Pop song feels cursedly literal presently: Ariana Grande is making a song about how she “spent such a lot on treatment”; Billie Eilish’s Barbie tune is a transparently easy plot abstract of Barbie; Kacey Musgraves’ new album is a ripped-from-the-group-chat account of going via a breakup and communing with nature. It’s no longer an issue unique to A-listers. It’s Over, the second one album via London manufacturer and singer Tatyana, is riddled with literalism, therapyspeak, and words which can be profoundly overused on TikTok: “I’m down unhealthy,” “touching grass,” “performing like a fan.” One wonders if there’s a brand new pharmaceutical doing the rounds that saps a pop celebrity’s want for subtext and thriller.
Fortunately, Tatyana has an ace up her sleeve. It’s Over would possibly be afflicted by a deeply fashionable affliction, nevertheless it’s additionally a ultimate excitement to hear, a glamorous, fine-tuned dance-pop file full of brazen, mercenary hooks and hypnotic synth traces that sound squelchy and spiky on the identical time. Whilst her lyrics dip into the sans-serif blandness of recent pop, Tatyana manages to refute its different deadly flaw—melody-averse mushiness—with songs that bullishly pressure their approach into your mind.
It’s Over used to be produced via Tatyana with Mikko Gordon (Idles, Arcade Hearth), and it feels of a work with high-saturation early-career data via artists like Tirzah and the Knife. Like the ones artists, Tatyana frequently alludes to analog space and techno however hardly dives in absolutely. As a substitute, she takes formal instruction from the ones genres: A part of the explanation songs like “Down Dangerous” and “Grasp My Hand” are so punishingly catchy is that their hooks repeat time and again like samples in a vintage Detroit observe, infrequently layering the word at the beat and different instances throwing it in haphazardly. In spite of their condensed paperwork, those songs play masterfully with pressure and aid in some way that makes their restricted emotional landscapes really feel like a function, no longer a malicious program.
At different instances, Tatyana’s vocals can really feel mismatched together with her manufacturing. “It’s Over,” a blocky, lurching observe on which she sings about feeling emotionally unstable, options the type of winkingly dramatic efficiency that may have felt extra at house on her 2022 debut Deal with Me Proper, which dealt extra in blank, hovering ’80s-inspired pop. “Out of Time,” a good looking, despair ballad, is underserved via its grand, nearly OPN-esque synth maelstrom finale, and via the truth that it arrives two songs after “I Do Care (& That’s K),” a slow-building piece of hazy electronica that does a greater task with the similar conceit. However Tatyana’s heat, smoky voice is completely at house on “Keep an eye on” and “Not anything Is True, The entirety Is Imaginable,” two simmering late-night space tracks that really feel equivalent portions moody and cheeky.
Those brighter moments are let down via lyrics that veer into general glibness. On “Down Dangerous,” clumsy traces like “All I do is really feel my emotions/I write my foolish little songs every night” stall an in a different way riotous, sharply written tune; on “We’re Again,” the heady thought of a possible reunion with an ex is undercut via a repeated hook of “we’re so again,” a word that’s overused and relatively meaningless. Tatyana says that she wrote the lyrics for It’s Over in the way in which she would discuss to her buddies, however the result’s an album that’s wildly gifted in a single house and completely underwhelming in some other—so off-balanced that you’re feeling find it irresistible may just topple at any second.
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