Clean Bandit - What Is Love? (Japanese Edition) (2018)

When they’d done asking their old advert mucker Cortana – Microsoft’s basic bitch version of Alexa – what she was wearing, Clean Bandit might well have made their long-awaited second album simply by asking their phone what love is. It is, according to What is Love?, a shallow, algorithm-friendly array of synthetic pop devotion featuring Rita Ora, Sean Paul, Demi Lovato and Ellie Goulding, half of which has been streamed, synced and saturated to high heaven already.

Reflecting modern pop’s reversal to pre-rock’n’roll tactics of albums as glorified single compilations, What is Love? is awash with ready-made hits. There are three overplayed rave-pop number ones stretching back to 2016 (“Rockabye”, “Symphony”, “Solo”), one top five (“I Miss You”) and Marina Diamandis’s sumptuous Latino crackler “Baby”, the album’s only standout and a surprise semi-flop considering Despacito’s Luis Fonsi sambas into view for verse three.

It’s to Clean Bandit’s credit that they don’t pad out the rest of the record with glorified remixes – the remaining tracks draw solid guest vocalists and bolster the album’s loose concept of cataloguing love’s broad range: blooming, familial, failing, frustrated. Word is Elton’s contribution missed the cut, presumably because he was singing about the common fisheries policy or something.