What Lykke Li Is Doing in a Vampire Movie

Youth Novels hit me at exactly the right moment, which is the only way a record really hits you. Lykke Li was twenty-one, Swedish, and making something that felt simultaneously ancient and invented from scratch—sad pop with actual weight behind it, the kind of album you put on at two in the morning and then sit there wondering what just happened to you. It’s been in my head ever since, and the wait for whatever came next had the specific anxiety of someone who knows the follow-up might ruin everything.

Then the announcement came: she’d contributed a track to the New Moon soundtrack. The Twilight sequel. My feelings about this were complicated in the way that only truly trivial things can be genuinely complicated.

I don’t have a particular problem with depressive pale vampires replacing whatever the previous teenage obsession was. What I’ve always had a problem with is dark forests in movies—that specific visual grammar of dread and murky cinematography. The Blair Witch Project gave me this problem. Wrong Turn confirmed it. Dark forests are where interesting things go to become unpleasant, and here was Lykke Li, apparently standing in one.

Except the song, "Possibility," is extraordinary. Slow, suffocating, and completely honest about the grey aftermath of love gone wrong—not dramatic loss, just the dead weight of realizing you’ve broken something that can’t be fixed. It made the rest of the soundtrack—The Killers, Death Cab for Cutie, the Editors—feel like a reasonable justification for the whole exercise. Even if you’ve never once cared about vampires. Even if you never will.