Commercial EDM thrives on triumph, each one greater than the last, and the Chainsmokers have a bootstrap story as big as any in the game. When Drew Taggart and Alex Pall released “#SELFIE” in December 2013, they were relative nobodies trying to make a dent on the EDM scene. A month later, Steve Aoki’s Dim Mak label picked up the single—a novelty song about social media that suggested women are somehow more vain and annoying than men—and things started happening for the duo. But, like the viral spread of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the success of “#SELFIE” and its attendant backlash threatened to eclipse their fledgling career.
“We made a novelty record that was, in my opinion, one of the most clever records ever made... Obviously not everyone got the joke,” Taggart told Idolator in late 2015, gravely underestimating everyone's ability to get jokes. “But we’re working our way out of that and proving that we’re pretty well-rounded musicians.” So they abandoned their EDM to emphasize slower tempos, slinky melodies, and songs about bruised feelings. Whether they helped initiate the move away from super-sized dance music or merely sniffed the shifting winds, it was a canny move. In the past year, they have become one of the biggest names in pop music. On YouTube, a pair of videos for their single “Closer”—a moody, surprisingly convincing song about sex, regret, and the passage of time—has been viewed 1.6 billion times. Their 10 most popular songs on YouTube and Spotify alone account for a combined seven billion plays.
This stylistic and emotional maturation is a big part of the narrative the Chainsmokers tell about themselves as party bros made good. The first lines we hear on the album are an apology: “You know I’m sorry,” sings a wounded, suspicious Taggart, sounding more like an emo singer than a superstar DJ, and it sets the brooding tone for an album preoccupied with breakups and betrayals. Musically, Memories… Do Not Open is of a piece with all of their output post-“Roses,” the single that marked their big shift. There are no big-room bangers, no concussive drops, no coked-up-mosquito-with-a-vuvuzela synth riffs. Diplo and Skrillex’s big hit for Justin Bieber, “Where Are Ü Now,” serves as the template for their pneumatic pads and processed vocals. With few exceptions—like “Break Up Every Night,” a peppy pop-rock number that could be a more caffeinated MAGIC!, or “Last Day Alive,” which features the country duo Florida Georgia Line in the musical equivalent of a poster of fighter jets—the duo and their 32 credited co-writers keep the tempos slow and the moods muted. It is an anodyne pop record for a post-EDM world, one where trap and trop-house mix with pale imitations of the Migos flow and Coldplay’s cornball sentimentality. None of it sounds anything like “#SELFIE,” but its worldview is barely any bigger than that song's narrow perspective; toggling between cheap thrills and bitter recriminations with all the emotional stakes of a drunken beach fight caught on Snapchat.
Taggart first sang on one of the duo’s songs with “Closer,” and its success seems to have encouraged him to take more of the spotlight here. His voice is capable, deep and boomy, and he has a way with reaching down for the low notes that faintly resembles the Crash Test Dummies. His chief quality, though, in song as in interviews, is a kind of everydude relatability, mapped out in conversational lines like, “Fuck it, yeah, I said it.” It is indicative of the Chainsmokers’ irony: a #nofilter vernacular sung through countless vocal filters.
Only “Paris” comes close to what they achieved with “Closer.” It’s enlivened by a similar ear for detail that flickers between the specific and the universal, and its us-against-the-world chorus has a way of reaching even the inner teen of even the most hardened listener. But too many of their songs writhe around in pettiness. “She wants to break up every night/Then tries to fuck me back to life” takes the art of the couplet to a new low—though whether that’s lower than the same song’s “She’s got seven different personalities/Every one’s a tragedy” may depend upon your views on assonance, make-up sex, and mental-health shaming. “Wake Up Alone” wastes Jhené Aiko on a song about worrying that once you’re rich and famous, people will only want to have sex with you for being rich and famous. And “It Won’t Kill Ya” pulls out all the stops—swaggering trap beats, horn fanfare, dolorous piano—for a song about hooking up before last call.
For two guys who sell reckless abandon as a lifestyle, they're just not very fun to be around. The smirk they wore on “#SELFIE” is dwarfed by the massive chip on their shoulder—both as Artists Who Demand to Be Taken Seriously and more exhaustingly as Dudes Who Can’t Seem to Catch a Break. The narcissism comes to a head on “Honest,” in which the song’s protagonist is tugged between his faithful girlfriend and the temptations of life on the road. “Bloodstream” might best encapsulate the album’s spiritual void. You don’t need to read the duo’s exegesis (“We are often criticized for being ‘party boys’ in what seems to be an attempt to discredit our artistry, when in fact, our partying has led to some of our most sobering songwriting moments”) to grok that it’s another song about the perils of fame. “Those things that I said/They were so overrated/But I, yeah, I meant it/Oh yeah, I really fucking meant it.” I’m not sure “overrated” means what he thinks it means here if he’s complaining that people have blown the duo's poorly thought-through public statements out of proportion.
But none of this stuff has happened in a vacuum. Despite the preponderance of sad piano across the album, the Chainsmokers remain preening arena hams who make videos that look like Maxim spreads. And that, as much as anything, is why they are so popular. The regret that’s baked into their tired-of-winning debut has as much to do with the ennui gnawing at the heart of modern culture as it does any of the time-worn traditions of teenage kicks, star-crossed lovers, and spring break blackout episodes. Beneath its shiny veneer, Memories… Do Not Open is a Pandora's box of self-loathing that, to use their vernacular, also wants to be really fucking meaningful. It would be daring to say that there’s levels to their music because maybe, like “#SELFIE,” this is all pop-art commentary and we’re still not getting the joke. But their billions of plays don’t lie: They've just got their fingers pressed to the basic, regressive pulse of America.
