Taken from this week’s Future Pop mailer. Click here to subscribe. All my Songs of the Week are featured on my Top of the Poptastic playlist, along with the rest of my faves from the year so far.
My Great Escape this year was basically made up of two things: female acts from Australia, and female acts from Scandinavia. And based on the quality of said performers, I could quite happily live on this diet for the foreseeable future. Swedish singer Janice (pronounced like Denise) Kavander was one of the best vocalists I saw at the festival, and though not all her songs were equally strong, I loved her single You Only Say You Love Me In The Dark as soon as I heard it. It’s the kind of mid-tempo power ballad that Leona Lewis would have dreamed of in her heyday. Ryan Tedder hasn’t written anything as good as this in years. I immediately went to Spotify to check the credits, and discovered Janice co-wrote the track with with Andreas Söderlund (aka HYENA) and Joel Sjöö, two indie artists-turned-pop writers who have written with acts including Hello Saferide, Erik Rapp and another act responsible for one of my Songs of the Week, Robinson.