Icona Pop – Ritual
A shaman told a friend of Icona Pop’s that her body was frozen. The cure, he said, was dancing and spicy food. Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo found this compelling enough to name their fourth album after it. Given what the pair have been through in the years since Club Romantech — motherhood, divorce, heartbreak, the disorienting experience of moving back to Sweden after years of living in the permanent elsewhere of pop stardom — you can see the appeal of a framework that makes movement the answer to everything.
The problem is that Ritual, for all its personal stakes, only occasionally sounds like a record made by people with that much to say. Opener “Hurt” is the best argument for the album’s ambitions: atmospheric, unhurried, stacked vocals climbing over shimmering synths into something that actually earns the word vulnerable. For three minutes, it sounds like the Icona Pop record that the past decade has been building toward. Then “Cooler” arrives with its brittle festival pulse and that feeling dissipates faster than a dropped ice cube on a hot dancefloor.
The title track, featuring Daya, rescues things somewhat. The framing — the dancefloor as survival mechanism, movement as the only rational response to the kinds of loss both women have sustained — is sincere and the production serves it. “Yellow Top” is breezy and fun, carrying its lightness with enough self-awareness to avoid tipping into vacancy. Closer “Foreverness” lands the bittersweet note the album has been reaching for throughout, warm synths doing the heavy emotional lifting as the thing dissolves into its own echo.
But between these peaks, Ritual settles too comfortably into a mid-2010s dance-pop register that the pair have never convincingly moved beyond and don’t really challenge here. At twenty-eight minutes it ends before it has made its fullest case. Jawo has said the album is more honest than people will realise. That honesty is present — it surfaces, it catches the light — but it deserves better production decisions around it, and a little more willingness to let the frozen body actually thaw.
