The Singles Jukebox

More anti-romantic songs, plz

[Video][Website]
[6.57]

Iain Mew: The blankness is surely deliberate, but the writing and performance are both too devoid enough of detail for me to grasp much of it. Knowledge of the relevant Gone Girl bit (which Lo’s said she was inspired by, and which sits ahead of the song on search results) gives something to lean on but when she sings, “Now you can’t tell if I’m really ironic” it doesn’t feel like it matters either way.
[4]

David Sheffieck: I’m not sure I realized just how much I’d missed Tove Lo until I heard this: she’s kept busy enough with features and soundtracks that it’s been easy to hear her voice in the past year or so. But “Cool Girl” hammers home how much Tove Lo’s voice isn’t just how her vocal sounds, it’s how she effortlessly conveys attitude in a way few others can match. The signature reverb on her vocal in the prechorus is exciting in the former sense, but it’s the stinging insouciance encapsulated by her lyric that really thrills.
[8]

A.J. Cohn: This song is of two minds. Lyrically, it is built around a single, sharp observation–that our appellations to describe the characters of appealing women invoke coldness and iciness. Lo doesn’t want to be the sort of woman who subsumes her own burning desires under a cool exterior. Rather, she calls for the heat of, as she put it in a Facebook post, “deep real love”–the “boiling blood” and “fever highs” she sings about. Musically, however, the thrust of the song is in the opposite direction. The dark pop sounds best at its chilliest — the icy, snappy chorus where Lo plays the “cool girl” — while on the bridge, where Lo tries to make the case for burning love, the track falls limp beneath her.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Pop has abandoned the love song, saith The New Yorker, diagnosing the symptom but not the disease. The magazine attributes Top 40’s malaise to self-obsessed celebrities — the easy exit of pop criticism — when the cause is something more universal. If pop’s obsession in 2011 was the apocalypse as stand-in for the death-drive that propels girls from party to aftermath, pop in 2016 obsesses over an everpresent dynamic I call the fuckbuddy mystique: the constant self-recalibration and all-consuming pain of girls who love guys who love not having to give a fuck. The trap is so hard to escape, is it any wonder people gravitate toward the words of a seething serial killer? (Points to Tove Lo, a genuinely smart songwriter, for being the 1 out of 10,000 rebloggers who acknowledges that the quote is Amy Dunne’s desperate monologue, not Gillian Flynn’s Bustle thinkpiece.) “Cool Girl” is Lo deliberately adapting Dunne’s plaint; it’s like “You Make Me Want to Wear Dresses” as trop-house. But she’s released it to the pop market, which views bleakness as sexiness and interiority as an invitation to fuck. I can’t count the number of reviews that call “Cool Girl” flirty or upbeat, even though Lo suggests right there that she’s being ironic, even though she’s written dirges for verses, dead-eyed come-ons for choruses and a bridge that yearns with her last untamped feelings. These are, of course, exact Swedish specifications that go back to ABBA, but Lo is good enough to use the structure. The chorus is snappy and catchy and perfect: as blank as you could ever ask for.
[8]

Anjy Ou: The chill, disaffected bounce of the chorus sounds exactly like the composure I try (and most times fail) to maintain around someone I like. The problem is, of course, that the cool girl doesn’t exist — it’s an act put on to preserve the unstable nebula of a casual relationship. Tove Lo knows this – the inflection on the second and fourth “girl” in the chorus sounds like her inner voice saying “Uh huh, okay honey.” And the tense build up of the pre-chorus threatens to reveal her truth. Eventually, the façade breaks completely: at the bridge, Tove reverts to her familiar raw, honest self — and here I realize I don’t like that Tove all that much? I guess in this song and in real life I’d rather be the cool girl who’s in denial than the girl on fire.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Yes, fine — I’m a sucker for wobbly electronic bass, whether by Change, Heaven 17, Billy Ocean or Robyn. The keeper is the singer, honoring the title moniker and banishing any thought of Ciara singing this instead.
[7]

William John: Tove Lo continues unabated in her pursuit of anti-romance and the unsentimental, and other than the confusion in temperature metaphors between chorus and middle eight this might be my favourite distillation of her yeah-I’m-a-hot-mess-but-there-are-reasons aesthetic yet. “Cool Girl” features a beat so kinetic and muscular that Teyana Taylor ought to be refreshing her inbox for a video re-shoot proposal.
[8]