Tones and I - Welcome to the Madhouse

The Guardian 0

After a global hit as odd as Dance Monkey, Toni Watson had dream conditions to write a debut. Instead, the album is unadventurous and occasionally exhausting

Unadulterated strangeness is hard to find on the pop charts. It’s to be expected when pop itself is engineered to hit pleasure centres, to make the drive to work a little easier or the ad for Grey’s Anatomy a little more memorable.

Still, sometimes something weird slips through the cracks and you get a precious, hard-to-replicate aberration: a song like MIA’s Paper Planes or Gotye and Kimbra’s Somebody that I Used to Know that, by virtue of its outré ideology or style, stands in sharp relief to everything else.

Related: 'Hiding in a big black hole': Tones and I reveals toll of bullying amid global success

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