on the pulse - 2021 - #13 - maroon 5, doja cat, jxdn, spellling, seventeen, rebecca black

…so you don’t need to tell me that this is late - I know it’s late, I’ve gotten tied up with a number of stupid things the past month, I’d really like to get something close to caught up here. So alright, let’s get On The Pulse!

Rebecca Black - Rebecca Black Was Here - So let’s do what every mainstream publication that covers this EP does and be all surprised that the girl that made ‘Friday’ is now making more distinct and charged hyperpop - those who have been paying attention have seen her on this path and working with acts in this lane for the past few years beyond her last pop EP in 2017, it was just a matter of time. And as someone who never got on the ‘Friday’ hatedom - because I know way too much about the skeevy, assembly-line process in how songs like that are made - I wanted to give this a fair shot. And… well, like with Slayyyter it’s a more accessible brand of hyperpop where the production feels considerably better balanced, but where she went into sharper, sexually charged bangers and 2000s pop, Rebecca Black opts for a more somber tone with the shuddering squonking synths and a slightly more reserved, melancholic approach in the watery keys and her vocals coaxed through more gentle, robotic refinement. And that makes sense for the short arc of the project - Black plays the girl who has to end it with a partner, and between trying to recast the story as better in her own mind to regretfully watching from the sidelines as that ex processes it, only to eventually wind up spiraling back into her life, gives the album some nuance and maturity I didn’t expect, but I’m happy to find! I just wish it landed more impact for me - for a hyperpop EP that runs less than twenty minutes I want to be able to take away a stronger melodic hook or two beyond the vocal line, or a note of clattering, visceral impact that we’ve seen in her collaborations with other acts in the scene. It’s certainly well-structured and pretty good, and the instrumental solos across ‘Girlfriend’ and ‘Personal’ have some charm, but it doesn’t quite stand out as strongly as I was hoping. Very solid 6/10, I do wish I liked it a bit more, though.

SEVENTEEN - Your Choice - Now as some of you know, I actually reviewed SEVENTEEN’s Semicolon EP last year and generally liked it for its above-average production and remarkably tasteful genre pivots, so now back with another bite-sized project this year clocking about twenty minutes… and I can’t say I like this as much. And unfortunately it ties back into something I observed when I covered Semicolon, that their best material was when they did their own thing, not go for obvious trend-chasing, but across this album there’s more clunky and repetitive English-language hooks, more wiry and underpowered trap beats, more flagrant gummy autotune, and less of a focus on the groove that made this band so distinctive for me. It’s a bad sign that when we get ‘GAM3 BO1’ there are bitcoin and NFT references that already feels forced and corny before the song is oversaturated with tinny chipmunk vocals! Thankfully by the end they pulled it around for the 90s R&B pastiche ‘Same dream, same mind, same night’ which has some really pretty harmonies and remind me that when SEVENTEEN class it up they punch above a lot of their peers, but when you realize that most of these are just pretty basic love songs, it might be too little, too late. I dunno, if you’re into the more forceful, in your face flash of k-pop, you might a few cuts worth checking, but this is not SEVENTEEN at their best. strong 5/10, I was kind of let down by this one.

