Rude

The guitar here is doing almost everything: a reggae-influenced skank rhythm played with the cheerful stubbornness of someone who is going to make this point whether you want to hear it or not. The production is minimal bordering on skeletal — guitar, light percussion, bassline, and a voice that sounds like it belongs to someone's charming older brother at a backyard party rather than a professional recording artist. That lo-fi quality is entirely deliberate and entirely the song's greatest asset. Magic! built a career on a specific kind of optimistic romantic persistence, and this track is the distillation of it: a man who has asked a woman's father for permission to marry her, been refused, and has responded by writing a politely indignant pop song about it. The reggae-fusion genre it occupies had a brief commercial window in the early 2010s, and this song was its most successful expression — catching a wave of nostalgia for the genre's early-90s pop crossover moment. The chorus has a handclap that arrives like punctuation, and there's something deeply infectious about the gap between the song's breezy tone and its frustrated content. You put this on at the beginning of a road trip, when everyone is still in a good mood and the disagreements haven't started yet.