If you haven’t yet watched The Idol, don’t bother. HBO’s sleazy music industry satire about unhappy pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) falling under the spell of ludicrously creepy wannabe manager Tedros Tedros (Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye, who co-created the show with Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson) is so bad it’s bad: a lurid miasma of grim titillation, saggy plotting, tonal confusion (let’s just say cringe comedy and graphic abuse are not natural bedfellows) and retina-searingly incessant displays of Depp’s underboob.
Yet if you have persevered with The Idol for whatever reason (sadomasochism?), you will have received an unexpected gift: a maddeningly persistent but seductively seedy earworm called World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak, the track that Jocelyn’s label are pushing as her comeback single in the show and that, in reality, is now being touted as a prospective summer anthem, having clocked up 11m Spotify streams over the past few weeks. Although Jocelyn is fictional, the track – which is both an arch collage of bad-girl tropes delivered with amusingly flat disaffection, and a shimmering dance-pop banger – very much isn’t. Credited to Depp, it was released on the first of five separate EPs – one for each corresponding episode (the series concludes on Sunday) – that together form an original, music-only version of The Idol’s OST.
