Marcel Winatschek

The Cleanest Kind of Weird

Urban Cone made the kind of electropop that sounds like it was assembled in a very clean, well-lit room by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Freak has that Swedish quality—the production is precise, the hook is unavoidable, and a slight melancholy runs underneath the polish that keeps it from being too comfortable. It doesn’t challenge anything. It just does what it does exceptionally well, which is more than can be said for most tracks that try this hard to sound this effortless.