In an airless office the sound is perplexing, like someone opened a wall. You wheel yourself back a sec. This is the world out there. All of it. At first, your bland text blanches, embarrassed of the light it’s known. Then you’re barely looking. The desk and monitor shrink, so tired they’ve grown thinner and blacker and more out of place. Summer doesn’t have time for them. Summer is the end of waiting for the best of ourselves, and this song shoves it crystalline with lyrics that don’t matter.
Baebadoobee’s new track, ‘Last Day On Earth’, has already become my summer song, and we’re not even there yet. It leaps at me with open arms, glimmering arpeggios, a chorus that celebrates nonsense in the sense of an ending. “You made it,” sings the feted Filipino, “it’s your last day on earth.” Guitars ring bright as chapel bells. “You killed someone last night and burned down a church.” If she’s into black metal, it’s probably through Wikipedia, which is fine and perhaps healthier for the constitution. The indie darling scored a viral hit on TikTok, itself a form of dark worship, although ‘Last Day . . .’ bins the sad-girl waltz for a sugar cane straight out of Ray Of Light-era Madonna. Unlike her past material soundtracking broken dances with guys that never stay long enough for coffee, this song is unalloyed pop music, a threat and a bad friend to the office chair, made to lift you shamelessly from any surface, including the floor. Whenever it plays – thanks, BBC Radio Six, for your service to impending unemployment – I am catapulted far above the dry terrain of numbers, deadlines and fully buttoned shirts. All I want to do is go outside.
