Victoria & Jacob - With No Certainty

has a strong vibe. From its busy glitchy beat to breathy, London, obscured lyrics, it seeks a sense of the intellectual, the slightly strange, while clinging tightly to the arm of pop.

Characterised by a wailing, lamenting refrain, the song presents sheer teenage esquivalience. The nonchalance, the effortless breaths of the first verse, are at once stubborn and noncommittal. Throughout, Victoria’s vocals are if not engaging, at least interesting. The weird cries, the contorted vowels; there’s something going on.

Similarly, the background is inclined towards the irregular, but rooted in the regular. Looped pitch shifted vocal snippets, out of the ordinary found sounds (a typewriter?), glitch kit drums, but still the regular trappings of a pop song. It’s got the bass, the beat, the structure. It’s even got some guitar.

In tandem, these two elements connect pretty well. It’s maybe an inherent property of the Victoria & Jacob label that they’re treated as a band of two halves, but at the same time this reading provides pretty reasonable grounds for analysis. There are crossover points, where the vocals are incorporated within the instrumentation, but for the most part it’s two similarly bound sojourners heading towards a common goal: intelligent pop.