Garbage - No Gods No Masters - I’ll admit going back and relistening to Garbage’s albums through the 90s to the turn of the millennium is kind of surreal. Falling at the tangled intersection of alternative rock and late 90s electronica with a smattering of goth and industrial that was more chic stylism than among the true believers, they were more pop their entire run with enough edginess and good hooks to win acclaim then and snag nostalgia now. But there’s a reason they tend to slip out of most conversations of the era - even their early work sounds pretty dated, especially in their content and presentation, and it’s hard to escape the feeling they were always more style than substance. And after that, they never were quite able to recapture that 90s alchemy in the next two decades - projects wound up scattered in genre but often well-enough composed to hold together, but not always memorable. And spoiler alert, that’s true with this project too - for the record, I’m only covering the standard edition, not the extra eight songs tacked on to make this over an hour - Garbage albums tend to run long as it is, and even in the standard edition this isn’t an exception. But I also feel like I might be the wrong person to talk about Garbage at this point, because in finding the middle ground between more percussion-heavy synthpop, alternative rock and a dash of industrial and goth rock, they kind of don’t synthesize the greatest strengths of any of them, and just having decent hooks and above-average production albeit lacking more potent atmosphere isn’t quite enough for me - which has been true about Garbage for years, they’re a solid introduction to these genres but once you’re in, unless you’re nostalgic there aren’t always a lot of reasons to go back. I do find it hilarious just how many critics are praising this as genre pushing, when in reality this isn’t close to the industrial or alternative scene that’s really moving the needle these days no matter how many layers they slam that sax sound through on on ‘Anonymous XXX' or the bells on ‘A Woman Destroyed’ or the flagrant post-punk riff of ‘Flipping The Bird’, even if said scene is actively pulling from the 90s and 2000s. But I think there’s two factors that makes this feel dated, the first being that this album is still trying to sound smoky and cool and hold onto that ‘transgressive’ edge and it’s gotten way less convincing, half because Shirley Manson can feel like a limited emotive presence and half because this album has nothing close to real distorted crunch, especially in the percussion. The other problem is that in between the self-flagellating angst and their usual spate of faux-goth hookup jams, Garbage looked to get more political and conscious on this album - which isn’t a bad idea, they had snippets that were trying to be a bit more forward-thinking in their heyday, but again, this is a band that’s probably most known for style over substance and it definitely shows through here. If anything I’m reminded of Marina’s project from earlier this year where you can tell the intentions are in the right place with songs like ‘The Men Who Rule The World’ or ‘Waiting For God’ - later followed up pretty well by the title track - or the revenge fantasy of ‘A Woman Destroyed’ and especially ‘Godhead’ and it feels like a painfully surface approach to these topics - distilling it all down to lines about dicks feels way clumsier and a lot less transgressive than it should in the age of Black Dresses and Special Interest and Backxwash, especially given it’s one of the best industrial-leaning grooves on the album. But let’s be real: at this point Garbage has nothing left to prove - they’re on their own label, firmly within their own sound, playing to the audience of diehards who want the nostalgia kick, so if I’m generally lukewarm on this, who really cares? Light 6/10, pretty much just for the fans.

MIKE - DISCO! - So I’ve seen how other music critics have stepped in it when it comes to talking about this New York lo-fi rapper, so I wanted to make sure I did my homework going through his entire back catalog ahead of time and with many a listen to Uncommon Nasa and billy woods, I’m used to thorny, tangled, very cerebral hip-hop in this territory. And thus what threw me was how relatively straightforward MIKE wound up - yeah, his production was textured and clattering and showed touches of jazzy experimentation, but his delivery and wordplay was pretty plainspoken and honest, where the Earl Sweatshirt comparison is inevitable but not exactly a bad thing. I don’t think I was ever precisely wowed by any of the projects I heard - I get the atmosphere and texture and raw appeal, but I often gravitate to the more layered and literate stuff where most of MIKE’s work felt pretty fragmented and occasionally undercooked, especially as things got more turgid and rough in later projects - but I didn’t dislike any of them so I wanted to give this a fair shot and… well, it’s interesting, I will say that. There’s still a very autobiographical and shaggy feel to the project as the beats trudge across the sample loops struggling to stay on key and MIKE’s conversational drawl, but said samples are a little brighter in their choice of vocal snippets and melodic fragments, which along with the meandering bars translate to an reluctant optimism that helps this feel a bit more accessible, even if the project absolutely runs long and the possibility of getting a fully composed hook is a pipe dream. But here’s the thing: I understand that the rougher, lo-fi presentation is supposed to be organic, homegrown, reinforce the plainspoken, basic outsider perspective… and I feel you could have gotten there without some of the most inconsistent mixing and mastering I’ve heard since Blu’s 2010s output. It’s most distracting around how the vocal fidelity never feels consistent or well-placed in the mix compared to the samples, and while the warmer tones mean I can tolerate it a little longer, it feels a lot less avant-garde and more a clumsy experiment in pushing away the audience where the dividends dry up fast, especially when it doesn’t augment MIKE’s emotive power as an MC. Look, if the mixing is such a persistent distraction, it’s going to be hard to care what he has to say, especially when he’s a pretty flat presence behind the mic; and here, if some of the deflection is part of the point, it feels like less of an excuse in comparison to his more downbeat projects. What’s frustrating is I do think he's a pretty good MC - there’s a self-aware plainness to his angst and depression where the near-persistent weed smoke untangles revelations, especially amidst the samples from his late mother from which you can tell he’s trying to build his inspiration to keep going and look for more, especially as he’s conscious of the weight his previous work brought and he wants to feel better - ‘Endgame’ is a great example of this. Now I don’t know if where MIKE goes from here is set up to be interesting - the few moments of flexing and bragging don’t grip me all that much and fit this production even less - but to bring it all around, I feel like MIKE is starting to hit the edges of this niche of lo-fi hip-hop, especially if he doesn’t want to wallow in depression. And while I can appreciate the textural experience and vibes off of this and some of the writing, the issues in execution and refinement prevent me from liking more. Solid 6/10, I know this isn’t really for me, but I do hear the potential for it to be in the future, and I appreciate that at least.

