The cycle started again earlier this week, this time on Twitter. That’s a bold proclamation to make, though, if only because Harris is giving himself room to top himself. Premature consensus is that we might already have our song of the summer. Harris explained its creation in an intimate, entertaining video showing him at work in the studio, solo noodling on the piano quickly becoming, through deft additions, the final version of the song. 34 on the Hot 100 (without the aid of a physical release) in its first week. It was good.įive weeks later, “Slide” has garnered well over 80 million streams on Spotify alone (adding over a million in the past 24 hours). ( Mama too hot like a-like what? Mama too hot like a furnace!) “Slide” felt like looking at sunlight through your eyelids. Harris brought Ocean’s unforgettable tenor into its poppiest territory to date and paired it with cocky, staccato verses from Quavo and Offset that, like all the best Migos’ verses, invite the listener to shout along. Two days later “ Slide” arrived and more than delivered on the promise of that tinny Snapchat snippet. In February, when he revealed his plan in earnest, Harris confirmed the initial speculation: he had a song with Frank Ocean and, in something of an embarrassment of riches, perpetual zeitgeist surfers Migos as well.
In 2017, he has a new plan: a slow drip of singles- ten in a year-the second of which arrived last night. Rumors are swirling that Harris, an unlikely pop star with hits like “ How Deep Is Your Love,” “ This Is What You Came For,” and “ We Found Love” under his belt, will never release another album. It wasn’t an isolated incident, though in fact, it was the beginning of a new kind of release strategy, tailor-made for the streaming age.
The clip, just 21 seconds long, had people talking.īy working with the most elusive pop musician in the world, Harris earned his chatter. The recording was remarkable because it featured Frank Ocean in his first appearance since his 2016 tour de force, Blonde. At the tail-end of January, Calvin Harris previewed a new song on Snapchat, making his own bootleg from a sunny and spare track booming in his car.