I Come Alive When I Hear Your Voice

One Direction “Hey Angel”

“Hey Angel” sounds like every song on The Verve’s Urban Hymns album distilled into one epic, lovelorn ballad, and it’s a great look on the boys of One Direction. Richard Ashcroft’s music may be a lot more dark and depressive than what you’d normally get from 1D, but his aesthetic was always hyper-romantic and melodramatic, and that suits them perfectly. Like pretty much all the best 1D songs, this is basically a song in which a bunch of cute boys sing about their admiration for some ordinary yet outstanding young woman. Now, look, the guys in One Direction and their various collaborators aren’t idiots, and they know this formula is something that makes them insane amounts of money. Flattery gets them everywhere. But I really don’t think it’s that cynical, and I think they sincerely respect the audience and aren’t bullshitting when they drop a chorus that goes “Oh, I wish I could be more like you! / Do you wish you could be more like me?” It’s exciting to hear respect and admiration be the focus of pop songs, particularly since that’s in short supply when it comes to the music of other major male pop stars today. You’re sure as hell never going to get this from misogynist uber-creeps like Drake and The Weeknd. And even if 1D is truly coming from a place of greedy cynicism, I just can’t see any downside in a lot of girls growing up listening to songs in which desirable young men sing about how cool girls are and how much they wish they were like them.

Buy it from Amazon.