I praised Brooke’s previous single Gimme Gimme for its “deftness and delicacy” and for acting like “a perfectly timed acoustic sorbet” in a day that seemed too full of cliched rockers trying their best to look tough and earnest indie kids trying to change the work with a working knowledge of A minor.
I’m glad to report that her new one, the wonderfully titled, I Hate You The Least, feels like a similar tonic. It’s pop, sure, but pop that is aware of the genre’s psychedelic and soulful history, understands its association with folk music, that country music is a distant cousin, knows what “less is more” actually means, and which offers a new, next step in the battle for pop’s survival.
This isn’t about following existing templates or more of the same. It is about shaking things up in the gentlest of ways, it is about a pop dream that is new, fresh, creative, instantly accessible and, in its way, delicately subverting the form but doing all of that in a way that seems already so familiar that you don’t feel the need to hang around awkwardly waiting for a formal introduction.
