“Another Way of Life” by Cristal Carrington

When it comes to making big jams, 2020 has shown us that Cristal Carrington is an artist who knows all the right moves when she gets into her element, and in the brand new single “Another Way of Life,” she continues to raise eyebrows with her phenomenal command of the music – and moreover, the studio in which she records in. While the beat in “Another Way of Life” is very powerful and would potentially be too much for some of Carrington’s less than brilliant rivals to keep up with, there’s an ease to her execution here that sounds confident to no end, bleeding through the music and affecting anyone within earshot. This is a mature release, and to critics like myself, a likely turning point in her career. 

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Cristal Carrington has an amazing voice, and though I don’t think it is getting nearly the amount of love from behind the board as it deserves, I will say that it’s woven into the instrumental components of the arrangement almost so seamlessly it could qualify as sheer by design. There isn’t any translucency to the bassline, thus making it possible for us to pick up on the contrast between the tone of the verse and that of the instrumental harmony being forged in real time before us here, and because of how carefully everything has been stacked together in this song, it never sounds like we’re listening to something specifically made for nightclub DJs more than it was the casual pop fan who wants some slammin’ at-home beats right now. 

Aside from a couple of surface level alterations I might have made to the relationship between the synth and the bass in this track, there’s really nothing about the way each of the instrumental elements were brought together that I would want to change. I don’t think you have to be a professional critic to recognize the amount of effort that Carrington is putting into her pipes here, and with her voice being as subtle a bridge between the darkness and the light within the poetry of “Another Way of Life,” I don’t know that this song would be nearly as spellbinding had it been performed by another artist with a different set of vocal skills. 

“Another Way of Life” doesn’t last more than three minutes in total length, but although it’s undisputedly on the shorter side, I don’t think it’s going to leave listeners feeling like they’ve just heard something rather incomplete in this single. Cristal Carrington has too much passion sewn into the soul of this music for that to be the case, and even if you’ve never heard her work before reading this article and checking out “Another Way of Life” for yourself, my gut tells me that most anyone with a taste for electropop rhythm and rhyme at its most cosmopolitan is going to take something meaningful away from this single. I’m impressed with Carrington’s growth, and hopefully she won’t hit her creative peak in the studio anytime soon. 

Nicole Killian