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Home Briefing archive Features Playlists Get Popjustice emails About Popjustice About Popjustice: Est 2000 The Popjustice Twenty Quid Music Prize Contact General contact details Submit music Forum Recent Posts New Music Friday: Julia Michaels has purchased, or hired, a chainsaw New Music Monday: Griff's Black Hole is super, and massive New Music Friday: Let's kick off 2021 with some KLF The Top 45 Singles Of 2020 New Music Friday: Mae Muller doesn't want to be dependent Hello! In theory you should only be seeing this if you're using a mobile or tablet. How's the site looking? If anything's wonky click here and tell us so we can fix it. Thanks! x Briefing Features Playlists New Music Friday: The Popjustice Edit Big Hit Energy 21st Century Pop 2018% Solid Pop Music Full archive About About Popjustice Contacting Popjustice Send music Popjustice: Est 2000 The Popjustice Twenty Quid Music Prize Forum The Briefing New Music Friday: Julia Michaels has purchased, or hired, a chainsaw Filed by Peter Robinson on March 26, 2021 The new Julia Michaels song starts off as one thing and ends up as something a bit different. Pop songs about rela­tion­ships tend to be vari­ations on a fairly small number of themes but All Your Exes artic­u­lates anxiety over former partners in a really unusual way, and there are some com­pletely excellent lines in the song. "When your friends tell stories about 2017 I know there's parts that they leave out to be con­sid­er­ate of me" — A LINE. (For instance.) (I mean that's an actual thing that happens all the time isn't it, but have you heard it in a song before?) "Wish I could be bliss­fully unaware of where you used to put your mouth and who you write your fucking songs about" — ANOTHER LINE. Loads of lines. It's literally a song with lots of words in. (A very good song.) Also!!! Having said all that, "I think I'm ready for your sex" in the Alle Farben / Theresa Rex song is probably the best lyric of the week. Moyka is abso­lutely not mucking about on her new one. What a song, what a popstar. Another set of KLF reissues means another com­pletely ana­chron­istic NMF playlist entry, this time in the form of Jarvis Cocker doing Justified & Ancient. I don't think history will judge me kindly for including the Seeb / Kooks remix on this week's playlist. Even I'm taking a bit of a dim view of my actions. But: it kind of works doesn't it? Like, it's actually quite good? We live in strange times. Maybe this is what a year without proper social contact does to people. What next? A Pigeon Detectives x R3HAB remix being 'actually not that bad'? Filed under: Alle Farben Julia Michaels Moyka The KLF Theresa Rex New Music Monday: Griff's Black Hole is super, and massive Filed by Peter Robinson on January 22, 2021 Griff's really done it this time. Heartbreak really shouldn't sound this spec­tac­u­lar but, well, here we are. What a song. The Black Hole artwork features a hole with a black border, ie the opposite of a black hole, but on the upside it does feature Griff ON HORSEBACK. Look at this: Incredible. Also: ELIO releases a really brilliant EP today and Charger is a real winner, despite being about mobile phones (a topic rapidly rising up the lyrical banned list). Rose Gray , a rave-pop prac­ti­tioner of con­sid­er­able talent, releases her Dancing, Drinking, Talking, Thinking EP today and every track's a winner. Which is best, do you think, out of dancing, drinking, talking and thinking? It would be inter­est­ing to get Rose Gray's thoughts on this matter. Years & Years have covered It's A Sin. Possible something to do with Olly being in a TV show of the same name which may or may not be starting on Channel 4 tonight; hard to say really as there's been very little publicity around it. The cover is ACOUSTIC but PERMITTED. 220 Kid 's done the shanty. PRETTYMUCH 's Stars is included in this week's playlist mainly for the almost heroic line "girl you're an angel from every angle": a lyric that surely made perfect sense written down but required some severe vocal gym­nastics to deliver 'in song'. They really went there didn't they? And to think they say pop music can't push bound­ar­ies. Filed under: ELIO Griff Prettymuch Rose GRay Years & Years New Music Friday: Let's kick off 2021 with some KLF Filed by Peter Robinson on January 1, 2021 You might say "Peter why have you put a 28-year-old song at the top of the New Music Friday, are you having another meltdown" and, yes, fair point but: a) America: What Time Is Love? hasn't been com­mer­cially available for nearly three decades after The KLF threw a strop and deleted their entire catalogue. (The band have today put a handful of their hit records, including two Number Ones, on streaming services.) b) It's a very slightly different edit to the one that came out in 1992 and is therefore unques­tion­ably NEW. c) Any excuse to celebrate one of the two greatest pop duos of all time. d) I think, very seriously, that all popstars could learn a thing or two from a band who responded to the challenge of remixing a hit for the US market by turning in a song in which they claimed to have arrived in America 500 years before Christopher Columbus. A policy of more ridicu­lous­ness wherever possible wouldn't harm pop in 2021. Also this week: Fa La La (feat Boyz II Men) hitmaker Justin Bieber releases his best in a while; it comes with the best artwork of his career. Kylie and Dua 1 have chucked out the Studio 2054 Real Groove thing. Raye 's released some remixes; the Joel Corry reswizzle of Love Of Your Life is the best of the bunch. For the avoidance of doubt that's Minogue and Lipa ↩ Filed under: Dua Lipa gabrielle aplin Joel Corry justin bieber Kylie Minogue Raye The KLF New Music Friday: Mae Muller doesn't want to be dependent Filed by Peter Robinson on November 6, 2020 Notes on this week's new releases: Mae Muller 's new one Dependent is the week's best new song — it sounds brilliant and has a great twist on the "treat me a like a lady" trope. Her new EP No One Else, Not Even You, is also out today. Commas in titles are generally to be avoided but this one works well. 8/10 for the comma. The only thing that could have made the Miley Cyrus and Stevie Nicks 'collab' any better is a "Stevie, can you handle this? Miley, can you handle this? It's the remix, can you handle this? I don't think you can't handle this woo" bit over the intro. Georgia Twinn 's new song is a big moment in its own right but also lands halfway between second album Lana and first album Charli, which isn't a bad place to be is it? Hello and con­grat­u­la­tions to Little Mix , whose sixth studio album is released today. As a gentleman named Jon with a private Twitter account noted earlier this week, the last British girlgroup to pull this off was Sugababes in 2008, and by that point they were on their third lineup. Kylie 's disco album, cleverly titled Disco, is out today. Last Chance is arguably the album's most on-brief song although I suppose disco means different things to different people. The extended version of the album shows up as Disco (Deluxe). Is Disco Deluxe a better album title than Disco? (Yes.) While we're praising longevity Shirley Bassey , the Queen of Q4, has released 70 albums across seven decades. Still no Bruce Hornsby col­lab­or­a­tions on the new one but she does cover I Made It Through The Rain, one of the most sen­sa­tional optim­ist­i­bangers of all time. After several years I've binned off one of the features of the Popjustice New Music Friday edit — the bit where I put a total stinker at the bottom of the playlist. Most weeks I'd find myself actively searching out something terrible and there's enough neg­at­iv­ity in the world without having to delib­er­ately look for new Jake Bugg releases. (Or acci­dent­ally hearing them if, like a lot of people, you listen to playlists on shuffle.) Filed under: Georgia Twinn Kylie Minogue Little Mix Mae Muller miley cyrus New Music Friday: There's a big one f...