A certain streaming service(!) recently informed me of my most-played song of 2021, which I suspect was a runaway winner. “Unlock It” by Charli XCX lurks at 8th in sequence on the 2017 future-pop blueprint and perfectly-titled “Pop 2”, taking cues from Ornette Coleman and Refused in terms of prophetically named genre statements. A track buried away on an album more than three years old, in our age of relentless infotainment and wafer-thin attention spans, ought to stand little chance of burrowing into any discourses, but in some cases cream does rise to the top.
Charli has herself acknowledged the cult fandom of “Unlock It” and its widespread perception, at least in the eyes of her fanbase, as her finest track, a reputation which has developed organically. This has been heightened and bolstered by the track’s popularity on TikTok, where a fine but inferior alternative cut, the Jeff Prior Mix, ranked among the app’s most-played songs of 2021 in the UK. Irrespective of this disparity in versions, my experience would seem to have been something of a universal one. “Unlock It” was already soaring when it took on a new relevance and eerie synchronicity during the deepest and darkest UK lockdown across winter 2020/21; certainly this was when I was most regularly hammering the track and dreaming naively of a summer that has yet to arrive, of parties as extravagant and free as those Charli has powered both her music and aesthetics on the basis of. Clearly I was not alone in that.
“Pop 2” as an album opens an already acclaimed trilogy of records completed by “Charli” and “How I’m Feeling Now”, the album de jour of the original worldwide lockdown (during which it was recorded in self-isolation across six weeks). Only time will tell whether this output represents the apex of XCX’s oeuvre, though we hope not, but as an already adored trio at the zenith of the hyperpop sub-genre, and one which stands to enhance its iconicity over time, this may be the case. This is not least as Charli has indicated her possible intention to pivot away from hyperpop on the upcoming 2022 album “Crash”, with tracks such as “Good Ones”, the heavyweight feature-blast “New Shapes” and equally star-studded Jax Jones and Joel Corry collab “Out Out” all implying a melding of 80s synth-pop with the recession-era bangers of LMFAO and The Black-Eyed Peas, records Charli has not been quiet in her praise of. While the typically elusive and amorphous forms of hyperpop continue to bubble away, especially in crossover with the burgeoning digicore movement, it is also difficult not to view the tragic death of Scottish producer and seminal hyperpop idol SOPHIE early in 2021 as a curtain call of sorts.
“Unlock It” is nothing less than one of the most thrilling, and therefore by extension best, pop songs of all time. It is anchored around its gleaming, sparkling synth line from Life Sim, a bleeping, sugared-up marble-cake melody which generates butterflies flapping like eagles. It is breathtaking. Overall production comes from major Charli collaborator and hyperpop overlord AG Cook of PC Music, who bends an exquisite track out of the sheer malleability of these components. The lyrics are luminous, a freak-sized funfair which repeatedly evokes white knuckles and deliciousness (“rollercoaster ride”, “cherry maraschino”) to convey the excitement of the pursuit of true love, the sort which brings out goosebumps and makes the stomach do bungee-jumps. This is in tandem with Charli’s other trope, besides partying, which is travelling by car; “passenger seat”, “got the roof down”, “when we pit stop”. Appropriately for a song this transcendent, the metaphor extends ever so slightly further on this occasion, with the song’s most beautiful lines; “I’m feeling like an astronaut watching the world/All alone, just you and I”.
Charli’s candied vocals croon in so syrupy a fashion as to match the song’s subject matter perfectly. They are not shifted up into a hyperpop archetype on this cut, but nonetheless subtly conjure up the genre’s chief promises of possibility and transformation. The chorus consists of little more than the track’s title repeated, spliced, cut up and interlocked in a clickety-click reminiscent of the ASMR stylings of Lorde and Billie Eilish, only to a synthetic tenfold. Charli’s voice throughout is near-indistinguishable from that of Kim Petras, who, alongside rapper Jay Park, gets to appear here in central, if as mentioned somewhat obscured, form on a perfect, timeless track. “Pop 2” is utterly loaded with invitees to Charli’s circus, and “Unlock It” is no exception. The German singer delivers the second verse, though I had to double check this. For me, this can be portrayed as a neat, knowing hyperpop trick, but all the same, both artists can count their blessings for being here.
