Like an 80s bop brought to life (something like a mutant baby of Rick Springfield and Sheena Easton), Tove Lo’s “Bad As The Boys,” the second single from the soon to be out Sunshine Kitty, continues down the bisexual path set forth on blue lips‘ “bitches” (and on blue lips in general). This time, however, Tove Lo doesn’t seem to be having as much fun as she sings of a heartbreaker type that one imagines to be vaguely like Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror.
With so far just a lyric video that echoes the karaoke vibe of what she had first put out to accompany “Glad He’s Gone” (a track with some bi undertones as well), Tove Lo walks around a darkened town in France with her amp while ALMA occasionally steps in to iterate that this womaneater is, indeed, “just as bad as the boys.” Which, is to say, of course, that she was a user and abuser, a love ’em and leave ’em type in constant search of the next vaginal fix.
ALMA chimes in, “I know she used me for some fun/And now it’s done until she felt like the one/Maybe the heat just got me blind/She’s so fine.” With a knack for simulating being in love–the “tenderness,” the implied monogamy–this force of nature (à la Sandra Bullock in Forces of Nature) ends up conning a bewildered Tove Lo, who thought it was sure to be more than just a summer fling.
But this adolescent perspective on love, too, also reminds one of another Netflix show besides Black Mirror—Stranger Things. To the point of the decidedly 80s teen yearning vibes of the track, Tove Lo even appears to be sporting a femme-mullet in the lyric video. Her state of bafflement over how the person she thought was her beloved could so callously abandon her leads Tove Lo to bemoan, “I met her in the summer thinking life will get better/But she’s gone now/Took my heart and sunk with it.” Negating what the heartless Franki Valli and the Four Seasons once said, Tove Lo further adds as a lament on her unexpected pain at the hands of one of her own kind, “Big girls cry.” Possibly even more when spurned by a woman.
As ALMA says, “Love hurts, when you’re fingering.” This usually-reserved-for-a-novice-male (though in this case, because she’s bad as the boys, female) act on the sexual menu puts the final touch on a song rooted in the nostalgia of a lost love from the summer of one’s youth. And, come to think of it, also smacks of the lesbianic premise behind the video for Clean Bandit, MARINA and Luis Fonsi’s “Baby.”
