Friday's Chill Pick 8/27/21

Hello guys, welcome back to Fire's Flaming Hot Takes! And it's time for Friday's Chill Pick - I'm reducing the songs from 2 to 1 partly because I'd rather have a long ass list of songs I wanna cover and wait forever than hit a dry spell after covering more and more songs and also partly because it's nearly 10 PM PST as of writing and I'm just tired haha. So what's our chill pick this week?

Wrabel - 11 Blocks
Release: June 24, 2016
Genre: Pop/electropop

Cover art for 11 Blocks by Wrabel
A bit of background, Wrabel is an openly gay artist who ended up first getting traction after Afrojack remixed his single "Ten Feet Tall". In 2016, he dropped "11 Blocks", which actually got a bit of traction on Hot AC radio, managing to get all the way to #11 and even hitting #18 on Bubbling Under. And the fact that didn't hit the top 10 on Hot AC and become a massive crossover smash is absolutely criminal, because "11 Blocks" is a genuinely incredible song. It's built off of mainly a three-note piano line and finger snaps before later building up with a solid guitar line in the chorus. The song's melody feels incredibly melancholic, and it sounds so good. And Wrabel's vocals are outstanding on this song, they're so emotive and powerful, and really help the lyrics stand out. Speaking of which, yeah the lyrics seriously make this song. In them, Wrabel is describing his feelings about a lover who left him, moving 11 blocks away from him. And in them, Wrabel realizes that he is indeed not over this first love. All the memories and pain come rushing back to him, and really the lyric that stood out to me was "someone stop me please from hurting myself because I'm 2 blocks away and you're hurting my health". And that really is enough for me to say this song is absolutely perfect in every way I can think of. It's no question at all that this song is easily one of my favorite songs of 2016 and had it actually been a Hot 100 hit it would've had a very strong chance of topping my best list for that year. This is a criminally underrated gem that's definitely recommended by me, and while I don't really love a lot of Wrabel's more recent output - outside of "nothing but the love", definitely should be checked out - "11 Blocks" is still incredible, and definitely deserves some more attention (10/10 - perfect)

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