Five Girls from the Land of Blondes

Berlin in July is an assault. The heat doesn’t build gradually—it just arrives one morning, sits on your chest, and refuses to move. My solution, which I can only defend as creative, was to start the day with cold sangria. The kind of decision that makes complete sense at 9am and spectacular none at noon, when your head is doing that low insistent throb that sangria specifically reserves for morning drinkers. In this city, drinking before noon is the exclusive pastime of the homeless and the recently abandoned, and I joined their ranks willingly.

Those Dancing Days dropped Run Run in 2008 and I came to it late, the way you always come to the best summer songs—already mid-July, already sweating through my shirt. Five girls from Sweden, which is to say five girls from a country constitutionally better equipped for joy. The song sounds exactly like what it is: young, fast, light, a little reckless. One of those tracks built entirely for the moment when you decide the heat is the point, not the problem.

I have an embarrassingly specific thing for Linnea Jonsson, the singer. Said it. She apparently turned up at the Technical University in Munich at some point and something about that image, combined with the music, combined with the morning sangria, lodged itself in me permanently. The hair especially—I want to get my hands in it and make a complete mess. I’ve never said that unprompted about anyone before. World premiere. The urge, not the song. The song is also very good.

The video is cheap and handmade and sincere, the way the best music videos look before anyone’s given the band real money. Watch it on a hot afternoon and you’ll feel immediately like you should be outside. I went outside.