#Icarus falls tv#

Icarus Falls is too long, which could be interpreted as taking a cynical page from the Drake and Migos playbook on gaming more streams.

#Icarus falls tv#

Paranoid lyrics about “blurry TV screens, fuzzy broken scenes” glide into a falsetto chorus about not trusting the person sleeping on the other side of the bed. Produced by Malay (who works with Frank Ocean and is a key Icarus Falls collaborator), the latter track is carried by the ticking of a dissonant clock and a rush of violins. Satisfaction and Scripted benefit from muted arrangements that showcase his plaintive vocal delivery and effortless melismatic range.

Sampling the reverb-drenched guitar from Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang, Good Guy puts the controlling nature of monogamy on blast: “I’m not a good guy / but I know you’re mine.” The album’s latter half leans into heartbreak in all its messy glory. “If time stands still / move I will to you,” goes the chorus, attempting to grasp at a moment that’s slipping away. On Stand Still, delicate harp runs and eerie snare snaps allude to narcissistic illusions of the “perfect” relationship. Amidst these odes lurks a possessive and consuming love. There You Are is the rare post-indefinite-hiatus One Direction anthem that would have fit neatly on Four, their final album before Zayn left.īut it’s not all Netflix rom-com vibes. In the album’s first half, tracks like Back To Life, Imprint and If I Got You are slapping declarative devotionals. “Sweet baby, our sex has meaning,” Zayn croons in opener Let Me, a confectionary sweet ballad with buoyant throwback synths, finger snaps and strumming guitar. As the poet Jack Gilbert put it in his poem Failing And Falling, “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.” In other words, we enjoy love’s highs because of the lows.

But loss and grief are still part of the equation.

It’s vivid, solitary pop and R&B that arrives at a tentative grasp of serious romance. His debut record, Mind Of Mine, was an exercise in fuccboi posturing that hopscotched between disparate sounds, but this double album is cohesive. Those smooth bops, sung to a mostly female fan base, are tailor-made for introverts cognizant of nerdy references to Super Mario Bros and Men In Black, but also question gendered behaviours we lean upon when chasing falling-in-love highs. Zayn’s enigmatic charm – what keeps me coming back for more, even when he frustrates me with his seemingly stoner-gamer work ethic – is how he deconstructs artifices we still uphold in our male pop idols.