Diplo - Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley Chapter 1: Snake Oil

You suspect Diplo - a man whose knack for catching the zeitgeist has kept him at the top of pop’s go-to collaborators for more than a decade - was having a little chuckle when he named his latest ‘Snake Oil’. Marketed as a country album at a time when, thanks to Lil Nas X, Orville Peck and more, the genre is having an upsurge in cool, even Thomas Wesley himself must know that his latest is little more than a classic Diplo offering dressed up to try and fool the masses. Both the aforementioned artists feature - Orville on a spoken word intro; Nas on a closing remix of ‘Old Town Road’ - but even with an additional clutch of country singers (Noah Cyrus, Zac Brown) on board, the result is still just a big, slick, debatably-decent pop record. It’s probably all you need to know that ‘Do Si Do’ - the biggest attempt at leaning in to the schtick - rhymes “honky tonk” with “badonkadonk”.