This week's new tracks

Tracks of the week reviewed: Tkay Maidza, Katy Perry, Slowthai

This week we’ve got a pre-lockdown dancefloor banger, a me-me-me power ballad, and a clapback mea culpa

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Tkay Maidza
Shook

This song is art. You can tell by the interpolation of the Drop It Like It’s Hot riff, you can tell by the Missy Elliott Back When She Was Great beat, and you can tell because the video is in a 21:9 aspect ratio: the official AR of art. Pop it on headphones for one of your daily walks; it’s as close as you’re going to get to the sweaty, ear-drum bursting, shouting-your-drinks-order dancefloor experience that we’re all craving right now.

Foxes
Love Not Loving You

Foxes is back! And she’s in thrall to pop of recent years with this banging I-don’t-need-no-lover effort, which is packed with Cut to the Feeling flourishes and pencil-case worthy lines such as “I guess I’m the love of my life” and “You make me dance like I mean it”. The flip-side to Robyn’s Dancing on My Own; she’s dancing on her own and she’s bloody loving it.

Katy Perry
Daisies

Wild to start “a new era” with a song about how everyone’s done badly by you and allude to your own flower-covered grave but, hey KP, you do you hun – advice she’s taken literally: this song is basically Unconditionally and Tsunami and every other power ballad she’s ever done. I guess if it ain’t broke …

Slowthai
Enemy

Slowthai isn’t super-jazzed about how everything went down at the NME awards, when he got trashed and ended up cancelled for being kind of a dick to Katherine Ryan. Of course, that was in the Before Times so no one really cares, but fair play to him for leaning into the bad guy persona with this clapback track. The ghoulish delivery of “keep my name out your dirty mouth” will haunt my dreams for weeks.

Club Intl
Crush

You might have thought Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme was played out, but then Club Intl got their mitts on it and made it into this synth-drenched fixation jam. A collaboration between ex-Public Access TV’s John Eatherly and Chromatics’ Johnny Jewel, it’s like an 80s high-school movie end-credits song on more drugs than Laura Palmer. So, an M83 song.