We weren't all at mindfulness/yoga retreats, wearing all-white Midsomer garb and dancing barefoot on the sand before engaging in spontaneous jam circles. – Daisy Jonesįor most of us, 2021 wasn't exactly glamorous. “New Shapes” is everything 2021 was supposed to have been like – and still could.
The three of them will make you want to slam your laptop screen down and go straight to the club. “Maybe we're meant for another dimension, babe,” she sings, liquified autotune tugging on your heart.
But it's Caroline's silky saccharine tones that really elevates this to something special. “Christine has found her queens,” someone typed, to the tune of 1.1k likes.
Scrolling through the YouTube comments, Christine is largely considered the stand-out of this track. Lyrics dripping in potential, excitement: “We could fall in love in new shapes / new shapes.” Remember your first Proper Night Out post-lockdown? How did it end up? Sick in the Lyft home, was it? WhatsApping a cryptic emoji to the ex before your last ex, at 4.03AM? Or was it a big disappointment? You got tired at midnight and slipped home, not used to so many people breathing on your face? Well, “New Shapes” is what the night should have felt like from the beginning. It’s a petty-at-times, constantly furious kiss-off addressed to an ex-boyfriend-turned-”damn sociopath” (this year’s My Chemical Romance “trust me”), and, most of all, a shining beacon of the brilliance that can occasionally come out of feeling really, really shit. But hopelessness isn’t just about stasis: It can also be rageful and, ultimately, curiously generative, as Olivia Rodrigo proved on her monster hit “good 4 u”.įollowing the down-tempo singles “drivers license” and “deja vu”, “good 4 u” was a win for those of us whose favourite genre is “music that sounds like you could run up the wall to it,” and felt like a major arrival for Rodrigo, who this year cemented an unavoidable place in the mainstream. For a lot of us, especially in the early part of 2021, it meant moping around, curtain twitching to get a look at a passing dog just to feel something, and screaming “I’m sick of making fucking sourdough” in manner of Gemma Collins on Celebrity Big Brother. It's a grim tale of sin and retribution, brought to life as one of the most intense physical experiences you could possibly have while taking a government-sanctioned stroll around the block with your Air Pods. "Do you wanna be in hell with me?" she asks, referencing an 18th century legend of the Pennsylvania Dutch, about an iron master who throws his dogs into the furnace for underperforming on a hunt only to see them return and drag him to hell. Reverberating with heavy piano and rumbling drums, "Pennsylvania Furnace" sounds like the fear of God itself – his judgement, his abandonment. Her fourth album, SINNER GET READY, takes that trauma and places it within the religious history and generally austere vibe of rural Pennsylvania, where Hayter lived until recently.
Themes of violence against women, the body, and revenge have run through each of her projects, taking the form of all kinds of sounds from operatic splendour to abrasive noise – as close to corporeal as it's possible for music to get – in an effort to articulate trauma ("lingua ignota" Latin for “unknown language”). Lingua Ignota's Kristin Hayter has long been rummaging through the landfill of despair. Not so with this “One Step Closer” reanimation, which takes a song that genuinely seems to express something about how we experience our relentlessly stressful times, and makes it sound like the way we experience them like the dark heart of the algorithm. So much of the culture that surrounds us centres on remaking or rebooting for its own sake, often producing results on the spectrum between “underwhelming” and “actually brain-numbing”. Dylan Brady and Laura Les continued their run of fascinating and irresistible post-everything hijinks into this year, and while Brady’s new version of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” featuring Dorian Electra, Big Freedia and 3OH!3 was almost the best thing the gecs-verse produced this year, this new take on “One Step Closer” has it beat in terms of sheer mayhem. There couldn’t have been a more fitting anthem for 2021 than a rework of Linkin Park’s furious declaration of hopelessness “One Step Closer”, by popular culture’s premier chaos goblins 100 gecs.
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