Critical Reception
"Galang" earned massive critical success upon its release, with its novelty, genre amalgamation and lyrics highlighted as positive features of the song, and typical of the compositions on Arular. Michaelangelo Matos in the Seattle Weekly described the words "London calling, speak the slang now/Boys say wha' gwan, girls say wha' wha'," as "tempting" taunts "from the top," whilst appreciating the "jump-rope skip abetted with a flat-four stomp at the end of the second bar, great groaning wowing synth-bass, post-Diwali hand claps, and what sound like tuned bottles clinking along every so often." He continued "The lift-up-and-over moment comes at 2:30, when the beat subsides and an a cappella "Ya-ya-hey! Whoa-yay-oh-yay-ohhh!" so simultaneously plainspoken and transported you can feel the concrete beneath their sneakers and see the clear skies beyond the council flats." Spin noted that the rapper "kicks fierce digitized double Dutch rhymes in a room full of bug zappers" before declaring the song to be "more addictive than online poker." Sasha Frere-Jones, writing in The New Yorker, appreciated the track's lyrics, feeling the track's "'Ya ya heeey, woy oy ee he hay yo' wasn't a pop chorus, or any sound that you'd hear on American radio, even if the station were playing, you know, world music. It's a voice from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot." i-D called the song "massive," while Dazed & Confused described the song as a "nagging electro bashment monster." NME described the song as "100 per cent ersatz: Sri Lanka imagined from a Shoreditch loft, Jamaican riddim conjured up from a GameBoy memory card." The reviewer implored listeners to not "be fooled by the sweetness of Maya’s singalong patois, though", concluding that "‘Galang’ secretes a martial edge under its seductive exterior; this is a song that advances on you, knife between clenched teeth" and that the single as a whole was effortlessly brilliant. It was also named Rough Trade's "Single of the Year." "Galang" placed highly in "Best of Year" and "Best of decade/Alltime" lists in several publications in various countries.
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