So, in celebration of Friday's release, which promises to be sad as ever, but her sexiest yet, here are five of our favorite Lykke Li tracks that show she's always known how to write a banger. She's lonely on "two nights," and messed up over unrequited love on "sex money feelings die." Now, however, she's channeling her misery into sensual, erotic dance tracks. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Lykke Li promised listeners, "it's pretty depressing…I've been through some shit." Sure enough on "deep end" she scorns a lover for burning her with "salty chlorine" kisses and on "hard rain," compares her love to a storm that calls for shelter.
With her alien shimmering semi-falsetto cleaner than ever, sailing over sharp trap beats, choppy, layered production, auto-tune flourishes, and grooving drum machines, we are hearing a sultry and confident Lykke Li, tinkering with hip-hop, pop and R&B to marvelous effect.ĭon't worry, it's still sad. The singer sheds her pastoral, twee folk and glittery disco threads, and the thunderous clouds of reverb that typically shroud her piercing vocals.
On this run of singles, Lykke Li is leaning into the infectious pop sensibility that has always run in the veins of her music - subdued, but present on her minimalist 2008 breakout Youth Novels, more apparent on her upbeat 2011 Wounded Rhymes, and even on her 2014 gorgeous bummer of an album, I Never Learn. So sad so sexy hints at both a transformation, and a culmination of the Lykke Li sound we've come to know and love: ever-surprising whimsicality, divine overflowing synths, playful beats, devastating lyricism, and the capacity to wring more depth out of the word "baby" than an old blues crooner. But when this juxtaposition works – as on the title track, a worthy entry to the sad pop canon – the effect is sad, sexy and enthralling.Based on the the two pairs of twin singles that Swedish indie-emo dream queen Lykke Li has revealed from her upcoming project so sad so sexy - out this Friday via RCA Records - we're in store for a mad ride and potentially an album of the summer. At times it’s a hard sell Deep End’s water noises and lines like “bae, you burned me” could feel naff, if not for the rawness in Li’s voice, while Last Piece’s pared-back drum machine and synth haze staggers between vulnerable and understated. Concluding with the expectedly evocative of picturesqueness utopia (the video for which takes a page from Kesha’s Learn to Let Go), the song is applicable to both the love that Li has for her son and the man who fathered him, producer Jeff Bhasker (a go-to in Kanye’s arsenal, in addition to producing four of the songs on so sad. So Sad So Sexy marks Li’s return to music after having a baby, losing her mother and experiencing a creative dry spell, and is defined by overt, intoxicating emotion in lieu of her more quaint, contained sadness of old.įrom opener Hard Rain, whose polyphonic R&B swagger jars with its message of lovers needing to be put “back together / though we never been apart”, all the way to closing track Utopia – released on Mother’s Day – and its touching, if simple, chorus of “we could be utopia, utopia”, a sense of bittersweet happiness and streamlined sadness flows through its 10 tracks. Despite this, it’s also “more danceable” and “party-like”, which may explain why the latest album from Sweden’s sad-pop champion Lykke Li has the power to trigger both shape-cutting and existential crises.
Indeed, a recent study found that the genre has become sadder over the past 30 years, a kind of Adele-ification process, if you will. F rom the post-adolescent ennui of Lorde’s Melodrama to the Weeknd’s My Dear Melancholy EP and Drake naming his latest single I’m Upset, lugubrious pop is all around.
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