound like mechanic monks melting from Track 10 and uncovering this perfectly serviceable gobful of Latinotronic bubblegum rom-pop. It’s a better story than: “Here’s some shit that was more interesting when you first heard it two years ago,” right?
Idles
Mercedes Marxist
Not the Daily Mail’s latest Corbyn slur, but a track snatched from the sweepings of Idles’ last album sessions about turning up for the revolution too drunk to overthrow a single bourgeoisie. They struggle to turn a promisingly righteous rattle into a full-throated chorus but, as part of the wider rock uprising, even fumbled molotovs stoke the conflagration.
