The electropop duo continues its 2020s comeback with an album that seeks renewal on the dancefloor but ends up feeling like a retread.
Few songs have catapulted and consequently demolished an artist’s career as decisively as Icona Pop and “I Love It.” But few artists have also ridden a song till the wheels fell off quite like Icona Pop and “I Love It.” The 5x platinum 2012 single featuring an up-and-coming songwriter named Charli xcx established Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo as the young decade’s most relentless party starters, but it also confined them to a suffocating identity. The pair meandered through singles and features but never aimed for anything more ambitious. They became so single-focused, in fact, that they didn’t get another full-length album out for 10 years.
Their long-awaited comeback, 2023’s Club Romantech, was an effort to finally move on—by moving into full-out EDM with help from Galantis, Sofi Tukker, and Joel Corry. Its follow-up, Ritual, feels like a recentering, an attempted reconnection with the self via the dancefloor. The “ritual” Icona Pop speak of is dancing away their demons, as declared in the title track’s hook: “You’ve gotta dance your ass off.” It’s a somewhat tired concept that’s already overly familiar in pop this decade (e.g. Chromatica, Superbloom). After all their time away, and all the EDM cosplay, you might expect Ritual to mark a step forward for Icona Pop, or even a restart. Instead, the lack of both maturity and sonic progression places the pair back in the exact box they’ve tried to escape.
The dedication to healing is inherent to opener “Hurt,” a peak from which Icona Pop fall for the following 25 minutes. The song swells with something close to spirituality, twinkly arpeggiating synths adding a jolt of energy and anticipation. Hjelt and Jawo’s vocals are captivating, doubled and tightly stacked to augment the choral feel. “Although you hurt me/There’s still a heart in my chest,” they sing, offering a “this too shall pass” mantra for the party kids who grew up with them. The track builds and builds and, right on schedule, hits a breakdown. But it doesn’t necessarily need it. What if they chose instead to end on a cliffhanger, that unresolved tension writhing, leaving every declaration of recovery with one looming question mark?
For a set of songs so invested in renewal, Ritual often sounds like a retread. “Cooler” evokes pre-rebrand Zara Larsson with its repetitive, droning, radio-preset pop melody and obligatory marimbas, while “Mad Love” has that singalong, “Boom Clap”-adjacent sheen that was integral to their debut LP. It’s stuffy, like they’re thinking too hard about what they’re doing. Hjelt and Jawo seem afraid to take too big a leap and thus perpetually one step behind. The “reinvention” narrative feels like the path of least resistance as they attempt to recapture the same demographic. It’s hard to hear lyrics like “How dare you ask for my password/When you’re logged out of Netflix” and not see the “How do you do, fellow kids” meme.
A similar kind of immaturity arises on “Butterfly Feelings,” which falls back on one of the most clichéd clichés in the book: getting “butterflies” from a crush. Still, it’s one of the catchier tracks with its scratchy, flanging vocal effects and rise-fall chorus melody. The rest of Ritual can’t live up to that promise of anticipation, lacking the punch and drive that made us want to spend all night in the first place. “When I’m with you/The party’s never over,” Icona Pop chant on “Never Over,” accompanied by a near slow-mo breakdown that makes everything around it feel simultaneously rushed and dragged. The party ended 13 years ago, but I guess Icona Pop’s still here.
