On September 3rd, he asked me what day it was…

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Micha Cavaseno: Over a deteriorated intro that sounds like a stumbling Dali’s cradle of lullabies, a strange little song emerges pulled out of a proposed memory. You know how pilots can describe sitting for a moment in the eye of a hurricane, and everything goes still? This is like that, but imagine dreams taking an elemental shape.
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Alfred Soto: For a thumper its specificity impresses me: a barbeque on Sept. 3, when they also hung out on the rooftop. Larsson’s anguished high notes suggest it was a harrowing occasion too. It’s not so harrowing when she goes into Rihannaland.
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Katherine St Asaph: This is a sound now, no? Do What U Want (With My Rooftop), Love Me Roofer, you know the style. “Rooftop” is another case of indie-pop’s determination to make an Anthem for every conceivable probably-millennial probably-Williamsburg-based moment; this one isn’t necessarily for me, because the last party I was at that moved to the rooftop, I tried three times to make it up the ladder without hyperventilating and/or falling then gave up and sulked in the living room googling “climbing ladder roof anxiety” until everyone came in from the cold. The details are a nice touch, but at this level of specificity I just want more: which ModCloth dress she wore, what beer he held, how many Facebook friends’ friends lists they went through before finding each other.
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Anthony Easton: This sounds terribly au courant, from the tightly contained structure to how she subtly twists her sound to the vocoder, from the casual phrasing to that one word chorus thing and the narrative hinted at but never quite delivered. That it is a jaunty pop song about watching someone take a header makes the craft seem just a little perverse.
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Leela Grace: I think no song has ever sounded LESS like a late-summer rooftop barbecue. This is a night drive through the rain, where the streetlights go smudgy through your windshield and you’re thinking about all your failed meet-cutes.
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Brad Shoup: Do these lyrics make more sense in a country song or a Missed Connections post? Either way, I really don’t think I needed to hear the story three times.
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Josh Winters: I bet you the amount of times she’s recounted this brief, bittersweet encounter to herself is the same amount I’ve endlessly listened to this while looking out my bedroom window and obsessing over all of mine. Perhaps I’m a masochist.
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Will Adams: When pop songs get specific, it’s usually in the form of tossing signifiers about to appeal to a wide audience. “Rooftop,” on the other hand, is just concerned with that one night, and it’s far more moving as a result. The verses reflect a more colloquial recounting (“that shit was crazy”), but the chorus just can’t forget the facts: the rooftop party, the place in which everyone says you’re meant to find love, ends up severing that brief connection by getting too rowdy. “One night on the rooftop,” Larsson repeats in a near-whisper. She hasn’t let go, and the song is a shot in the dark, a hope that maybe he hasn’t let go, either.
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