Album Review: Icona Pop – Ritual
2 min read
Icona Pop arrived in the early 2010s with the sort of unapologetic dance-pop that seemed almost engineered for a crowd, before I Love It catapulted the Swedish duo from Scandinavian pop hopefuls into a global phenomenon. Since then, Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo have continued to evolve without losing that instinct for a huge chorus and an even bigger night out. Ritual arrives via Ultra Records, and the title feels particularly fitting for a duo whose music has always been about repetition in the best possible sense — the lights, the beat, the crowd, and the inevitable drop. Let’s get into this….
Hurt is predominantly an atmosphere builder, only really dropping into the track toward the end with a brief uplifting beat, which leads into Ritual collaboration with Daya – a fast beat and lyrically heavy, I didn’t love the almost spoken vocals meshed with that very up tempo beat, to be honest. Dance To This follows with a playful house beat, the vocals being a better fit, as is the case with Butterfly Feelings, which is a slower beat, and more of a pop track, and Cooler uses an almost garage beat (which I was never a huge fan of), but the synths over the top for me are (IMO) a bad fit with the beat and the vocals.
Yellow Top is a very chart friendly bouncy house track, where Mad Love feels like a solid US indie synth set up and is a decent track, as is the set up and execution to the slightly quicker Didn’t Mean It Like That. The final two tracks Never Over and Foreverness seem to both be Icona Pop’s stabs at the classic post-come down track that seemingly every dance album seems to have at the minute – they’re both decent enough (if you can get past the cliché), but of the two, Foreverness is the far superior.
There is nothing on Ritual that is going to be close to the mega hit I Love It – it’s a collection of short, punchy tracks with nothing that really pop’s out at me as outstanding, though it is well produced and I only really struggled against hitting skip a couple of times in the whole listen… though I’m sure there will be some fantastic remixes out there in the not too distant future. Sadly, I’d consider this just a bit of a nothing burger for me.
