Femme
High (Tape Music)

In the mid-2000s, there was a whole scene of gay club kids releasing over-the-top insane “art” singles that were funny to about 90 people. Fans of Fierce Girl’s What Makes A Girl Fierce and Niyi’s Your Mummy know what a joyous period that was. Femme have some of that spirit: dodgy electroclash production values and videos that look like they were shot on the third day of a massive bender. But, on songs such as High, there’s also an undercurrent of melancholy and self doubt, like she’s at the party off her tits but also watching herself acting like a dickhead, all at the same time. It’s the music Drake would make if, instead of growing up in Toronto, he’d done ket at squat raves in South London.

Nicki Minaj
Anaconda (Cash Money)

Nicki Minaj’s flow used to be schizophrenic, drawing on multiple conflicting characters and overdubbed ramblings. Now it’s closer to full-blown derangement. The lyrics of this song sound like they were written in faeces on the walls at Bedlam. The final line, as far as I can make out, is, “Fuck those skinny bitches in the club I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club fuck you if you skinny bitches WHAT? Haaaaa, HAAAA, brrrr I got a big fat ass”. It’s utterly insane, but entirely compelling. My only regret is that the four-year-old me, who used to run round the house shouting “bum poo willy fart” in fits of hysterics, never got to hear it.

Mapei
Change (Downtown Records)

Mapei is a walking encapsulation of the music industry at the moment. She emerged a few years ago as a rapper and her raw demos had touches of Lauryn Hill brilliance. She could have made something incredible but no one cared, because underground hip-hop doesn’t sound great on the radio or sell records. So five years later, she’s back as a singer with a hipstery overexposed press shot that looks nothing like her and a vague trendy hip-hop flavour but no actual rapping. This isn’t a simple sell-out story – Change is a great pop song, probably more accomplished than her earlier stuff – but you can’t help feel that instead of a powerful female voice we got another track for an Urban Outfitters playlist.

Perplexus
Put You On (Perplexus)

Everything about this song is daring me to hate it. The artist’s logo looks like the branding for a since-discontinued herbal high. The video features a guy doing parkour (gross) through Camden market (ewww) so he can meet a girl wearing a fedora (vomits all over laptop). And its UK R&B with an old-school garage beat makes me want to down nine Panda Pops and go raging on a glucose bender. This is the sort of thing I’d imagine Lemar to be making if he hadn’t... wait, what happened to Lemar? Is he OK?