Track Evaluate: Seventeen – Unhealthy Affect

Ok-pop has been mired in early-2000s nostalgia for the previous few years. In my view, the trade has typically adopted essentially the most boring musical tendencies of that period, however often we’ll see a gaggle hijack the enduring manufacturing fashion of Y2K celebrity producers Timbaland and The Neptunes. For Seventeen’s latest album, they skipped the intermediary and went straight to the supply. They’ve included tracks produced by each Timbaland and The Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams, the latter of which now has a music video.

Unhealthy Affect is certainly one of three full-group tracks on the album and the track I used to be most curious to listen to. Pharrell has an unbelievable contact relating to rhythm, crafting a few of the 2000s’ most iconic blasts of sparse, brittle funk. On the again of this resume, I used to be shocked the primary time I heard Unhealthy Affect. What’s with this torpid entice beat? If Pharrell’s identify wasn’t hooked up to the observe, I’d by no means have pegged it as his work. The instrumental sounds generic sufficient to be nearly anybody, missing the magic contact that characterizes so lots of The Neptunes’ early-2000s hip-hop classics. The manufacturing right here feels oddly robotic and by no means brisk sufficient to elicit pleasure. It’s as if the track is making an attempt to tug itself from the mud at each flip.

It is a disgrace, as a result of Unhealthy Affect additionally contains a few of the album’s most memorable melodies. The verses quantity to little or no and inhibit the track as a lot because the instrumental does, however I like the moments of layered vocals that supply spikes of depth in an in any other case reserved association. From what I can inform given the track’s odd construction, there are two foremost hooks/choruses. Each work properly, from the sprawling melodic centerpiece to the slinky chorus that opens and closes the observe. A remix would possibly simply rework Unhealthy Affect into an actual spotlight. Possibly we merely wanted a mixture of each promoted tracks. Give me the depth of Thunder and the sinewy hookiness of Unhealthy Affect in a single track, every compensating for the opposite’s weak point.

Grade: C+