Release Date: September 24, 2013
Icona Pop is a female Swedish electro-pop duo with enough energy and girl power to tackle an American football stadium sound system.
The group is as prototypically poppy as its radio and club night play counts might suggest. Icona Pop hides behind no profound or innovative intentions. An 8-year-old will recognize “I Love It,” a dance-worthy hit that brought This Is… Icona Pop to large-scale attention.
The remaining 10 tracks on this sophomore Record Company/Big Beat Records release follow in energetic and soaring vocal suit, molding a thoroughly reliable dance album to cue up at your impromptu Friday night party, if that’s what you and your girls are into.
Stockholm-raised Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo formed Icona Pop after meeting at a party hosted by Jawo in 2009, where they bonded so hard that an original performance piece came a mere four weeks later. Chemistry is the compository tie that assures their solidarity as a duo, shown through filmed friendly mischievousness and goofy, finish-each-other’s-sentences interviews.
Driving anthem “Girlfriend” is designed to create sing-along moments for, you guessed it, girlfriends, intrinsically fostering memories grounded in girl power and single women strength.
In true pop form, it demands little from us except a willingness to dance and tolerate high energy repetitions.
In this sense, This Is… Icona Pop is a great success by two ambitious party girls with an ear for leading epic vocal choruses and tastefully touching on emotional chord progressions.
Ballads “Just Another Night” and “Hold On” seem to exist only to switch up the album’s pace. Lyrics are typical and vague, preventing Icona Pop from using these slow spaces to declare any challenging or uniquely relatable thoughts.
This is disappointing, but contextually unsurprising, given that most of This Is… Icona Pop’s songs were written by outside parties.
The EDM influence on pop music is in full force, and Icona Pop is certainly down with that incorporation. From the dirty zipper bass on “All Night” and the building electro cores of “We Got The World” and “Ready For The Weekend,” This Is… Icona Pop finds a natural fusion in the inclusion of mainstream EDM elements with the duo’s self-proclaimed “classical pop melody” style.
This is no revolutionary feat, though. The Black Eyed Peas, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and Katy Perry all boast electro-heavy elements; it’s what Top 40 bar-goers and the entire ’90s generation have come to expect. It’s conclusive that for this reason, This Is… Icona Pop earns award-winning popular respect while falling critically short of inventive admiration.
Icona Pop – This Is… Icona Pop tracklist:
- “I Love It (feat. Charli XCX)”
- “All Night”
- “We Got The World”
- “Ready For The Weekend”
- “Girlfriend”
- “In The Stars”
- “On A Roll”
- “Just Another Night”
- “Hold On”
- “Light Me Up”
- “Then We Kiss”
