The Apology Pop Never Needed

There was a stretch in the mid-2000s when liking pop music required a kind of apologetics—you had to frame it ironically, or shore it up with enough indie credentials that people knew you knew better. Swedish bands with reverb problems muttered melodramatically in dark rooms and everyone nodded along. Some people fled into drum and bass, which was at least honest about wanting your body to do something, and were never heard from again.

What happened after that was better. Pop stopped being something you explained and became something you just put on. HAIM sounded like the past and the future in the same riff. Sky Ferreira made something that felt genuinely personal inside a genre that usually strips everything personal out. Icona Pop made a track so purely committed to not caring that it became the sound of caring the right amount. The genre had been fucked from every conceivable angle more times than anyone cares to count, and it came out of it with better instincts.

Charli XCX fits right into this—British, twenty-one at the time, operating somewhere between the Spice Girls’ brazen maximalism and S Club 7’s relentless good faith. "Nuclear Seasons," "Stay Away," "You (Ha Ha Ha)" were the kind of tracks that didn’t try to be anything other than what they were, and that confidence is harder than it looks. True Romance committed fully to its own melodic logic, the kind of album that sounds like it was made by someone who stopped worrying about the right answer halfway through and just went with what felt good.

"SuperLove" takes that logic and sets it loose in Tokyo, which is exactly right. There’s nowhere else on earth where pop’s relationship to color, tempo, and unironic sincerity exists at that density. The video isn’t using Japan as aesthetic tourism—it’s using it as the correct container for a song this unembarrassed about its own pleasure. The melody does what it needs to do. I played it three times in a row and didn’t feel the need to explain myself to anyone.