Everything Wrong With I Love It (And Why I Don’t Care)
Aino Jawo is one of those people where I register the fact of how good-looking she is and my brain just stalls for a moment before moving on. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s not a particularly useful thing to admit. But she’s half of Icona Pop, and Icona Pop have a new song, and I’m listening to it, so there it is.
The problem with writing about Icona Pop is I Love It, the song they made with Charli XCX in 2012 that subsequently got played in every gym, every car commercial, every party montage in every mid-budget romantic comedy for four solid years. The song is fine. Actually it’s good, in isolation, the first time—clean and efficient, designed to produce that brief expanding feeling of something starting. The problem is that it got played until the feeling it creates wore smooth, like a coin handled too many times. I can’t hear the opening without something in me bracing for it.
Which is frustrating, because Aino and Caroline Hjelt are genuinely good at this. They’re Swedish, which helps—Swedish pop has a particular confidence in the mechanics of a hook, a willingness to be direct without being dumb. The new song is called Brightside and it’s lighter than anything they’ve done in a while: something about female friendship, uncomplicated in the best sense, warm without needing to earn that warmth through darkness first. It doesn’t resolve my feelings about the other song. It doesn’t need to.