What Little Boots Handed Me

"New In Town" had been on rotation for weeks—the kind of song that lodges itself so completely you stop noticing you’re humming it. Little Boots—Victoria Hesketh—had been picking up the sort of attention that feels like genuine excitement rather than manufactured campaign roll-out, and apparently even Kanye West, briefly a gay fish in the popular imagination, had become a convert.

Her debut album Hands lands somewhere between Ladyhawke, Annie, and La Roux—that specific strain of late-aughts electropop that had enough actual songwriting underneath to survive the decade. It occasionally drifts into inert territory, polished surfaces saying nothing in particular. But when it works—on "Earthquake," on "Remedy," and especially on the hidden track "Hands," which reframes her entirely—it genuinely delivers.

The relief of it, after months of Lady Gaga comprehensively strip-mining the genre and daring you to object, was real. Hands felt like opening a window. Hesketh has warmth that doesn’t perform itself and a pop instinct that doesn’t require spectacle to function. She kept a blog at the time—personal, unpolished, interested in things other than her own image—which was a good sign. The album proved it.