Released and popularised in 2017, “Feel It Still” was on the radio, everywhere, all the time – we could never escape it. But, if someone had told me Portugal the Man is in fact a band and not one singular man, let alone an artist making music for eleven years before this song, and still releasing songs to this day – I wouldn’t have believed you. This song has over a billion streams, with few other of their songs reaching a million.
This song came out in the year of Ed Sheeran’s Divide, and summer hits like “Issues”, “Make Me (Cry)”, “Despacito”, “Havana”, and “Rockabye”, and joins all those earworms that remind us of a truly iconic summer of music. Musically, it doesn’t really fit with those, but it’s embedded in our memories as part of that collection, plastered across the radios and pre-show playlists.
It is unique, however, to those songs in that it doesn’t really come from an artist who’s that well known, but instead from an artist who’s managed – one time – to crack the general public’s taste and come out with an absolute banger. The high-pitched vocals and easy-to-listen-to-and-to-sing-along-to rhythm made it even easier to become a hit. It was covered by celebrities and YouTube artists alike and is just a great song.
Now, I don’t know the rest of the band’s discography, but it seems on this occasion, with this one song in a 16-year history, they managed to make a small name for themselves, and it was great to see!
