This is a song that really capitalises on the musical power of harmonic rhythm – ie. the rhythm with which the chords change. A surprisingly large number of songs maintain a consistent harmonic rhythm throughout, which naturally means that this characteric is common to a lot of the AI-generated music that’s now flooding the internet, so it’s worthwhile investigating alternative possibilities here if you’re going to set yourself apart from the advancing legions of robo-tunesmiths.

In the first instance, the simple fact that the primary chorus texture (first heard at 0:51) just speeds up the harmonic rhythm from its slow preceding two-bars-per-chord pace immediately adds a sense of extra forward impetus. But we don’t just get an increase in the pace to one chord per bar (as plenty of other songs do), but instead we get a much more ear-catching alternation of dotted-half-note and quarter-note chords, made all the more propulsive by the powerfully rising scalar bass line.

Not content to rest on their laurels, though, the producers here double down fabulously on this tactic for the final chorus section by combining it with another tried-and-trusted technique: the ‘drop chorus’. In other words, from about 2:40, the arrangement feels like it’s building up towards another big full-texture downbeat for the second half of the chorus at 2:43, but then instead we get a surprisingly sparse bar of just gospel choir to start with (the ‘drop’ of the ‘drop chorus’), before the band rejoins the melee a bar later. But rather than beginning bar two with the expected second bar of the harmonic progression, the band instead squishes together the bar-one and bar-two chords at an even brisker quarter-note note rate, thereby compounding the arrangment impact of the drop-chorus’s delayed full-band entry with the extra musical excitement of the faster harmonic rhythm.

I’d use the word ‘synergy’ now, if it didn’t make me sound quite so much like a tech CEO.