Nights Like These – Jordan Duffy (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I’m not sure when it happened—sometime in the last twenty years, perhaps—but pop has lost its way. Although today’s pop might tick all the right boxes for fun and infectiousness, it seems to have lost such qualities as integrity, deftness, intelligence, and subtlety. It has, to use the cliche, become style over substance. And not that stylish style at that.

Thankfully, Jordan Duffy has looked past the modern throwaway take on the genre and tapped into a more honest and satisfying take on things. Nights Like These, her latest single, learns from the past, particularly from the seductive sound of eighties pop-soul, while looking to secure a brighter future for all concerned.

Nights Like These is the perfect showcase for her 4-octave range, but a voice does not a single make, and whilst this impressive vocal might be the icing on the cake, it is the pulsing back beats and depth-charge bass lines, the shimmering electronica, and gorgeous, nighttime sax runs that create the perfect platform for her voice to dance across.

Pop music hasn’t been this great for a long time. Today, it is the bastion of dance routines, guest rappers, lowest common denominator sonics, and tried-and-tested record industry-driven templates. Does Nights Like These herald the start of a fight back? How much difference can one artist make? How many others will be influenced by such a return to quality over quantity? Only time will tell, but I, for one, have a good feeling about things.