Album Review: Icona Pop – This is…
With the release of their first ‘official’ international album, This is…, Sweden’s Icona Pop find themselves in a strange position. Renowned and well-known for their Charli XCX co-written – and ad-synced to hell – breakout track ‘I Love It’, and with a 2012 Swedish debut LP, Icona Pop, already having been downloaded – or at the very least, streamed – by anyone who truly gives a damn about the duo, you can’t help but question the artistic purpose of This is… Icona Pop: an album whose first side is dominated by cuts from that eponymous first release. Too familiar and established to be an introduction (as its title might suggest) and not developed enough to be a proper follow-up, it sits in an awkward hinterland with the glint of the almighty dollar in its gaze.
The choice of the immediately recognisable ‘I Love It’ is an understandable ploy; after all, for anyone who hasn’t yet found themselves exposed to the Scandi pair’s particular brand of boisterous synth-pop, it’s a perfect call-to-arms: a pristine dancefloor bounce-along thick with bubbly attitude. There certainly aren’t many acts out there who can pull off a line like, “I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs,” with quite such aplomb. In spite of it being a year-and-a-half old now, it’s still bags of fun; though in a year that’s seen us fixated with Bangers, Artpop and Prism, it does lose some of its sheen on this re-re-release.
A great deal of the time, it’s on the record’s newer cuts that we find the duo sounding at their most fresh and exuberant, not that you’d know it from ‘All Night’: the first track here not to have been culled from 2012’s Icona Pop and a recent single to boot. It’s a slice of nightclub-ready euro- pop marred by a string of stumbling lyricisms: “With a love this deep, we don’t need no sleep.” – Really, guys? Eventually, it descends into an Ibizan bass bomb of an utterly forgettable chorus.
It’s on the album’s closing run of tracks that This is… Icona Pop truly begins to shine however. The groovesome ‘On a Roll’ – outside of another bumbling chorus line: “On a roll again, rock and roll again.” – could easily be a mid-noughties Annie or Robyn cut, and that’s as high a compliment as they come. ‘Just Another Night’, meanwhile, is a welcome respite from the blaring electro-horns and squelchy synth pads that dominate much of the record.
And then there’s ‘Light Me Up’: an indelibly infectious and utterly engrossing stomp-along that might just be the best thing the duo have written since ‘I Love It’ first made its way onto the internet. What joins the dot-to-dot of quality between this trio of late-in-the-day gems? Why, absolutely nothing. And that’s exactly the point. This is… Icona Pop works at its most effective when the pair are daring to step outside of their established, shouty synth-pop sound and experiment with new things. A little more of this and whatever’s next could be something very special indeed.
– Alex Cull
