About a third of the way through Icona Pop's sold-out show last week at New York's Webster Hall, Caroline Hjelt pulled out what appeared to be a gold-plated kazoo. "This is a song about how much we like making out with people!" she and bandmate Aino Jawo declared, practically in unison, with the triumphant and outsized exuberance of a pair of Olympians who have just won an unexpected gold medal. The song is called "Then We Kiss", a thumping, hyperactive new-wave sunburst that concludes the Swedish duo's full-length debut, This Is…Icona Pop, a collection of cranked-up, EDM-influenced pop that sounds like a cross between ABBA's Gold and Andrew WK's I Get Wet. "Then We Kiss" is a perfect closer-- the kind of song to the tune of which balloons and confetti fall out of rafters-- and its final, chanted lines ("All I wanna do is have a good time") serve as a succinct summary of the 32 minutes that have come before. The only thing Icona Pop take seriously is fun, which is to say that they don't take anything very seriously at all.
Of course, the song that elevated Icona Pop from plastic to gold kazoo status is "I Love It", the hard-driving, rainbow-brite break-up anthem that was first (and, initially, quietly) released as a single in May 2012. The song's life has been fascinating, if not downright myth-busting. In a moment when it seems like the internet has killed off the very notion of a monoculture, it became an unavoidable global hit (it just went double-platinum in the U.S.); in a moment when it seemed our pop cultural attention spans were dwindling to nothing, its star burned slowly enough to make it a Song of the Summer contender two years in a row. "I Love It" has pinballed across the zeitgeist with anarchic glee. It has been covered by Titus Andronicus and Cookie Monster; it has soundtracked a scene of coke-addled dancing on Girls and one of primetime network pomp on Dancing With the Stars. The last time I watched the video for "I Love It", I first had to sit through a 30-second ad that was soundtracked by "I Love It".
To the cynical, this might read like Chapter 1 of a one hit wonder story, and usually these aren't the sort of circumstances under which an artist releases a debut of consistent quality, or sets the foundation for a long career. But This Is…Icona Pop is a pleasant surprise: it's something more than just 11 tracks of padding around an undeniable hit. "I Love It" kicks things off (as it did last year's spirited yet spotty Iconic EP), but in sequence-- somewhat improbably-- it's not so much an early burn-out as it is the spark that launches the rest of the album's propulsive run.
Given that Icona Pop’s preferred theme is turning lemons into (hard) lemonade, they could not have a more perfect origin story. The two met at a party when each was rising from the ashes of her own respective misfortune: Jawo had just been dumped, and Hjelt had just recovered from a prolonged leg injuring sustained by, in her words, "jumping on a trampoline after beer pong." Their connection was immediate and electric; they wrote their first song the next day. Though their debut album finds them working with an assortment of co-writers and producers (including Norweigan hitmakers Stargate and Swedish producer Patrik Berger), the palpable chemistry between Hjelt and Jawo is the engine driving Icona Pop's sound. Their voices-- much more often entwined than solo-- blare forcefully enough to compete with (and often overpower) the songs' pounding beats and throbbing synths, but this over-exerted quality also gives their music a certain human warmth. "Voices have to crack a little for it to sound like two people," Hjelt said in a recent interview, nailing the essence This Is…Icona Pop's scrappy, collaborative charm. File it under "bestie-core."
Icona Pop's best songs are the ones that tightrope-walk the line between good and bad taste-- that own their gaucheness confidently enough to transform it into glory. The strobe-light pulse of "We Got the World" pushes an anthemic melody into the red (Icona Pop usually sing like people who will wake up with sore throats tomorrow), while the irresistibly goofy "On a Roll" sounds like something Electric Six would write for the Eurovision Song Contest ("You go with me/ There will not be drinking of tea/ Huh!"). The plot of "On A Roll" revolves around the unbelievable luck of finding a "brand new, crispy" $100 bill on the ground; in an Icona Pop song this is more than enough money to have a good time. This Is… embraces the spirit of glam, but it's not music about the acquisition of wealth (imagine if every song on American radio were written by artists from countries with near-utopian levels of income equality) or acquisition of anything long-term, really. ("You and I live, don’t learn," they proclaim on "We Got the World", "Every day we fire it up and let it burn.") Like most great party music, Icona Pop's euphoria is mixed with a twinge of apocalypse, like the soundtrack to a house party where the world ends before you have to separate the trash from the recycling.
The first seven songs play out like a 20-minute power hour, but the album loses a bit of steam after that. Clumsy lyrics ("Close my eyes and we're still naked/ But then I see that my clock is changing") are always harder to forgive when they're caked in melodrama, so the sub-Journey power ballad "Just Another Night" lands with a thud. Similarly, the electro-reggae number "Light Me Up" is, as you might guess from the title, a little too on-the-nose. But luckily Icona Pop get it back in the end with "Then We Kiss", a song that calls to mind the sleek, luminous pair of neo-new-wave songs that Ric Ocasek produced on No Doubt's Rock Steady. "Then We Kiss" barely exceeds two minutes, but it strays just far enough from the formula to suggest that Icona Pop might have more than one trick up their sleeves. On a debut, though, they can get by without showing much range.
The closest Icona Pop come to matching the endorphin-drunk perfection of "I Love It" is "Girlfriend", a beaming synth-pop anthem that plays out like Robyn’s "Call Your Girlfriend" might if the girls in that song both decided to dump their cheating dude and become best friends instead. Some might dismiss it as Girl Power recycled for generation EDM, but unlike the Spice Girls, Icona Pop actually seem to like each other in real life. "All I need in this life of sin is me and my girlfriend," Hjelt and Jawo sing, reimagining Tupac’s sensitive thug theme song as a suga-coated ode to female solidarity. A little over the top? Sure. But coming from the group who coined post-guilty-pleasure pop's most quotable slogan, we should expect nothing less.
