Daphne & Celeste’s comeback album is an unpredictable triumph

‘Hey Daphne, whatever happened to Yazz?’

It’s a shoulder-tapping question on an album that begs a few of them. What divine force brought the gruesome twosome behind early-noughties school playground anthems ‘U.G.L.Y’ and ‘Ooh Stick You’ near a recording booth again? And why did wonky-pop maestro Max Tundra choose to write and produce his first full-length in ten years for them?

The point is, in a parallel universe, Tundra’s pop obsession runs so deep, he could have just as easily gifted …Save the World to 80s singer Yazz (she of ‘The Only Way is Up‘ fame) , or Taylor Dayne, or Shocking Blue, two more flash-in-the-pan icons name-checked in the same song. And they’d be lucky to have it. The album is a touching tribute to the juvenile sugar rush only class A drugs and supposedly throwaway music can provide, all while managing to sound fresh and unpredictable.

But make no mistake: this record belongs as much to Daphne & Celeste as it does to the man twiddling the knobs. Thrown into the pop machine as teenagers, fronting singles overflowing with insults – which they would fearlessly perform to a violently drunk crowd at Reading 2000 – the pair’s story is unique, and the best tracks tend to play off their serendipitous friendship.

Tundra makes heavy use of vocoders to heighten, rather then tame, their cartoonish personalities. On ‘BB’, they take ‘basic buskers’ to task for clogging the charts with heteronormative drivel. An Ed Sheeran-skewering guitar-and-vocal refrain gives the song a solid melodic foundation, but in a meta twist, the girls make no effort to hide their disdain for it: ‘This is the first thing you figure out when you get a guitar’.

…Save the World is aimed squarely at those with a sweet tooth for irony-laden pop. Daphne & Celeste & Max spend so much time winking, they may well have been legally blind recording these songs, and ‘Sunny Day’ and closer ‘Kandy Korn’ arguably push the 90s-Nickelodeon-show-on-crack vibe an inch too far. That said, if you can’t hear an inexplicable beauty in the acid-trance gem ‘Alarms’, then maybe you don’t deserve to be saved.

8.5 / 10

Great ‘Expectations’: Hayley Kiyoko’s out-and-proud debut

Remember that Britney x Madonna song ‘Me Against the Music’? It’s always been a bit shit, but I do like Brit’s quasi-rap before the chorus. Across her debut album Expectations, Hayley Kiyoko’s pop instincts rarely falter, yet a stab at the Princess of Pop’s breakneck delivery on ‘Curious’ could be her ballsiest move so far…

‘Did you take him to the pier in Santa Monica? /
Forget to bring a jacket / Wrap up in him / Cause you wanted to?’

(In pop music terms, this is a soliloquy. Hayley fires it out in five seconds flat.)

Jacking the beat from Fifth Harmony’s ‘Work From Home’, the single clicks and thumps in all the right places, even as the lyrics coyly confront a girlfriend over her heterosexual affair. The ‘If you let him touch ya…’ hook is niftily copied-and-pasted-and-pasted, allowing Hayley to vent her frustration, while maintaining her composure.

The 26-year-old singer and actress represents a post-Tumblr wave of young queer voices in pop. The fearlessness with which she’s presenting her sexuality is pioneering in itself. The album’s artwork finds her candidly revering the female form, and in her music, the corresponding pronouns come thick and fast.

‘Sleepover’ will be painfully familiar to any gay who’s crushed on a straight friend. Over a tender groove, Hayley’s fresh-as-morning-dew voice cries out for intimacy, and yes, for great expectations not met. ‘He’ll Never Love You’ is an intervention for a girlfriend in denial of her true identity, elevated by an impatient vocal.

The synth-pop production is largely dreamy and fluorescent, acting as bubble wrapping for Hayley’s vulnerable songwriting. This duality is no more apparent than on a daring pair of mini-epics that dominate the middle section.

Both are emotionally complex and serpentine in structure, but the album’s heart pumps hardest on ‘Mercy/Gatekeeper’. Segueing from pulsating dance to a rockier verse straight from Sky Ferreira’s hard drive, Hayley traces the root(s) of her depression: ‘I can tell you don’t get it / ‘Cause you tell me everything will be okay’. A portentous monologue about autonomy follows, and the epiphany is rewarded with a swirl of sumptuous synths and Haim-esque harmonies, for a cathartic finish.

Expectations is a mellow and atmospheric listen, but the laborious path to self-acceptance bears juicy fruit. The Kehlani-featuring ‘What I Need’ is sexy and of-the-moment, and deserves to be a minor hit. The funk-reliant ‘Palm Dreams’, meanwhile, soundtracks an impossibly cool party, a sequinned declaration that queer life really does get better.

9 / 10