We Could Shine Brighter Than Glitter

Four years between albums feels long until you remember what the last one contained. I Never Learn from 2014 had No Rest for the Wicked and Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone on it—songs that were precise about exactly where they hurt, which is always harder than it looks. You don’t follow something like that casually or quickly.

Lykke Li announced So Sad So Sexy and released the video for Utopia more or less simultaneously. In the years since I Never Learn she became a mother—a son named Dion, with musician Jeff Bhasker—and that shift shows up in the new music. The earlier records wound themselves tight around a single interior point of pain. Utopia wants something outside itself.

We could be the most psychedelic, we could shine brighter than glitter, she sings, there’s only one way up. We could be the most transcendental, go deep like Dylan, there’s only one way out. It’s utopian in the literal sense: a place that doesn’t exist yet, a world rebuilt around joy rather than survival. The video earns the feeling without overselling it. After four years of whatever her life actually became, it reads less like a manifesto and more like a wish she finally allowed herself to make out loud.