Lucy Dacus - Home Video - I guess I’m just working my way through the members of Boygenius one by one here, where I wind up liking but not loving their material - seems to be a recurring theme here. Well, after reviewing Phoebe Bridgers last year and Julien Baker this year, Lucy Dacus was the last on my list so I went to her back catalog and… well, colour me a little surprised with how muscular and punchy her 2016 debut No Burden, anchored in thick, roiling guitars that flattered her deeper vocals and canny writing pretty effectively, and that’s before ‘Map On A Wall’ became the sort of galloping indie rock stomper that if I had heard this album five years ago would have easily had a shot to make my favourite songs of 2016! Now I think Historian from 2018 is a little more expansive and refined, but I’m not sure it has the snarled, heavy immediacy of her debut, even if it is still pretty damn impressive and makes me wish I was reviewing her then too - so suffice to say, I’ve now picked up expectations for this! And… well, it’s absolutely a great album that has me kicking myself I wasn’t listening to more Lucy Dacus, but it’s also the sort of album that has me convinced that she’s building towards a stronger project in the future. The mixes are larger and have picked up thicker, rolling synths riding off the guitars that might not have the same burly crunch as her early work - although the rambunctious crunch of ‘First Time’ is a welcome callback - but still have that coursing groove and texture at the album’s loudest moments, even to the point of feeling a little blown out and clunky at spots. But you can tell that’s intended to create some oppressively loud moments on ‘VBS’ and ‘Triple Dog Dare’ that are played for stark contrast - similar to the intentionally distancing usage of autotune on ‘Partner In Crime’, which I actually really liked in an Imogen Heap-esque parallel as she tries to bend the picture to seem older when dating someone that age. Now I will say the album starts meandering pretty quickly, but you can tell that’s by design when you get to the songwriting - the album is titled Home Video and it often feels like sifting through old photographs and memories going home for a spell, where she’s grown up enough and changed to be very honest with herself and her old friends and flings, but also aware of how going back to that environment can bring forth those old emotions, which lends the album a lot of pathos. If anything it feels like the evolution of what Katie Pruitt did last year with Expectations, especially in the naked explorations of religion and queerness, except Dacus’ writing feels more self-assured and cutting in her insight and less interested in glamour or romance; I was reminded more often than not of Lori McKenna at her most blunt and that’s high praise indeed. And thus it’s a harder listen - ‘Cartwheel’ has her friends growing up chasing boys and her feeling betrayed or left behind, ‘Christine’ is an open confrontation of a friend that Dacus thinks is settling down for the wrong partner, a future she herself could see occuring between the lines on ‘Please Stay’, ‘VBS’ is a starkly honest portrayal of her first boyfriend at Bible camp - all the more cutting on ‘Brando’ where she cuts through his artsy pretensions effortlessly and includes the genuinely excellent line, ‘You called me cerebral, I didn't know what you meant / But now I do, would it have killed you to call me pretty instead?’ And ‘Thumbs’ might be the most devastating song she’s ever written or performed, where she goes with a friend to confront their estranged father and the layers of sympathetic pain and rage she unpacks is legit heartbreaking - following that song with ‘Going Going Gone’ suggests what she’s most looking to challenge are traditional cycles and expectations of life, relationships, gender, and sexuality that we can fall into so quickly, and she doesn’t exclude herself in that, which is why the album starts questioning why those friends couldn’t have left and taken more chances like her… and ends on ‘Triple Dog Dare’ with a diversion to fantasy, where she tries to convince a friend in high school to run away together, break that cycle. So yeah, probably her most varied and impressive album to date, very solid 8/10, and absolutely worth more attention - I want to see where she goes from here, there more on that horizon.

