You’ll remember LIZ from her hit ‘When I Rule the World’, one of the first straight pop singles produced by SOPHIE at the dawn of hyperpop. LIZ’s career after this single has left interesting songs like ‘Intuition’, although it has been uneven and, for example, the artist has only published one studio album, ‘Planet 2YK’, in 2019.
This will no longer be the case this year, as LIZ has set a date for her second album, ‘Prototype’, which will be released on June 12. It will include a posthumous SOPHIE production, ‘Sunscreen’, known since August last year, and the recent -although very brief- single ‘Likey’. Today we focus on the latest single, ‘L in Lover’, the Song Of The Day.
‘L in Lover’ is fascinating because it imagines a world in which Mariah Carey is a hyperpop artist. Its melodic similarities to ‘Dreamlover’ are so obvious that LIZ seems to play at blurring the lines between AI semblance and blatant plagiarism, but for some reason I personally can’t stop listening to the song on loop.
Using impossible vocal manipulations, harmonies totally typical of 90s Mariah, a refined hyperpop production style and phrases like “Lips all pink and rosy / It’s my birthday, gimme a pony”, ‘L in Lover’ revives that first hyperpop that played with the caricature of the most bubblegum and commercial pop, but takes it towards a more R&B style that turns it into an irresistible «guilty pleasure»: you know it’s a copy, but no You can stop listening to it.
