Pall, Taggart, and the Mechanics of the Sure Thing

Every few years someone cracks the code on radio pop and runs it until it breaks. Alex Pall and Drew Taggart cracked it hard. Don’t Let Me Down with Daya, Closer with Halsey, Paris, the Coldplay collaboration Something Just Like This—each one landing, each one charting, the platinum certifications accumulating like interest in a very boring, very lucrative account.

They’re genuinely good at this. The formula is legible—take a melodic hook with just enough emotional surface area, find a vocalist whose brand maps onto theirs, build around a drop that doesn’t ask too much—but executing it reliably is its own skill. Closer went to number one in both the US and the UK. Something Just Like This cracked the top five on both sides of the Atlantic. You don’t do that by accident.

Who Do You Love pairs them with 5 Seconds of Summer, which makes a certain sense: two acts who live in the same genre neighborhood, who share a demographic and a taste for melodic pop that sits just left of pure radio product. The song does what Chainsmokers songs do. Whether the collaboration reveals anything new about either act is a different question—sometimes a pairing is less about chemistry and more about arithmetic. Two audiences, one song, numbers go up.

I don’t say that dismissively. There’s real pleasure in a well-made pop mechanism. And sometimes the arithmetic produces something that surprises you anyway.