If you've been following Popjustice's New Music Friday playlists over the last couple of years you'll have encountered a few releases by Antony & Cleopatra, the creative partnership between songwriter and producer Alexander Burnett and more excitingly (sorry Alexander) Anita Blay who, in her salad days, was known and loved by Popjustice as CocknBullKid. They've been making quite sparse housey pop music.
Anyway Anita popped an email over last week containing A&C's new single Why Don't You Just Call Me? and the low-key vibes of the duo's previous songs have been chucked in the bin because this new one's a total sun-out-windows-open-volume-up discohouse thunderer.
A diversion from the duo's previous output. Also, better than the duo's previous output. And that's the way to be doing it, isn't it? Getting better? Rather than getting worse? That's the pop dream right there.
Anita says the song came about as a result of "a few accidents, chopping things up, losing our minds and then starting again"; Antony's explanation of the lyrics is that calling people is better than messaging, because "text threads and reading into ‘read’ and ‘seen’ can be dangerous" — an admirable stance but at the same time let's not allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that anybody who calls without warning is probably a psychopath.
- Why Don't You Just Call Me? is out tomorrow, via your friendly local stream provider. Why not say hello to the band on Twitter?