The video-sharing app is really the perfect vehicle for Charli’s vision for pop music: intelligent, but with a layer of artifice that’s very easy to take the piss out of – the chorus of “Unlock It” has the title repeated a total of 18 times. Bad for complex lyricism, good for simple to follow dance routines.
“Unlock It” plays to this very specific moment in pop culture brilliantly, proving that
Pop 2’s brief of sounding like the future was eerily prescient – if by ‘the future’ you mean ‘in four years time’, of course. It’s a long game, but one Charli has been stoically playing. In the past decade, she’s proven to be one of our most reliable and chameleonic makers of bops. From 2013’s glitchy, alt-pop debut