Mirror Starts Moving Without Me

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  2024 Top 20

  Adam Wood

  Here’s a fun connection: a couple of years ago Mia Berrin (aka Pom Pom Squad) released a cover of Nada Surf’s 1996 post-grunge single ‘Popular’, supported by a near shot-for-shot remake of the original video. So, number 17, meet number 13. If you have any notes on how her gender-bent repurposing subverts one of your biggest songs… I suggest you phrase them nicely. Because one thing Berrin makes very clear on MSMWM is that she is not in the mood to take any $h!t.

  Exhibit A is single ‘Street Fighter’, a jaunty electro-pop cut on which she issues an invitation to talk things through, before correcting herself: ‘I meant box with our gloves off’. A couple of tracks later, on ‘Villain’ she’s channelling Billie Eilish circa 2019, asking to be handed a hatchet, and contemplating digging another plot in her garden.

  There’s a similar shadowy tone to rousing opener ‘Downhill’, on which a defiant Berrin casts a spell in layered vocals over a marching beat and crunchily-produced guitars. Then ‘Spinning’ mixes up something enchanting by stirring a dose of anger with a cup of sadness. The embrace of this vein of darkness set Pom Pom Squad’s record apart for me this year. As did, it has to be said, a knack for penning hooks which just never misses. In amongst a bounty to choose from, my pick is probably ‘Messages’, with its resigned but undefeated chorus that seems to invoke peak Cardigans.