It was 2am on Pride weekend in New York, and at the queer pop party Gorgeous Gorgeous, the churchy organs of Jocelyn’s comeback single World Class Sinner / I’m A Freak swelled through the air. “You can pull my hair / Touch me anywhere / Whip and chains,” she sang, amid bass that lingered in the air like her beloved Virginia Slims. And, as some partygoers took a break to sway, mop sweat or to yell “who is this?”, at least a quarter of clubbers lost their mind.
Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, is the fictional pop star at the center of HBO’s beleaguered trauma buffet The Idol. World Class Sinner, with its sticky touch me touch me touch me hook and deliciously dead-eyed autotune, has slinked its way into being a sleeper hit, with over 10m streams and a shoutout by Lorde, who sang along to it on Instagram. “Is the Idol’s World Class Sinner the song of the summer?” asked GQ. In the show, World Class Sinner is supposed to be bad, as a cynical play to get Jocelyn back on the radio. (“Every time I listen to it I’m fucking embarrassed,” Jocelyn says.) But the song is a cannily constructed earworm, with a Timbaland stutter soaked in the hazy, R&B-inflected pop sounds of the mid-2010s. As one TikTok user put it: “Makes me wanna drink tequila and get a tattoo.” It might be the only thing the show has stumbled into doing right.
