The Dystopian Artistry of Clean Bandit

CJG GHANNY is a novelist, essayist, and mental health advocate who resides in Boston, MA. His writing has been featured in Cuepoint, The Caribbean Writer, Scroll.in, Burnt Roti, and The West Indian Critic. He is the editor-in-chief of Lesser and Leeward, a digital press dedicated to emerging Caribbean diaspora voices. His first novel, NMQP, is completed and seeking a publisher if you happen to know anyone. He can be found on Twitter @cjg_ghanny.

Clean Bandit has an impeccability that isn’t easily explainable. For a few of their latest single releases — “I Miss You” and “Rockabye” — I heard the song before knowing who it was by and thought, each time, “This sounds generic in an iconic way… or maybe iconic in a generic way.” Finding out that Clean Bandit are the artisans behind each tune has yet to remove that taste from my mouth. Don’t get my words twisted. Clean Bandit’s first album, New Eyes, was an early favorite of mine and still bangs on each re-listen. Their material since then, though, has stretched farther and farther into the expanses of the Uncanny Valley.

Take their recent single “Solo” featuring Demi Lovato, the video for which dropped last week. It has all the elements of a pop song in 2018 — a capable vocalist taking hints from the “indie…