Wolf Alice – “You’re a Germ” (video) (Singles Going Steady)

Paul Duffus: Wolf Alice get a couple of things very right here. Firstly, the line “You’re a dodgy fucker as well!” is a decent way to end a chorus. Swearing is good and more bands should consider it as a way of adding caffeine to their lyrics. Personally I wouldn’t have ended the line with “as well”, which is weak. After “fucker”, maybe go for a c-bomb to finish things off with a bang. Just stick the second person personal pronoun in before it to make up the syllables, and boom: We have Rock! It doesn’t need to make sense. Secondly, the video is great. You get to see the band getting killed over and over again, which is also something many other bands should consider in their promos. It offers a bit of catharsis if the song is especially bad, which, well, this kind of is. Sort of grungy, poppy, rocky, there’s a kerrannngg from the guitar about 30 seconds in, which you hope is going to signal all kinds of groin-pumping heaviness, but turns out to be only a passing thought. Any awesomeness hinted at by the video and that one moment of axe-gasm never materialises. [5/10]

Timothy Gabriele: The music video sets the band through a series of alternate reality cabin-in-the-woods scenarios wherein the band members’ ultimate goal seems to be to escape a series of tropes. Spoiler alert: they don’t succeed. The song itself’s got a respectable snarl, but the same logic follows. [5/10]