The relatively poor chart performance of Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s solo debut (not even cracking the top 10) must have come as a disappointment, and more disappointingly to me marks a setback for the ongoing UK garage revival. But the song is great.

Ideologically correct Niche, you love to see it

Not to be all lesbian yearning on the lesbian yearning website but

I was thinking about the word “rizz”, and how weird it is that we have a recent word that if I wanted to explain to e.g. my parents I would have to describe as a synonym for “braggadocio”, a word I figured nobody had used for at least 50 years. So I checked the ngram, and it turns out there’s been a steady uptick in the use of “braggadicio” since 1980 (in which case why do we even need the word “rizz”, TBH).

An argument could be made that Perfect Picture’s themes of authenticity IRL vs. URL, photos and screens, is a bit of backsliding towards the less interesting parts of 90s pomo (the sort of thing that started getting written when academics who'ld read too much Baudrillard got their first modem). But the tunes do bang, and Diamond’s not-quite-flat affect is appropriate, and her lyrics rather more carefully mine the ambiguity of presentation than people could in the 90s (when online and offline really did seem meaningfully distinct).