After Park’s rapped verse, which is wisely economical in refusing to distract from the song’s central thesis, we reach the escalating climax of the track, which is a rocket ship aimed squarely into the stratosphere. You would need to venture back to post-metal’s early-century prime to locate tracks with as barrelling a denouement or as wide-eyed a sense of their own epic structure. “Unlock It” in fact contains a false finish, but more on that momentarily. As the hook doubles and trebles up towards a climax, this section commences with percussive synth stabs underlaying that unforgettable main melodic line. As vocals clamber atop each other, the sense of escalation is ratcheted up hugely by, first of all, clapping drums and then hissing noise and sirens; the melodies become increasingly fluttery and stargazey, the overall mix is more and more ecstatic by the second. This constitutes an incredibly powerful, awe-inducing stretch of guaranteed Stendhal Syndrome, the likes of which can only be afforded full justice by being heard.
“Unlock It” seems to be over at a spritely three minutes, a giddy plunge over the horizon which should have you reaching instantly for the repeat button. This does not account for its gorgeous post-Burial coda, which takes proceedings closer to the four minute mark; the revivification of majestic melody, the disembodied pitched-up garage vocals floating free from the track which birthed them in a furious orgy of love and sonics, the pitch-perfect interplay between voice and percussion. This is an unexpected and excellent appendage to what would have stood as unadulterated musical bliss on its own, and worthy of the comparison to British electronic music’s greatest artist, in feeling if not in style, and it is indeed his significance as an indicator and barometer of how things “feel” which brings Burial his seismic relevance as a 21st Century artist.
I mention this especially because it is when thinking about “Unlock It”, as I have done so much over the past 12 months, that this following particular quote from consciousness-bending British documentary artist Adam Curtis about Burial’s music often comes to mind. As this shows, Curtis is an unabashed disciple of Burial, whose music has liberally scored his astounding films, from “Bitter Lake” to “Hypernormalisation”, and the superb 2021 TV series “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”. Curtis opined of the visionary South London producer’s song “Come Down To Us”, arguably his very best work in an extremely competitive field:
“It really sums up our time…that song is saying, it’s really frightening to jump off the edge into the darkness. Both when you fall in love with someone, and when you want to change the world. And it depends whether you can live with the fear or whether you really want the thrill of it. Or whether you retreat into the world you’re happy with….it’s the mood of our time that we’re waiting for”.
This is one of the best descriptions I’ve ever seen of “Come Down To Us” as a song, of Burial’s music in general, of the 21st Century to date and most probably of music, period. It describes what all of the very best music to be recorded, which is to say a vanishingly rare collection of songs, is able to do, including pop music of course. All pop songs should have no less ambitious an aim than to encapsulate such head-spinning, generational tendencies, and Charli XCX is able to stand as a progressive and forward-thinking act who has achieved this Herculean feat at least once with “Unlock It”. This is to say nothing of the now clear link between the Lana Wachowski speech famously sampled in Burial’s track and the direction and thematic content of much of hyperpop, which I will not explore further here but which resonates forcefully in this connection.
“Unlock It” is explicitly about love, but all songs about love are about changing the world, and all songs about changing the world are about love. Curtis accidentally and miraculously captures that symbiosis with his words, and the way tracks which somehow hurdle such towering credentials feel to listen to; they create an apprehension which is life-affirming and terrifying, even on countless repeat listens. This is the magnetism “Unlock It” boasts and which will continue to pull me back into the song, through another lonely winter into 2022 and for as long as we continue to wonder when life might be the same again, if ever, but certainly for as a long as the hope and energy of adventure continue to blaze, however faintly.
Roads To The North 