Tove Lo and SG Lewis are one of those special pop star-producer combinations. What they bring out in each other is unique to their partnership – a creative synergy so electric, the music they create together often feels another echelon to the rest of their discography. HEAT, the pair’s sweaty, rambunctious four track EP, sees Lo and Lewis tumble head over crotch from the wet tarmac of downtown London, New York, or LA into the nightclub. In the bathroom, they cut HEAT’s lines from electroclash and bloghouse, then offer them up as pop.
HEAT is a body of work that wears its references proudly, like a collection of wrist stamps from last night’s club crawl. There’s DJ Seinfeld all over the euphoric lo-fi house of Desire, Goldfrapp on the humid Let Me Go OH OH, and Madison Avenue in the effervescent French touch of the title track. But nowhere is this melange of mid-2000’s sleaze as potent as on Busy Girl, HEAT’S most ‘that Britney’s shameless’ moment. Against a shuddering synthline that owes a round to Mason and Bodyrockers, Lo delivers spoken word verses like an automated Uffie. The track’s giddy two and half minutes are filled to the brim with the sort of irresistible sonic liquor that’s easy to get drunk on quick, with Lewis finding contrasts in synths that sometimes shimmer, or sometimes grind up on each other like deliciously perverse party girls at an early morning afters somewhere in LA.
With recent projects like Charli XCX’s masterful brat and the memory-lane bangers of Club Shy, bloghouse feels, like, so major right now. Its resurgence, underground incubated and nostalgia fed by millennial ravers approaching their Second Naivety, is making the switch from cult classic to it-girl. HEAT feels quite zeitgeisty in this regard; to speak in TMZ, it’s the Lindsay to brat’s Paris. While the EP captures bloghouse’s unhinged lightning, Lo and Lewis seem less concerned with lasting impact than they are with getting into the club that is the present. And who wouldn’t be, anyway – especially when the rager raging inside is this fucking iconic.