jxdn - Tell Me About Tomorrow - …you know, with that KennyHoopla and Travis Barker collaboration, I had expectations - which went unmet, but hey, it’s the thought that counts. That was not the case with jxdn, who is a TikTok star who was at one point part of the Sway House - it depresses me that I know what that is - who started making music that hit the rock charts and what do you know, there’s Travis Barker again, with Machine Gun Kelly and iann dior in tow! I hope that’s why y’all grasp why I was skeptical about this… of which I was right to be, because everyone who said Machine Gun Kelly owed Tickets To My Downfall to Travis Barker enabling him to rip off Blink-182 need to hear this kid; ‘A WASTED YEAR’ is a flagrant riff of ‘Feeling This’ that was more obvious than anything MGK did! Shame it doesn’t stop there, because between the atmospherics that are pulling wholesale from tones that Post Malone and Trippie Redd of all people have done better and the rap moments where blackbear’s influence is obvious and not in a good way, and you realize just how many mechanisms that Barker is putting in place to muscle this kid’s brand of “pop punk” into the spotlight with a prebuilt TikTok audience to put him over the top - and I include song structure in that, as most of these songs are distilled down to the rawest basics possible. And I never felt this with Machine Gun Kelly - yeah, he’s a pretty bad singer but he has charisma and presence that all the autotune here can’t prop up for jxdn, and even though I’d agree Tickets To My Downfall is dumb and derivative, there were enough honest and mostly genuine moments and a palpable desperation to its saving throw that if it had failed Diddy would have killed his record deal that lends it some populism - it paradoxically helps you root for him, even if you know he’s never going to pull it off again. jxdn, meanwhile, is just as dumb and possibly even more derivative in content and vocal style, but without that added populism all the flaws race to the forefront: the production is overcompressed to a frankly obscene degree, stripped of real impact, and severely lacking in punchy groove, jxdn is a singer with no distinctive bite or texture to his vocals and his slurred over ‘rockstar’ moments don’t impress me whatsoever - and you can tell he tries to mimic his guest stars when they show up, like with Machine Gun Kelly on ‘WANNA BE’, and you cannot tell me there’s anything close to nuance in this brand of flagrantly high school melodrama - which again, I get how this might work for its target audience, but I grew up in the last wave of this, I remember when this had more punch and impact, especially the painfully shallow ‘emo’ moments - hell, Olivia Rodrigo’s rock moments hit harder than this! But the larger problem is that outside of the intro and interlude, this is sixteen songs and given how basic it all is, it starts getting forgettable fast - it’s a bad sign that probably the biggest standout is ‘A WASTED YEAR’. Outside of that… 4/10, give me ‘ONE MINUTE’, ‘TELL ME ABOUT TOMORROW’ and the bassline of ‘SO WHAT’, which is probably the best groove here. Skip the rest.

