Lykke Li - So Sad So Sexy

The Guardian 80

(RCA)

From 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. 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. 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. 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.

From 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. 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. 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.

Pitchfork 64

With festival-ready hooks and trap-inspired production, Lykke Li delivers another record about an unraveling romance and the fraught sexuality of its final moments with diminishing returns.

Drowned In Sound 60

“love is the feeling, love is the feeling.”

This carves Li out her membership to the Sad Girl’s Club from the get-go; and sets the scene for her newest release – So Sad, So Sexy. As the music grows it lets us know some rabid change is about to jump aboard. A sub-base beat emerges from the darkest depths of the ocean…then…then…

R&B?! Huh?!

What we see quickly, is that Lykke Li is so done with the twee indie-pop that’s defined her career to this point. Gone is the stripped back, alt-clap halting vibe. Gone is the candyfloss bounce in her voice. Gone, for the most part, is the quintessential Li-reverb. It’s a move away from her expected sound, underlined in part by the face her YouTube channel contains no trace of her previous albums. Is this new vibe, we wonder, in part influenced by partner, revered hip-hop and rap producer Jeff Bhasker? How in holy hell do you jump from Swedish Queen of weird, to sleek R&B hip-hop diva in four years?!

And what do we have instead?!

Instead, Li powers her voice with an erotically-charged electronic depression that lurks beneath the surface of today’s youth. The same nihilistic-sadness that lives at the bottom of dank memes and Facebook groups that exist with the pure purpose of being twentysomething’s tags in comment sections. One thing is for sure, Li has grown up, and between 2014’s I Never Learn and today’s So Sad So Sexy; it would be fair to say that Saturn’s Return has hit the pop-star hard. She’s had a baby. She’s become a hard-core devotee of Transcendental Meditation. She’s shacked up with a lover, presumably settled down to nurture new life in the world. Put simply, it seems she’s moved from a girl to an adult, and So Sad So Sexy is the equivalent of Li sub-tweeting her ex. It’s a look back at a life well lived, rather than a record about the ache when you’re inside it.

Taken separately, each track resonates with that hip vibe you’d always felt like the American Apparel staff had and you didn’t. It’s emotionally charged, thick and heavy with layers – cemented one on top of the other with haste. Her lyrics still hold the beauty of her indie-pop reign. “I’m better alone than lonely here with you” and “let me keep the last piece of my heart, before you tear it all apart”, and cautionary tales such as “drink up drink up I’m so fucked up” bring us back to her heart, and the elements on their own have the potential to overwhelm and delight.

But as a sum of its parts, So Sad So Sexy quickly switches your brain off. When you rope in so many big names, Scrillex, Frank Ocean, T-Minus – the result has a potential to ring beautiful. However, here you can’t help but imagine a check-list on the dashboard of the mixing desk that lists all the best hip-hop and R&B effects. Chose one, and tick it off, and by the end you’ll find that no line is left without a check. There’s a huge drop into sub-base that makes your glassware shake. There’s the slightly-out-of-time call and response with a heavily filtered electronic male voice. There’s high notes interspersed with beats, real proper beats, that flail in for a few bars then disappear. There’s a vocoder that rocks up once and vanishes. If Li was a Pokémon collector So Sad So Sexy would have caught ‘em all, but alas – this is music; and the truth is Li should really leave the hip-hop influences too Janelle Monae and Lorde.