Merci de ne pas fumer…

Will Rivitz: The lyrics are inane, the production is a cross between mediocre pop-rock and bland disco, Drew Taggart and Emily Warren work about as well together as cotton candy and Marmite, and yet the song is somehow incredible. I can’t tell if it’s in spite of all of this or because of it. My love for this group defies rationale, and I guess I’ll just have to accept that all critical faculties go out the window whenever I put them on. All things considered, that’s probably not so bad.

[9]

Megan Harrington: The Chainsmokers are masters of turning the ephemeral, the ineffable, and the alchemical into the immediate, the obvious, and the true. “Paris” sounds almost simple, a string of hashtags and a few evocative synthesizer notes, but it’s an ode to nostalgia delivered as an ode to the future. “When we go down” and “we’ll show them” Drew Taggart sings about a love already past, complicating the straightforwardness of memory’s opiates. By the song’s end I’m left wondering which is better: the future endlessly rewritten but always triumphant or the past brutally specific and eternally stirring.

[9]

Crystal Leww: With every passing single, the marketing campaign around The Chainsmokers grows more and more perplexing. Why play the asshole when your songs are about falling in and out of love in the most genuine of ways? “Paris,” for Drew Taggart, is about Paris and the girl he loved in Paris, but “Paris” for anyone else can be about any specific place attached to specific memories of a person, perhaps remembered through rose-colored nostalgia glasses more than clear eyes. Last year, millennial nostalgia was one of the most fascinating storylines for me, and The Chainsmokers have doubled-down here in 2017, making a sweet little tune about falling in love in the most cliché of cities. Remarkably, “Paris” is actually about the boy in Paris for me, the one who exists only in my memories as handsome, quiet but confident, understanding and empathetic, the small town boy who made something of himself. I miss a younger me, too.

[9]

Jonathan Bradley: Some music is better described with reference to literary genre than those conventionally used for pop song: Modest Mouse, for instance, makes a kind of Pacific Northwestern Gothic, while Arcade Fire’s Funeral is children’s fantasy. The Chainsmokers’ artless and affecting “Closer” exists in the same territory as Carly Rae Jepsen, Taylor Swift’s 1989, or the first two Bloc Party albums, which is that of publishing’s nascent New Adult category. “Paris” attempts to add to the oeuvre with another narrative of twentysomethings negotiating the heady mix of possibility and responsibility offered by adulthood via the earnestness and emotional volatility of adolescence. But where “Closer”‘s chorus of “we ain’t ever getting older” worked because it was bold and affirmative and more than a little embarrassing for it, its equivalent here is “if we go down, then we go down together,” a maxim more familiar and so less expansive with possibility. (In recent times, Colin Meloy invested it with more drama, Adam Lazzara with more urgency.) In fact, much of “Paris” has that musty, recycled quality that forbids the gauche possibility of “Closer”: I enjoyed the slant rhyme of “Paris” and “parents” until I remembered that I enjoyed it more in “Ultralight Beam.” The parts that work do so almost by accident: the proficient prettiness of the song’s new wave throb; the cheap romanticism of travel; the easy evocations of ennui and aimless hedonism, so easy that to describe them thus is to over-intellectualize them, that attach to cigarettes and drunkenness and Instagrammable moments. Love and wanderlust and self-seriousness don’t become any less inviting just because they’ve been delivered with artful design and posted to a Pinterest board, but this isn’t even the best song in this milieu called “Paris” from the last twelve months — and The 1975’s one was mostly about London!

[6]

Claire Biddles: This is not the “Paris” acknowledged in my household.

[2]

Maxwell Cavaseno: I’ve been in the cult too long probably, but I’m spending the majority of this song going “…she’s tragically posting pictures on the internet, he’s entering a period of self-loathing beneath his vapidity, they named the song ‘Paris.’ Oh yeah, The Chainsmokers are into The 1975.” Which, y’know, a shame that doesn’t make them much better, but still.

