The Pop Corporation

When dance music works best, it’s straddles the line between sleazy, wrecking your shoes, drunk cigs and gritty, and impossibly glamorous and shimmering with fantasy. It worked for disco, it worked for the pop-house boom in the early ’90s, and it’s worked for just about anything to shake your backside with on the weekend.

Dance music – the type that comes with catchy vocals – has really suffered in recent years, from erring on the side of grim images of bottle receptions in Dubai tourist traps, or being too steeped in the fantasy of luxury to feel relatable.

We needed something else and over the last 18 months, there’s been a spike in hip-house, dirty disco, and a new twist on dance music that’s got a foot in each other trashy/glam camps. While Brat Summer may have cornered the marketing for that notion, it was still a thing being played out in stadium sized rooms, rather than windowless clubs and fun basements.

And so, to Tatyana.

Last year, we couldn’t stop listening to the effervescent synthbop of ‘It’s Over’, with it’s dripping “my friends got sober – yeah it’s all over now” line, that we hoped it wasn’t going to be one of those records that appeared like a white label, and then promptly vanished off to the toilets to do a bump, without telling us the full story first.

There was no need to worry however, as Tatyana had a whole-ass album the entire time, and for some reason, didn’t get what it was owed. In January, Tatyana reminded us what we loved so much about ‘It’s Over’ (the single) with the very Friday-night-friendly ‘What Have You Done For Me Lately?‘, and then, to pull our pants down in front of everyone, released a re-jigged version of ‘It’s Over’ (the album) called ‘It’s So Over’.

Throughout the album, the themes are fun, relatable, sarcastic, bored – and while other music we’ve enjoyed as sailed dangerously close to sounding like it’s been in too much therapy group chats and self-help Instagram accounts, or been far too cool to smile at anyone it doesn’t know, here Tatyana is giving us the kind of music that sounds much more like snippets of gossip and alcopop advice heard huddled around the back door of a club, gleefully yapping through clouds of Lost Mary smoke.

Catchy and hooked-filled as the LP is, it’s still got a rough, DIY spikiness that is super enjoyable and feels much more relevant than a lot of the supreme gloss of a lot of work released at the upper echelons of the charts. While it isn’t a heavy, Berlin warehouse rave of a project, it’s still aimed squarely at going out. It isn’t about vocal acrobatics, and it certainly isn’t pitched by someone too cool to actively enjoy anything – this is music you want to root for like your mate made it.

And in part, it’s totally on us that we weren’t aware that there was a previous album release all this time, and worse still that we missed the original release of ‘It’s Over’ as an album. This extended version is where it’s at however, and this is all testament to the immediacy of the production of ‘It’s Over’, and subsequently, the new ‘What Have You Done For Me Lately?’ Maybe it got buried by Charli XCX? Who knows – it’s never too late to shine a light on good music, right?

While there’s elements of hip electronic pop like, say, The Knife and Robyn, where the album really shines is on the boogie/house fusion of ‘Bird of Prey’, ‘We’re Back’, and ‘Hold My Hand’. Rubbery, squelchy basslines and clicky rhythms rattle along while Tatyana floats over the top, giving a 2024/5 vibe of ESG and Tom Tom Club, if they were pounding synths and drum machines after getting the bags in.

The aforementioned title-track and ‘Leave Me With The Roses’ have a stuttering quality that reminds us a little of everything we love about classic Timbaland and Missy productions. This version however is backed by a slew of heavier hitting remixes too, with an absolute peach from Gabe Gurnsey and Technodaddy666 cropping up with a great UKG inspired shuffler.

The whole thing veers between confessional, conversational and what-have-you, to just getting loose with your besties – and that’s the thing that makes this whole body of work so utterly charming and compelling – it’s not overthinking it, it’s vibrant, there’s no posturing and it’s just a really, really good time. God, we all need that.

All the things that have been extolled as virtues in the post Brat summer period, it seems, were already there in Tatyana’s March ’24 release. While she may have lacked the financial backing for an all-conquering (and let’s face it, brilliant) marketing campaign, it’s always interesting to see a smaller artist with a similar message get missed for something as trivial as a lack of meme clout. Such is the way of pop music, and no mistake.

However, with this updated version of the album, Tatyana has allowed us to reconsider (or in our embarrassing case, consider it properly for the first time because our heads were turned elsewhere at the time). With ‘It’s (So) Over’, we sincerely have an album of super likeable, relatable, top notch bops that deserve to be filling ears and dancefloors everywhere. For too long, we’ve allowed Stan Culture to let us be bogged down in streaming numbers and shiny objects, when all we needed was to find ourself in the kitchen of a party, dancing.

File this album next to Rochelle Jordan’s criminally underrated ‘Play With The Changes’ LP and Shygirl’s hyperactive bangers.

The great news is that Tatyana is bringing the party with her on a small ‘Everything Is Possible ‘ UK tour and you’d be well advised to get yourself a ticket and wear the kind of footwear you’re okay with wrecking.