the Mountain Goats - Dark In Here - I’m not sure what it was about that last Mountain Goats album Getting Into Knives that hooked me more than everyone else. Maybe I’m a sucker for the writing leaning into a feral and dilapidated place along with the rougher production, maybe it was how there were enough slow burn moments to really suck me in, maybe it was listening to it alongside the newest clipping for a thematic synergy that gave them both so much replay value. Anyway, folks have been way more supportive and excited about this Mountain Goats project, highlighting its immediacy and how the songs were better than ever… which makes things really awkward when I come here and say that I wasn’t really feeling this as much as I wanted to be. Yeah, I’m as shocked as anyone, but I’ve given this a lot of listens really trying to find the greatness that hooked so many folks and while it’s certainly very good, I’d only say it’s on the cusp of greatness, and to my shock a lot of that is rooted in the songwriting and themes. John Darnielle has described this project as a sister album to Getting Into Knives recorded around the same time, and I definitely hear some of it in the bleaker imagery and increasingly haunted weirdness, but there’s a different flavour to the darkness here that honestly reminds me more of In League With Dragons or Goths, where the album might cloak itself in those tones but in reality feels more human and “normal” beneath it all… except minus the intensely detailed settings that gave those two albums so much character - yeah, I dug the layered Biblical detachment of ‘Mobile’, but it’s one of the exceptions. I think another factor is urgency: an album like Getting Into Knives was all unstable, feral edges drilling into that territory where the melancholy came on the side, whereas Dark In Here is already in that dreary space and getting more comfortable there, which is reflected in the instrumentation picking up more of those jazzy arranged elements from Goths but with a more refined, realized tone, free jazz freakout on ‘Lizard Suit’ excepted. But that was an album that was acutely aware of how ossified in time that scene was, where age and ongoing life are the greater dangers, whereas this album doesn’t quite have that contrast point or added level of artifice in the storytelling, which has the feel of going down a familiar, meandering road but with less points that stick out; it’s not like this album has a ‘Rain In Soho’ either. So what we wind up with are a selection of increasingly scattered but pretty good Mountain Goats songs that honestly could be slotted among the slightly lesser cuts of any of the last three albums - more accessible for sure as there’s less of that deflective artifice, but not really better for it. Which is a shame because when it comes to the production and instrumentation of this album, this might be one of their most varied and propulsive in sometime: the pulsating gallop of the bass, organ, and snares on ‘The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower’ and the piano accented title track, the soft rock of ‘Mobile’, the great slow-burn of ‘The Slow Parts of Death Metal Songs’… but when you realize that the majority of even the best songs run long, the momentum starts flagging and there’s less that pulls me back. So while I don’t think there’s the obvious standouts that’ll suck me in forever, there’s enough great songs to just edge this to an extremely light 8/10 - I don’t think I’ll go back to this in the same way as their best, but when the Mountain Goats have the consistent quality that they do, some of it is just managing expectations.

Spellling - The Turning Wheel - so… guess who feels very late to the party here? In all due fairness, I feel like I should have reviewed Mazy Fly two years ago, it was on my radar but somehow slipped through the cracks, but with the surge of critical acclaim directed at Spelllling’s newest album, especially from one fellow colleague on this website, I figured I’d do my due diligence and catch up on her first two albums. And I’ll admit I’m not sure how to feel about them - a haunting but fractured tone somewhere between vintage darkwave, modern R&B, and art pop, she was intriguing enough to hold my interest but I wasn’t sure I was hooked just yet. Granted, hearing that she had again expanded her sound and amplified her Kate Bush influence this time around was intriguing, so I did want to hear this… and yeah, I’m happy to join the consensus here that this is pretty great, definitely Spellling’s best work to date but also the sort of album that opens the door for so many more sounds of which I’d love to hear her approach, especially when you realize that she self-produced this project and it sounds gorgeous, with impeccable balance and the exact richness of tones you love to hear in baroque pop! Now as much as I deeply love Kate Bush’s catalog and you can absolutely hear the influence in the theatricality, the more ornate compositions, just how well synths are integrated opposite classical arrangements alongside writing that can effectively hit the balance between pop and baroque poetry, in certain patches Bush’s production could sound a little dated, especially in the 80s, and while there’s some of that in some of the programmed percussion and flattened or oily synth tones here, the cleaner and more expansive mix to say nothing of more textured basslines and percussion grooves definitely help Spellling make this her own - Kate Bush would not have a cut a song like ‘Revolution’, let me tell you! Maybe not transcend that influence - Spellling’s vocals can be really damn pretty especially with the increased use of choirs and multi-tracking, but there’s a shy mysticism to her delivery that in certain moments could afford to be sold a little harder or sharper, really drive the theatrical moments home to match her arrangements - but it’s not so obtrusive that it gets distracting, and moments like the romanticism of ‘Always’, the soulful pianowork of the title track, the fantastic swell and hook of ‘Awaken’, the gothic psychedelia of ‘Queen Of Wands’, and any time Lisa Reed opens up to shred on the guitar hits retro and swings right through it to goddamn awesome! And while there’s a part of me that prefers a slightly wordier brand of baroque pop, I can’t deny there’s a thematic richness to this album: so much of this album circles a yearning for transcendence over that turning wheel of time, but enough of a grounded reality by looking inwards to pull forth the magic and music to build and work down here. In a way it evades analysis, as magic is ought to do, which makes me wish I was a little more enraptured with the writing and performance as a whole, but I know enough to recognize greatness when I hear it. Solid 8/10, really impressive stuff.

