Tim: A couple of Swedes, Salem Al Fakir (previously of Avicii vocals and co-writing, and a second place in Melodifestivalen) and Vincent Pontare (previously of these pages, and also co-writing with Avicii and Axwell Λ Ingrosso), out together with a new brand and a new track. And here’s fun: once you see the butterfly in the video as spinning back and forth rather than flapping its wings, you’ll not be able to see it any other way.
Tom: I don’t see the butterfly spinni… ah, never mind, there it is.
Tim: Now, I reckon it’s hard to know how to judge this, really.
Tom: It’s a bit… retro, isn’t it? It’s like they’ve taken bits from all sorts of genres and lumped them all together. Not mashed: lumped.
Tim: Maybe, but the thing is that as a dance track, which I was expecting given their pedigree, it’s not great – there’s no big drop, and any massive instrumental post-chorus you’d expect is binned off and replaced by a repetition of the vocal chorus.
Tom: And I know I’ve heard that drum loop — that repetitive drum loop — a hundred times before.
Tim: The structure also lends itself to dance music – the lack of a middle eight or final chorus is something we’ve seen before, only ever with dance tracks. A pop song can’t really work like that, it makes it too short, which is like it is here; it’s also almost a bit too unexciting and steady to be a decent pop tune.
Tom: I’m sure this is part of a genre that we don’t know much about, Tim. I’m just not sure if I want to know much about it.
Tim: Oh, I think you’re doing yourself a massive disservice there, pop and dance is basically what we do. This is a weird confluence, though. It’s as though they wanted to do a dance tune, but also wanted to keep it as mainstream as possible. Trying to compromise, they ended up with a bit of a damp squib. Given their previous hits, I’ll wait for a follow up before giving up on the act completely, but this is really quite disappointing. Shame.