Single review: Agnes - 24 Hours

Single review: Agnes - 24 Hours | Random J Pop

Swedish pop star Agnes is the winner of the second season of Idol, the Swedish equivalent of American Idol. I wonder why they didn’t call it Swedish Idol?

HENNYWAY.

As is often the case with winners of these shows, the music Agnes released following her win and then for some years after was pretty unremarkable. This was through no fault of Agnes though. The record label and management team wanted something safe that would sell well enough and have Agnes just blend. Because let’s face it; very seldom do we get a winner of one of these talent shows who is wholly unique and feels fresh. Most of the time the winners become winners not just because of their talent, but how plain vanilla and malleable they can be to whatever the record label feels will work at a given time. Everything about Agnes’ look and sound was overwhelmingly safe to a point where nothing about her captured your attention. Agnes knew that she was not giving what she shoulda gave, so she took a break. And not a little 3 year break. 7 YEARS BITCH.

When Agnes returned to the scene in 2019 she looked different and sounded different. Agnes was starting to write her own narrative. Her EP Nothing Can Compare was intriguing. Her first single of 2020 “Goodlife” was really nice. But it wasn’t until her second single of 2020 where Agnes really started to settle into this new pop persona she’d built. “Fingers Crossed” blew the hinges off of everything Agnes had ever done - delivering ABBA levels of pop excellence and one of the best pop songs of 2020 that barely anybody knew of. And now Agnes is back almost a year later, with another contender for one of the best pop songs of the year that will fly under radars.

Single review: Agnes - 24 Hours | Random J Pop

With “Goodlife” having a 60s inspired sound and then “Fingers Crossed” being 70s, “24 Hours” is kinda 80s. I say kinda, because the song is of a sound that bridged the 70s and 80s - when disco was on its way out, but synth pop was on the rise; with new wave taking off in the UK and Europe running with Eurodisco. In short, think ABBA meets Giorgio Moroder and that’s pretty much “24 Hours”. When you hear this song, it immediately sounds like something from the late 70s and early 80s that you’ve probably heard before. And when you listen to the song, you have a very clear frame of reference and images conjured in your mind. For me it’s sparky, rhinestone jumpsuits, ostrich feather boas, lens flares and VHS quality - which is pretty much what Agnes gives in the music video.

The remarkable thing about “24 Hours” is that it’s so damn authentic that it could fly as a song from the late 70s. The sound and the song structure down to the ethereal spoken word middle 8 is period accurate as fuck. But the great thing about Agnes tapping into this sound over the standard string laden disco sound of the early to mid 70s is that it plays into her voice, which is pretty low set. Where-as disco for the most part was sung high, with Donna Summer’s voice being the control, this new wave disco fusion embraced vocals in lower registers and a sense of grit, tension and urgency - the complete antithesis of disco.

Agnes has always had a really nice tone to her voice. But with her being an Idol winner and being thrown head first into generic ass radio pop, her music never really leaned into her tone and always tried to downplay it. “24 Hours” really has Agnes plonking her ass in her lower register and making everybody just fucking deal with it. She still goes high-ish for the chorus - but the majority of the song is grounded in Agnes singing low.

Agnes singing low on a song like this also highlights how amazing the production and the mixing on this song is. With so much of the music and Agnes’ voice sitting within a similar range, it would be easy for everything to just bleed into one buzzy sounding monotonous mess, but there is so much clarity in the whole thing. The production of this song comes courtesy of Vargas and Lagola, who have worked with Agnes on all of her post hiatus material, and even a few songs before it - so they know her voice well by this point to provide optimal production and mixing for it. One half of Vargas and Lagola is also Agnes’ husband. So there’s also that. He wants his boo to sound her best.

Single review: Agnes - 24 Hours | Random J Pop

Some of us are probably a little fatigued with disco, given that every-fucking-body is doing it. But good music is good music, regardless of the sound being one you may be tired of. And whilst disco and it’s offshoots and variants are being run into the ground, there’s no denying that Agnes’ gauntlet is one that anybody would throw into the ring if they had it - because this “24 Hours” is just THAT good. Everything about it is so meticulous, yet the song never feels overdone. It’s short and it’s sweet, but also layered. Of course dis bitch and Vargas and Lagola are Swedish. Only a Swedish posse could pull some shit like this off in this fashion.

The thing with doing disco in this day and age is that nobody is really taking risks with it. And this isn’t a negative thing. Some artists do disco just for the sound, and approach it more or less how they would any other style of music, i.e Madonna and Dua Lipa. Some artists approach disco faithfully and find that it’s an ideal pocket for them which allows them to shine their brightest. This is exactly what it did for Jessie Ware, and is similarly what it’s doing for Agnes. Sometimes it’s not about reinventing the wheel, but simply recreating the wheel to roll out at your best. This is what “24 Hours” is for Agnes. She knew she was onto a good thing with “Goodlife”. Then said ‘Fuck it’ and soared with “Fingers Crossed”. And now a bitch is that GIF of the pastor turning into a jet plane. If Agnes maintains this trajectory, then her upcoming album is going to leave my edges looking like Tilda Swinton’s in Doctor Strange.

The unfortunate thing about “24 Hours” is that it released at a time when the pop-scape is saturated with disco, which has either turned people off of it, or had their ear acclimatise to it to such a point that nothing within it stands out. I’m having to set my own bias aside by not exclaiming ‘How could this song not stand out!?’ - because I know full well why it could get lost in the shuffle. If Agnes had released this instead of "Fingers Crossed" in the middle of 2020, it may have fared much better when there were less songs about of a similar sound.

But commercial success aside, I like what Agnes is serving. She’s remaking herself in the image of something which feels right and true to her, and “24 Hours” alone is a hell of an introduction to this new version of who Agnes is for those who missed it the first couple of times around.

VERDICT: THE LEGEND OF AGNES AND THE TRIFORCE WIG OF POWER

Comments