Coming For Me

Cults “Bad Things”

Madeline Follin’s voice is high and extremely girlish, Brian Oblivion’s arrangements are perky, bright and obviously indebted to a more innocent era of pop. Their first album as Cults can get extremely twee, sometimes aggravatingly precious. What makes the record work is that the two find ways to subvert their youthful sound, or at least add a touch of darkness to songs that would be little more than adorably melodramatic in lesser hand. “Bad Things,” my favorite song from the album, really creeps me out. It’s very catchy and sounds sweet, but when I hear it, I just expect something incredibly bad to happen to its protagonist. There’s something very portentous about this track — that I can’t quite piece together a narrative but feel sure of the subtext only intensifies my feeling of “ahhhh, no!” when I hear Follin’s tiny voice sing “I’m gonna run away and never come back.”

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