Just the Right Height’s New Album Is an Algorithmic Pop Satire

For all the discourse about how formulas and algorithms dictate the sound and shape of pop music in 2018, it is important to remember that there are no actual rules for what makes a hit. Flukes and misunderstandings and simple disregard for how words work have been the lifeblood of the genre for more or less as long as it has existed. Just last week, Britney Spears celebrated the 20th anniversary of “…Baby One More Time,” a song whose title was abridged from its chorus because its writer, the tried-and-true Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, misunderstood that “hit me” couldn’t be used as a direct synonym for “call me” without the context. Not realizing the threatening dimension it gave the song, he reportedly refused to change it. That didn’t stop its enduring successes, though. Not in the slightest.

And at least Britney’s song makes, like, grammatical sense. In the Spotify era, all manners of syntactical abuses have been purveyed in the name of pop music. In 2018, there is a song that I’ve been told is a hit that goes “you’re the next Drew Barry / And I want more” and there’s another that plays every time I’m in a Walgreens that relies on a repetition of the words “scars to your beautiful.” Neither of those phrases really seems to mean much of anything, but they resonate with people on some level, clearly. This is not new in the history of pop music, but it underscores one of its enduring truths—there’s something strange and alchemical that happens when words on the page intertwine with glossine swells of software synthesizers. As much as you, or the industry, might try to quantify that effect, you can’t really.

It’s in this context that the New York-based artist Keke Hunt’s second album under the moniker Just the Right Height emerges. The record, released last week on She Rocks, is called Let Forever Be Only You Tonight, which is exactly the sort of phrase that that’s filled the history of pop—a string of words with a suggestion of profundity, but without much literal meaning. The songs follow in turn, over dizzying synth parts and puttering drum machines. Hunt sings things like, “Alone glamour fashion models entrance beauty / And you never give me more than one minute.” It’s infectious, but a little off, deliberately. The lyrics play like those illusions where you read a sentence with garbled letters and your brain is tricked into reading real words out of it. Based on how you’ve been trained by decades of listening to pop music, you fill in the blanks.

But the songs of Let Forever Be Only You Tonight have different roots than the stuff that ends up filling New Music Friday playlists. Hunt’s starting point for a lot of the songs was an online lyric generator that algorithmically recombined lyrics from existing pop songs to make things that were a little surreal. The idea was inspired in part by the title character from the William Gibson novel Idoru, who Hunt says via email is “a pop icon who is a programmatic reflection designed to satisfy her fans.”

“Working this way lyrically I’m creating songs that are original while being reminiscent of previously expressed words and sentiments,” she says. “It’s intended to be overused and uncanny in that way. That’s something I notice in my favorite songs.”

This isn’t exactly a pop prank—Hunt harbors a sincere love for Swedish pop, especially Martin, and the music of the boy-band era—but there’s something both confrontational about the resultant songs. They’re built around samples and synth lines that are both sickly sweet and scraping, something like a hybrid of cotton candy and steel wool. They’re brash, and harsh and otherworldly. Tracks like “Hard World Toys” remind me of DEVO’s deconstructions of pop songwriting and some of the contemporary echoes of that tradition (like the masked freaks of New York’s Haord Records), but something about her algorithmic lyric approach gives the songs real heart. There’s some joy that’s specific to her disjointedness.

“Next time you turn on IHeartRadio, just listen to the lyrics,” she says. “Some of the lyrics are insane and it’s curious to think that suits in a boardroom sign off on every single release. At face value something can sound so bizarre or jarring, but through the power of lyric and song resonates with facets of experience difficult to describe more factually.“

Today, she’s sharing a video—made with the artist Andrew Storrs—for “Tonight” and “Pray No One Even Liked Her” that underscores the unsettling charms of this record. The clip mostly consists of verité lo-fi footage of Hunt singing and picking through the dirt and brushing her teeth, rough-hewn stuff that emphasizes the contrasts between her work and the raw material that informed it. Hunt grew up in DIY contexts, playing in electronic and noise acts with names like Mom’s Spaghetti, and her work is still wonderfully rough around the edges in a way that such a lineage would suggest.

“If the lo-fi quality says anything, it’s just that the work is self-taught and independent in its vision and approach,” she says.

If you’re into music that feels a little broken, a little absurdist, then there’s probably something for you in Let Forever Be Only You Tonight, especially if there’s a place in your heart for pop music too. Despite the fact that the sounds are harsh at times, Hunt applied one of the great lessons of popular music: “I try to create in my music moments that are at first annoying but eventually become more pleasurable over time.” That’s a tactic she says she’s always appreciated about music that plays on the radio. Just give it time, you’ll adjust to the frequency.