Throwing Shade – “hashtag IRL” (Singles Going Steady)

Sarah Zupko: Throwing Shade critiques the phony plasticity and the anti-intellectualism of social media most effectively on “hashtag IRL”. The music is simple and the annoying hashtags are called out for a good reason, to highlight the essential impermanence and aural clutter of much of today’s internet, particularly the Twitterverse, but also our clickbait culture. [7/10]

Morgan Y. Evans: Ninja Tune for the win. Quirky, fetching, edgy little viral sounding minimalist dream music out on the superhighway fringes like finding new future colony life growing amidst the detritus of yesterday’s dead kitsch, fresh shoots of “cool” sprouting up from the feeling you get from watching Lost in Translation too many times in a row with no sleep or the subconscious child of anime and Kraftwerk’s “techno pop”. [8/10]

Jedd Beaudoin: We used to go to this regional department store in Wisconsin and play around with the sampler on the $80 Casios there. At 12 we came up with better stuff than this. #boring #next [1/10]

Chad Miller: Takes a while for the track to get going, but it gets into an effective groove about halfway through. The last minute or so is pretty enjoyable as a bunch of hashtags start swirling into the mix. The music underneath it all is futuristic and dark, sounding reminiscent of Fatima Al Qadiri. There’s a few hashtags that jump out at you like #lol, #omg, #wtf, but there’s a few like #alone that you have to strain to pick up. It sounds suffocating, and by the time the speaker begs to “please follow me”, it seems important. [7/10]

Magdalen Jenne: This track is so immediately dated I don’t want to dignify it by treating it as more than a gimmick. Throwing Shade tonelessly chants “hashtag, get online”, and “like, like, searching, searching” for two intolerable minutes, like a parody of everyone’s annoying friend who’s really into Banksy and has a photography exhibit in a Bushwick warehouse of cell phone pictures of people on their cell phones, as some kind of misguided commentary. The plaintive, unaccompanied “hashtag… please follow me” at the end is the cherry on top, reminding me of every entitled, sheltered white kid who’s ever forced me to listen to their spoken word poetry. [2/10]

Ari Rosenschein: Throwing Shade’s overwrought YouTube bio touts the influence of Kraftwerk on the group but “hashtag IRL” is just a two-minute 16-second guilt trip. Everyone wants more followers. Our internet pickled minds are getting stupider. Tell us something we don’t. No. [3/10]

Throwing Shade‘s House of Silk releases March 4th via Ninja Tune.

SCORE: 4.66