In 2013, Icona Pop had an international smash hit with 'I Love It'. The single went Top 10 around the world, including the US where it went double platinum. When the single went to Number One in the UK we wrote a lengthyish post detailing the song's 28-step path to glory: in short, the song's success was down to a certain amount of planning, with quite a few happy accidents along the way.
What did the band do in 2014?
Well, most significantly, they had a great single called 'Get Lost'. There were a few things wrong with it but there was plenty right with it — not least the storming chorus.
The single got to Number 58 in Sweden and doesn't appear to have charted anywhere else at all. (It was even released in the UK, not that anybody noticed.) The duo have been playing live dates during 2014, but beyond 'Get Lost' their main contribution to the world's chart landscape seems to have been a collaboration with Cobra Starship that barely dented the Australian Top 70.
As 2014 draws to a close Icona Pop are in a tricky position: they're clearly keeping themselves busy in a variety of worldwide locations, but pop's all about momentum. Have the duo achieved anything in the last twelve months that would justify a similarly busy 2015, or 2016?
Perhaps they are about to unleash a massive beast of a single. But 'Get Lost' was quite a bit of a beast, and the band's label clearly saw no point in pushing it internationally. Why not? Did the label view Icona Pop as a one hit wonder, or a novelty act? Was the band's international release pattern in the wake of 'I Love It' — with various different tracks of varying quality apparently being 'the next single' in various different territories — so messy that nobody knew how to move forward? Did they try, in the wake of 'I Love It', to crowbar themselves so far into the world of EDM that they sacrificed the outsiderish charm that made such sense to their early supporters? Or is it simply the case that Charli XCX absorbed so much of 'I Love It''s momentum that there was none left for Icona Pop?
Look, maybe 2014 has been a brilliant year for Icona Pop and maybe everything's gone exactly to plan and maybe they wouldn't change a thing. Even if that's not the case, maybe 2015 will still be the year in which they deliver the follow-up album their brilliant debut definitely deserves. Maybe they've already recorded a megabanger so immense that it will make 'I Love It' sound like a Rixton b‑side. Either way, from the outside, all we can say is that there's a great pop duo at stake here, and it'd be good to see them get their act together before they get lost forever.