IVE had a rough English-language debut earlier this year with an overly artificial cover of Icona Pop’s 2013 hit All Night. Mixing issues and heavy-handed vocals effects marred that effort, so it makes sense the group would team up with an established producer who could iron out some of those issues. They picked a good one in David Guetta. I’ve enjoyed his music for years (almost decades at this point!) and of course IVE have quite a few solid hits of their own. Unfortunately, new single Supernova Love doesn’t capture the best of either artist.
More and more, we find modern pop songs that sound like AI. It’s an uncanny valley type sheen — vocals smoothed to the point they feel drained of humanity, melodies that sound like echoes of other songs we’ve heard before. In this case, Supernova Love‘s opening strings may sound familiar because they’re an interpolation of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s piano instrumental Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence — refashioned as a glistening dance track. Even though this well-known melody becomes the driving force behind the song, Love somehow finds a way to accommodate nine (!) other writers/producers.
The music video shortens the song by about a minute, but even in its extended iteration Supernova Love doesn’t take advantage of the best aspects of dance music. Rather than ebb and flow and build to glorious peaks, it simply bops along with limited ideas. The celestial production is quite satisfying as an idea, but IVE’s individual quirks get lost in the mix. Rather than sounding elusive or mysterious, they simply come across as bored and copy/pasted onto the beat. A gutsier performance during the verses would have countered the layered chorus and resulted in a more engaging set of textures. This is a definite improvement over All Night, yet succumbs to many of the same issues. IVE have too much star power to sound this flat and AI’ed.
Hooks
8
Production
7
Longevity
8
Bias
8
RATING
7.75