Doja Cat - Planet Her - You know, the one very convenient thing about running a show where you talk about the Hot 100 is that if you wind up covering her on that show, reviewing the album itself winds up pretty straightforward! And man, I wish it was better - unfortunately a lot of the charting moments are the most interesting on this project but also highlight how Doja Cat sounds overmanaged and pulled in a few too many directions. Now she’s got a jack-of-all-trades skillset in terms of her pretty good singing voice - although her baby-voiced higher register can get grating pretty fast, not gonna lie - and her more cartoonish rapping, and a very online, very horny, manic sense of humour, and it’s a damn shame the album doesn’t really play into her strengths, especially given how much this album will flit across genres from Afrobeat to R&B to more conventional pop to stabs at cloud rap and trap that could really use producers to make the mix as colourful as she is, or at least give her more defined, distinctive tunes to work with instead of mixes that feel so hollowed out and spare and interchangeable with the field. But the problems run deeper, in that Doja Cat can be a bit of a chameleon in terms of her presence and vibe on certain songs, or at least try to emulate her peers rather than accentuate her own uniqueness - and the frequent shoutouts and most of the guest collaborations don’t really help this, where it can become way too obvious who she’s mimicking especially when guests like The Weeknd and JID could make for more interesting collaborations than the ones we got - and sadly the writing doesn’t do much to elevate her regardless. Oh, she’ll have moments where she’s convincingly sexy like ‘Naked’ or ‘Love To Dream’ or ‘Kiss Me More’ with SZA, or where she gets silly in the right way - I enjoy ‘Get Into It (Yuh)’ way more than I should - but you’re not going to get any deeper on any of these tracks, and it makes the album feel really thin and underwhelming. Yeah, the brooding, 2000s-R&B ‘Alone’ is probably the closest we get to it and it’s a highlight… but there isn’t really more to give me more to say. I dunno, given Doja Cat’s personality this should feel way more interesting than it is, and without any truly great song… strong 5/10, believe it or not I wanted to like this more.

Maroon 5 - Jordi - …hey, don’t blame me for this one, sometimes you need the utterly generic silent majority act to boost the video for the algorithm - at least that’s not as cynical as, well, this album! Look, at this point it’s a dead meme how utterly inessential and past their prime Maroon 5 is, where I have to assume the only reason mainstream critics are bothering to cover this is an easy target - that’s how dead the meme is - and thus when we get a new album, I have no idea why a Patron requested this at all! Probably assuming that I’m going to get cranky about it, but even that isn’t worth the effort, especially considering their last album was called Red Pill Blues and it sucked harder than this! But even if this album is a bit better in showcasing slightly better grooves and less outright bad decisions, it is shockingly inessential and devoid of personality, and when you consider where Maroon 5 started where they at least had a distinctive tone, even if it wasn’t your thing there was at least more there! And this even extends to Adam Levine, where you can tell outside of his voice he’s a cipher on these songs, where his behind-the-scenes songwriters are more recognizable than he is - not a good sign when one of said songwriters is blackbear! And I could talk about how programmed and yet formless this album feels, with many of the beats just hanging minus any sort of distinctive instrumental melody or some utterly lifeless and reverb-swamped reggae that MAGIC! would laugh at - this album was recorded with none of the band in the room together and wow it sounds like it, and the chintzy as hell vocal mixing doesn’t help - or how the content feels beyond basic, or how Stevie Nicks completely phones in her vocals on ‘Remedy’, or really that Maroon 5’s existence and popularity for the past decade is a searing indictment of how derivative mush is often the most common byproduct of capitalism and not unique innovation, and what does that say about the silent majority audience that still buys it… but really, is this act even worth that conversation? What I find most interesting about Jordi is how it’s even starting to sound self-aware about its own hollowness and legacy - relationships are ended, we’re looking back on what’s lost and what remains - where I’ll just say it, the inclusion of verses from both the late Nipsey Hussle and Juice WRLD feel really tacky and a bit gross, especially when you can recognize Adam Levine’s navel-gazing and corporate shilling as the larger context of the project - and yet there’s just so little to recognize, more brand maintenance than album. It’s not even all that fun in its disposability, and if you can’t even deliver that, what’s the point? Let me put it like this: the best song here is ‘Convince Me Otherwise’ with H.E.R. which sounds like Tame Impala making a 90s quiet storm ballad… and honestly, H.E.R. could have done it herself. strong 3/10, you don’t need to care about this anymore.