Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Mark Ronson: “True Blue” [ft. Angel Olsen]

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• SONY UK 

2019

LISTEN TO THE TRACK BELOW

• Mark Ronson

“True Blue” [ft. Angel Olsen]

You might not think to sit Mark Ronson next to Angel Olsen at the dinner party. Ronson, a frequent maximalist, has shaped some of the shiniest, most successful pop songs of the past two decades, while Olsen’s early work emerged from the lo-fi folk revival. But on their unlikely collaboration “True Blue,” they are remarkably copacetic, crafting an oozing disco cut that plays like narcotized ABBA.

If you haven’t noticed from Ronson’s latest stage prop—a giant broken-heart disco ball—the songs that populate his new album are “sad bangers” that explore romance gone wrong. “True Blue” extends that theme, but not solely with words. Where singles like “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” and title track “Late Night Feelings” are essentially upbeat pop songs with bittersweet lyrics, “True Blue” buries longing deep in the mix. Olsen’s voice crawls out from under a whining orchestra of warped tape, as if crying out from the bottom of a well. The sound of dissolution is everywhere on “True Blue,” in the fragments of words dissolving at the song’s perimeter and the metallic thrums of guitar dissipating into nothing. Instead of Ronson’s often crisp production, “True Blue” sounds as if it were smeared across the dancefloor just before last call. It is a song for the wee, drunken hours—a “sad banger” that suits the lone dancer best.

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