Singles Roundup: Secret Frequency, The Wonder Years, & Bad Cop Bad Cop

We've got a couple of interesting topics to discuss this week.

Secret Frequency - Crashing Words

Let's start with this one, because it requires a bit of musing. AI and music has been a topic in the headlines of late, with at least one 'band' on Spotify racking up big numbers despite being fake. Myself, I'm at least curious about if AI will ever get easy enough for me to replace all of my own vocals with something that sounds passable, so one day I can be proud of my own work as a musician... but I digress.

I'm not sure what to make of Secret Frequency. Their music is on Spotify and YouTube, but I can find no social media presence; no website, no Facebook profile, no Instagram account. Are they real? Honestly, I have no idea if 'they' are an AI performance of a song someone has written or not. The interesting thing is to ask myself if it matters.

In a way, it doesn't. The song sounds really good, the vocal doesn't feel artificial, and the composition is very strong. It's the kind of swelling rock song that hits me in the way I want to feel music, and that should be the only important factor. It isn't, of course, as it's hard to ignore the possible lack of humanity behind it. There's the theoretical and the practical in play here, and it leaves me both enjoying and hating this song at the same time.

The Wonder Years - New Lows

I found it rather funny that the song was credited to Becky Lynch featuring The Wonder Years. Oh, when you're the bigger deal in the marketplace, you get to make everyone else grovel for crumbs of attention. In this case, that would be WWE, who got The Wonder Years to record this new theme for their biggest female star. Since their last album won AOTY from me, of course I was going to listen to what they came up with. The results are... frustrating.

The song is excellent. It makes reference to her story, and it has the band's signature brand of propulsive fury in the stirring hook. It's really good, except for it only being two minutes long and feeling incomplete. It needs a bridge or a breakdown, so we can cycle through the cathartic moment one more time before it's gone. I know why it was written this way, but if you're going to release it as a stand-alone song, it needs to work that way too. This one maybe doesn't.

Bad Cop Bad Cop - I4NI

The opening lyric of this song asks an interesting question; "Why are we so obsessed with 'an eye for an eye'?" What we have seen over the last decade of our lives is not just a coarsening of culture, but an embrace of vengeance and violence as the answer to life's problems. Somewhere along the way, we forgot the second part of the phrase that tells us that eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

There's something hopeful about punk music being the source of introspection asking us to be more respectful people toward everyone. If you look at many of the most controversial issues out there, they can be summed up as a lack of respect for people who want to live their lives differently than we might. Truly, who gives a damn what other people do when it doesn't make fuck-all difference to our lives?

Bad Cop Bad Cop are breaking the news to us that perhaps we need a refresher course on how to be decent people. They do it in a pop-punk gloss that soothes the burn, and gets our head bopping up and down, agreeing whether we mean to or not.