[3]

Anthony Easton: The ennui of easy money seems obscene after the 20th, the rhyme “terrace”/”Paris” is lazy, and this does that sexist thing where the heavy lifting is done by Emily Warren without even a guesting notice. All of that said, I am feeling a bit seduced by the production here: suburban American white boys pretending to be Neil Tennant, and it kind of works.

[4]

Josh Langhoff: Living in Round Lake, my drunken death fantasies usually involve choking on pound cake, not falling off a terrace. My fantasies might not suffer from the nobility of these scrufflaws and their majestic dissonant V chord (which never resolves; neither does life), but my imaginary choking game definitely out-nobles them in one regard: How you gonna pledge your troth to Emily Warren and then leave her off the credits?

[7]

Katie Gill: CREDIT [clap emoji] YOUR [clap emoji] GUEST [clap emoji] VOCALISTS. Especially when Andrew Taggart still kind of can’t sing. Emily Warren pulls more out of her six words than Taggart does for the entire song. I don’t know how many “mediocre EDM with corny rhymes and a guest female vocalist who’s really deserves a part that’s better than what she’s given” songs the Chainsmokers have but “Paris” proves that they’ve at least got one more than I expected.

[2]

Will Adams: An easy fix: here’s a Chainsmokers song that actually credits Emily Warren, doesn’t have Andrew Taggart struggling with a range of a major third, isn’t yet another “Closer” rehash, and is much, much better.

[3]

Scott Mildenhall: Replace your man from The Chainsmokers with chirpy evangelist Adam Young, and you basically have an Owl City single here. If ever some people needed a trip to “Umbrella Beach,” it’s these three. Even as a volume-based metaphor, flat does not magically connote “depth,” so it’s probably a good job that it seems what they want above all to connote is a false affinity with the marketing cliche illusion of a generation. Next time bring out those ’80s drums quicker, and remember that you’re the band 3OH!3 could have been.

[4]

Alfred Soto: The piano and guitar parts drift in, worth accompanying a better song. No one will say this is clever or particularly offensive either: it’s a nothing song anchored to a moronic couplet and a kind of desperate uplift. Nevertheless, the royalties ensure Andrew Taggart’s ability to buy the most expensive hair products.

[3]

Mo Kim: Barely qualifies as a text: at least “Closer” had petty larceny and overpriced cars to add background detail. The subdued instrumental fares a little better, at least, though frankly neither Andrew Taggart nor (uncredited!) Emily Warren are putting in enough effort to convince me there is romance or tension or much of anything here. Like staring at a drawing of the Eiffel Tower rendered in black Crayola.

[3]

Katherine St Asaph: Anyone who warns their daughter away from the Chainsmokers deserves a parenting award. Two, if they throw in uncredited frat-glurge.

[3]

Joshua Copperman: The lyrics are RhymeZone-should-block-Andrew-Taggart’s-IP-address lazy, sorely lacking the narrative specificity that made “Closer” a smash hit, but this is definitely a musical improvement on most post-“Roses” singles. The production is lush and warm, while still retaining the minimalism that’s become their signature sound. Everything that works, though, probably does because it was lifted from “Midnight City,” and “City” is the kind of song that even Imagine Dragons couldn’t screw up. In fact, “Shots” actually sounds better when compared to “Paris” — for all the faults of that band, their urgency feels far more engaging than Taggart and co’s floaty lethargy. But even as the typically dead-eyed lead performance, the arbitrarily placed “One Dance” piano and those atrocious lyrics threaten to screw up the song, the builds soar and there’s actually a climax instead of just a copy-and-paste drop. If anyone makes that work, it’s Emily Warren, whose sadly uncredited contributions help glue the parts together and raise it above most of the Chainsmokers’ other work. It’s not quite as immaculate as “Roses,” but it’s easily one of the better songs they’ve released since then.

[6]