Elijah Noll – “Dirty Games” (audio) (premiere)

Elijah Noll makes poppy R&B in the loosest sense: music which spans decades and styles, refusing to pin itself into any corner of the genre. “Dirty Games” is as much rooted in the ‘80s as it is in the now, as much a-ha as Walk the Moon, as much straightforward electropop as Justin Timberlake’s carefully twisted confections. And, like much of the music which straddles these stylings, “Dirty Games” is a quality slab of plaintive, rock-inflected rhythmic pop. It’s driving, it’s sad, and it’s viscerally triumphant all at once; in other words, it’s everything that makes a good pop song in three and a half minutes.

“I wrote the track right after I got out of a long-term relationship,” says Noll. “Around that same time, I was diving head first into a new chapter and was dealing with the fear of falling into another relationship and fucking that one up just the same.”