30 Seconds to Decide

30 seconds. What can you do in 30 seconds? A quick google search offers tips to do stretches while sat at your desk, delete an unused app from your phone, or text your parents. All good ideas.

You can also listen to the clip of the new Duran Duran track, Danse Macabre, and decide that it is rubbish.

What is this clip, and why do so many feel they can announce so strongly their opinion?

Regardless of the musical merits, a lot is about our expectation.

What did we know about Danse Macabre before we heard this clip?

1. Andy is on it. And he has been enthusiastic about what he has contributed and created.

2. It is new, quick music, something many of us have been wanting for a long time. No more five-year album cycles, endless production tweaks and letting the promotion boys bring in some new hot collaborator. Just make a song and release it! Well, now they have.

3. The weirdness of making a Hallowe’en themed album. It is not clear that anyone has ever before made a themed Hallowe’en album, meaning there is little / nothing to have reference to – a blessing but also a curse as we can pour our own expectations onto it. Which brings us to…

4. Nightboat. YES! What an opening to the recent shows. Moody, arty Duran, Back to basics. More of this please! Which led into…

5. The artwork. YES YES YES! Spooky photos, Arcadia-ish cryptic symbols. It was all so exciting 3 days ago!

And then we got 30 seconds of noise, rapping (?), an upbeat track, which none of the above had prepared us for.

Cue crushing disappointment, amongst some.

Or….

The track listing of the cover versions released on Monday already proved Danse Macabre is not going to be a synth-swept gothic masterpiece. Superfreak and Psycho Killer show this is an album that is going to be as much for fun and silliness as a candlelit night in a graveyard.

Duran Duran never do the same thing twice. We had Invisible. You've already got Secret Oktober Part 2 on a promise. This was always going to be different.

We also only have – fact fans – a 30 second snippet of a song that will be on a Hallowe’en themed album released IN AUGUST. How spooky did you think it was going to be? We have no idea how this chorus (?) will fit with the rest of the song.

And even when the whole track is released on 30th August, it may take a while to get to know it, especially until it is within the whole album in October.

Until then, text your parents.