Hannah Gold Drops New Single

Cinematic music videos are coming back in a big way right now, and this doesn’t apply to the mainstream pop market alone. If anything, it’s an influx of creative visuals out of the underground that happens to be generating the biggest buzz anywhere in pop at the moment, and you needn’t search further for an example of this beyond Hannah Gold’s new video for “You Did This.” Shot like something out of the 1980s’ era of conceptualism, “You Did This” is a movie-style foray into the narrative of its source material and then some, if not a good depiction of its creator’s attitude in unrelenting visual form.

Beyond the imagery in the video, the single itself is sporting one of the more prominent beats of any I’ve heard in a pop track lately, but this isn’t because the percussion is bearing down on the verse. Contrarily, there isn’t as much color in the drum parts as I would have liked and, truthfully, as Gold would have benefitted from, but we’re compensated for the lack of action with a heady bass part that would have intimidated a lot of her peers. She’s fine with its size though, and her confidence with the lyrics verifies as much.

This lead vocal can be relatively tame next to the groove in “You Did This,” and the enhanced tension in the arrangement undeniably gives a little more of that trademark moodiness Gold is making into her own signature in this song. I want her to be a little more angsty when she’s delivering these words, if for no other reason than to espouse the inner demons she’s trying to sort out with the poetic substance of the narrative. It pays to be bad with this kind of a beat, and she’s hinting at something even more ambitious than what she’s already done thus far in this performance.

As much as I could criticize a minimalist bottom end in “You Did This,” there’s nothing aloof nor off-center about this lead vocal, which is probably the brightest of a hundred lights to be enjoyed in this single. Hannah Gold is always in control of the vibe when she’s performing, and this alone gives us more than a couple of reasons to get enraptured in whatever she happens to be crooning – which, in a song like this one, is something of greater weight than what the status quo in pop music has always allowed for.

Sophisticated but without the ego that I’ve grown used to in the output we’ve heard from her peers on the major label end of the pop genre, Hannah Gold’s new single is a breath of fresh air and the complete opposite of the condensed nonsense you could get from any of her rivals at the moment. This might not be her ceiling as a creative, but the personality of this material suggests we’re getting as much of her potency as she can muster up from within a recording studio – and that in itself is something worth celebrating.

Mindy McCall