Although it rarely appears on ANBAD in its purest form, I’m an enormous pop fan, cutting my eight-year-old musical teeth on Pet Shop Boys LPs borrowed from my cousin and copied to TDK 90 cassette.
It’s fair to say that on ANBAD I regularly – wait, a better word would be snobbishly– hide this particular soft spot under a bushel, and eschew the straight-up delights of Call Me Maybe in preference to some oddball bedroom music instead.
I sleep uneasily, but with my perceived dignity intact.
Anyway. Fou De Toi made a brilliant pop song that I wasn’t going to ignore. The Korean neo-2-Step song I had planned to feature will just have to wait.
With an inevitability that you undoubtedly anticipated two paragraphs ago, Fou de Toi are from Sweden, heartland of the solid-gold pop song, the silvery chorus, and the smart things done with agonising simplicity.
Heartless is precisely three minutes long, gets the chorus out of the way early and regularly, and is exactly 130BPM. These guys are good. They know the pop secrets, and wring every ounce out of a cute, happy, joyful song with beautiful, surgical precision. It’s the kind of song that you think you already know, and yet have never heard before.
Put your cool aside, and jump in: the water’s lovely. You’ll be humming the chorus all day. Perfect pop.
Written by Joe Sparrow
