You Always Live Again, Unfortunately

M.I.A. arrived back with Y.A.L.A.—You Always Live Again, her Buddhist riposte to YOLO—well after the Drake meme had already exhausted itself and become a punchline. The timing felt like a summary of the whole post-Paper Planes era: the public fight with Madonna at the Super Bowl, the critically bruised Maya, the general sense that the version of M.I.A. who made something feel urgent and dangerous had gotten lost somewhere between the press provocations and the art-world gestures.

Y.A.L.A. is too experimental to function as a comeback single, which would be fine if the experimentation arrived somewhere. It doesn’t. It hovers at the edges of interesting without committing—a track that exists mainly as a concept rather than as a song that actually does anything to you. Paper Planes worked because it was pop music smuggling menace and politics through the back door. This is the reverse: a political concept with no song underneath it. Compare it to Bad Girls, which was all instinct and velocity and didn’t need to explain itself to anyone.

I want a good M.I.A. record badly enough to sit with this for a while. Wanting something doesn’t make it true, but I’ll keep listening.