Despite the recent release of Sunshine Kitty (one of 2019’s best albums), Tove Lo apparently didn’t want to miss out on a chance to collaborate with Billie Eilish’s brother and musical puppeteer, Finneas O’Connell, for two new singles entitled “Bikini Porn” and “Passion and Pain Taste the Same When I’m Weak” (same)–just in time to perform on her upcoming Sunshine Kitty Tour. The former being an upbeat, funk-laden ditty that perfectly correlates to the album artwork of a lascivious-looking Tove Lo lounging atop a leopard print towel on the grass next to a pool for just the right amount of trashy-sexy chic.
Perfectly intermixing Tove Lo’s brand of raunchiness with Finneas’ brand of confessional-styled lyrics that Eilish has become known for, the former accuses, “Run around in your boring bubble/Scared to pop it, you think I’m trouble/Time to time I know you’ll be dreaming: ‘What would life be if I just go with her?’” It is this precise lyric that bears the mark of Finneas’ influence before Tove Lo segues into her own unique strain of bawdiness with, “I’m all bikini porn/Now my bikini’s gone/I got you dangled around me/You, ooh, you quit your office job…/Oh, you rollin’ free with no worries.” It’s almost as though she’s deliberately goading us to abandon our middling professions in time for the summer (more to the point, in time for the Ibiza opening parties in May).
Of course, Tove Lo has never been known to be abashed about the inverse to her party animal nature: her sensitive side–which, to be sure, only fuels the partying alter ego when she, like the rest of us, ends up getting hurt. Conjuring sonic and thematic undertones of “everything i wanted” by Eilish and Tove Lo’s own “Sweettalk My Heart,” she sings, “I’m naive, impulsive even/Falling too fast/I’m forgetful/When it’s hurtful, why let it last?”
Showing us a darker underbelly to summer and the inevitable romances that ultimately turn out to be flings one looks back upon with a sense of longing and nostalgia, she layers the original message of “Sweettalk My Heart” with the semi-sardonic commands, “Love on my moods and keep me off the deep end/Midst summer’s pool and I fill it with secrets/You’re gonna get what you’re givin’ to me,” as compared with the aforementioned’s, “Tell me you love me, tell me you’re mine/Tell me, I know it, don’t need a sign…/Sweeter than love/Is the taste of all those promises/That pulls you in for good.” In many regards, it also echoes the 2018 summer jam that was Lykke Li’s “deep end” (from the equally as seminal summer album so sad so sexy), with her also seasonally-themed imagery, “Swimming pool, swimming pool/Indigo, deep blue, deep blue/Oh, baby I know where you’ve been/I know where you been, in the deep end.”
Not fooled by the potential for amorous disaster, Li embraces the magicality of the summer, even with its penchant for causing self-destructive behavior. Just as Tove Lo already is in spite of it being the thick of winter. After all, like a true European (even if a Scandinavian), she is someone who lives for the summer. Essentially begging for bikini porn all year-round. If climate change comes to full fruition, she might just get her wish.
