Earworms is where we talk about pop from the classics to hidden gems and forgotten hits.

The music of Elvis Costello and his then-new band, The Attractions, had all of the bite of punk but none of the bark. The Attractions were, for one, competent at their instruments – far better than competent, in fact. Their distinctive strength was not in the fierce guitar assault which defined punk, but their use of negative space. Their songs were crafted around the bass and keyboard, and were often as notable for what they didn’t do as for what they did. The twitchy guitar on My Aim Is True was that of a young man with something to prove; with his music with The Attraction, Costello is totally in control of his form. They achieved a balance of punk energy and pop construction that Costello – and many others for that matter – would struggle to achieve again.

Costello’s songwriting has always been fantastic, but rarely as perfect as on This Year’s Model. Though many try, few make songs about their ex-girlfriends that are both clever and meaningful. He is one of the few angry men types with enough self-awareness and acerbic wit to pull it off. His anger is allowed more shades of grey than typical punk – some complexity tends to get lost when you’re screaming. His attacks are just as often self-directed as they are at the girl: “Thinking all about those censored sequences / Worrying about the consequences / Waiting until I come to my senses / Better put it all in present tenses.” (But that doesn’t mean he has no harsh words reserved for the other person, for example: “You’re easily led but you’re much too scared to follow.”) As would become clear on Armed Forces, concealed in his songs are social commentaries, disguised as targeted tirades.

The star of the show, though, is the single that didn’t make the cut (in the UK at least): “Radio, Radio.” The song is the punkest thing to come from the album, lyrically and musically. Costello is madder than ever, this time at the parochial BBC playlists – which infamously blacklisted many punk bands, including “God Save the Queen” – and the promise of technologically-mediated salvation. “Radio is a sound salvation / Radio is cleaning up the nation,” he sings. Like Wire’s “Ex Lion Tamer,” with its sardonic entreaty to “Stay glued to your TV set,” Costello thinks the radio run by “a lot of fools”; unlike that song, “Radio, Radio” supports a reading of it as finding real salvation through the music.

It’s built around a recurring keyboard riff which is as forceful as anything a punk band has ever mustered, and The Attractions manage to impart an urgent undercurrent throughout which gives force to Costello’s singing. Pete Thomas’ drumming is a show of restraint, accenting exactly where it's needed. As with all their songs, The Attractions know when to build tension and when to release it, mirroring the themes of the lyrics. Pressure builds during the verses as Costello tells of anger and apathy, before finally the keyboard comes back: salvation.

Costello is sympathetic with, but still manages to see above the punk mindset. He complains that the radio is “Tryin’ to anesthetize the way that you feel,” with their presentation of only “polite” – bland – playlists. He also correctly identifies the self-destructive streak in punk: “I wanna bite the hand that feeds me / I wanna bite that hand so badly.” But he avoids the nihilism of The Sex Pistols and the political impulses of The Clash for a chance at aesthetic revolution, of finding meaning through art. When he finally sings “Wonderful radio / Marvelous radio,” you almost that he means it.

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Pop music simultaneously has a bad rep and gets off too easy. It’s seen by many as vapid and simple, consumed and produced by mindless zombies; but at the same time, we’ll forgive anything for a good hook. Because of this we let our pop stars misbehave, and let their music bore us. Meanwhile, music’s critical apparatus sees itself as above pop, or, when it does deign to review it, fails to engage with it. We are left with a critical establishment, and a culture more generally, that sees pop as something to accept or reject wholesale, rather than something worthy of critical thought.

Recently, however, we’ve seen a surge of cultural criticism that takes pop seriously – and we’ve seen pop that deserves to be taken seriously, from Lemonade to Dua Lipa and Charli XCX and much, much more. (While the ice around pop culture began to thaw with the Frankfurt school, that trickle has transformed into an ocean in recent memory.) This influx of criticism suggests a blossoming awareness of the importance of pop. To that end, this is Earworms, where we think about pop in all its glory and, in this case, weirdness.

The Unicorns released their second album, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone, during a strange time in indie rock. This was when Arcade Fire, The Decemberists, and the leaders of the Montreal scene (also home to The Unicorns) Godspeed You! Black Emperor, were taking over indie with their self-serious, capital-I Important albums. The Unicorns, equally as ambitious, went in precisely the other direction, crafting catchy, silly songs that belie their innovative structure.

Who Will Cut Our Hair follows a loose concept about the transition out of childhood that follows the acceptance of one’s inevitable death. The band use childlike themes (telling ghost stories around a campfire, contracting a case of the “jellybones”) to tell deceptively adult stories about the loss that accompanies the end of innocence. The album is book-ended by the outline of their story: “I Don’t Wanna Die” and “Ready to Die.” Their juxtaposition suggests the realization that an acceptance of death is the groundwork of really living – as Wilco put it, “You have to learn how to die/If you want to be alive.”

But a tight concept album this is not; the real story is their ambitious pop song-craft. They shatter any notion of traditional verse-chorus-verse pop. Take “Jellybones,” where they take a chorus catchy enough to sustain most bands for an entire song and immediately change directions from a puerile tale of nervousness around a crush to a wide-eyed admonition of the power of love. They apply this managed chaos to half-jokingly poking fun at making it big (“If we work real hard, we can buy matching clothes/for our live shows”), Magnolia-style washed-up child stars (FAN: “I hate you”/STAR: “I hate you too”), and the all-important difference between horses and unicorns (who happen to be people too).

Their songs are wonderfully frayed around the edges, like in their frequent instrumental freak-outs at the beginning of songs, as if each band member felt the need to take turns making sure their instruments still work. But they can also show real virtuosity (not to mention versatility) when the interplay of drums, guitars and synths align; but it is never too long before entropy sets in again.

Centering the revelry is the by-turns productive and explosive tension between the two singers, Nick Diamonds and Alden Ginger. In their clashing sensibilities we find something like the locus of the band, where their push and pull – a balancing of noise and pop – results in the brilliant restlessness of their songs. They are neither in sync nor opposites which complete each other: too close and too far. Their relationship was also prone to devolving, as on “I Was Born (A Unicorn),” into petty squabbles. Perhaps they, too, were growing up on the album. Following a hectic tour promoting the album, the band quietly broke up. Nonetheless, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone stands testament to a delicate process, and the great pop they made along the way.

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