Just go back and listen to a string of those Gaga classics and you’ll realize Max’s output follows suit yet falls short in terms of lyrics, production, melody, dynamics, personality, and every other conceivable metric. She doesn’t have another single that pops like “Sweet But Psycho,” nor does she have anything yet that will get her out of Gaga’s shadow. Around the same time she put out “Sweet But Psycho” last summer, she also released “Not Your Barbie Girl,” a quasi-cover of Aqua’s ’90s mega-hit “Barbie Girl.”Īll of those songs contribute to Max’s bid to become the most extra of the yas queens, but they rarely rise above the level of cliche. It seems like she’s now settling into, if not a signature sound, at least a personal brand. On David Guetta’s pop-rock-EDM composite “Let Me Be Me,” she became the umpteenth person to interpolate the melody from “Tom’s Diner.” She sang the hook on “Out Of My Head,” rapper Witt Lowry’s attempt to replicate Eminem’s crossover hits. Max did a pretty good diva-house vocal on Le Youth’s 2017 single “Clap Your Hands.” She teamed with Vice and Jason Derulo on “Make Up,” the kind of sparkling-clean corporate lite-funk track you’d expect Derulo to record. As such, she’s tried her hand at a few different flavors of Top 40 pop, practicing the kind of mercenary elasticity her fellow Albanian-American pop singer Bebe Rexha is known for. The promo offensive is on it seems like only a matter of time before Max becomes as inescapable in her home country as she already is in Germany, Latvia, and New Zealand.īefore her big break with “Sweet But Psycho,” Max had been kicking around the lower rungs of the mainstream music industry for a couple years.
#SINGER AVA MAX TV#
Last night Max had her first stateside TV appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden (appropriately, an Englishman will be among the first to sell this massive UK hit back to Americans). It’s rising at Top 40 radio (#24), streaming (#47), and digital track sales (#13). It’s up to a respectable #36 on the Hot 100 this week. Together they’ve taken over large swaths of planet Earth with one of those pirouetting hooks so effective it will infect you whether you like it or not: “Oh, she’s sweet but a psycho/ A little bit psycho/ At night she’s screamin’ ‘I’m-ma-ma-ma out my mind.'”īack home in the US of A, “Sweet But Psycho” hasn’t had the same impact - yet. Max wrote “Sweet But Psycho” with Cirkut, Norwegian social media star Tix, and rising industry songwriters Madison Love and Cook Classics. More recently he’s helmed tracks for Kim Petras, another artist making blown-out dance-pop that unapologetically sets its compass by icons like Britney Spears. Although he never worked with Gaga, he had a hand in early ’10s hits for Katy Perry (“Part Of Me,” “Wide Awake,” “Roar,” “Dark Horse”), Rihanna (“Where Have You Been,” “You Da One”), Kesha (“Die Young”), and Miley Cyrus (“Wrecking Ball”). Besides the sound of her music, her age (24) and ostentatious presentation (her platinum blonde locks are cut to shoulder length on one side but billow halfway down her back on the other) suggest she probably went through a heavy Gaga phase at some point.Īlso likely contributing to that sense of nostalgia for a decade ago is the involvement of producer and co-writer Cirkut. Even more so it reminds me of early Lady Gaga electro-pop jams like “Just Dance,” “Poker Face,” “Telephone,” and “Bad Romance.” Max gets that comparison a lot, and rightfully so. Its particular brand of dance-pop cheese reminds me a bit of Eurodance hits like La Bouche’s “Be My Lover,” Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Be Dee),” or Cascada’s “Everytime We Touch,” albeit with that genre’s relentless 4/4 thump subbed out for a measured synth surge native to modern Top 40 radio. It’s easy to see why “Sweet But Psycho” has been such a hit overseas. In the UK, it reached the summit at the end of 2018 and has remained there since. The track, which Max calls a tongue-in-cheek look at the way women are often perceived in romantic relationships, and which a casual listener might hear as a reinforcement of the stigmas Max says she’s critiquing, has gone #1 in 15 countries. To that list you can now add Ava Max - aka Wisconsin-born, Virginia-raised Amanda Ava Koci - whose “Sweet But Psycho” might be the biggest song in the world right now. A non-exhaustive list of American musicians who’ve hit it big in Europe and the UK before breaking through back home: Jimi Hendrix, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, the Strokes, the White Stripes, Andrew W.K.