Single Review: Charlie XCX – Forever
Holly Lamb gives her verdict on the new Charlie XCX single.
Charli XCX has resumed her status as the fallen angel of pop, an enchanting bittersweet singer who reminisces about romance whilst marching to her own anthem of rebellion in her newest single ‘forever’. Amidst the struggles of lockdown, she has endeavoured to produce and record the entire album How I Am Feeling Now to push the boundaries of pop even further.
In ‘Forever’, the listener is immediately lured by the robotic synthesized clips of Charli’s pleading voice as it crashes against an experimental pop beat. The oxymoronic intro of ‘Love suicide / You and I drove for miles’ paints an image evocative of the turbulence of Bonny and Clyde.
there is a fundamental air of hope, reconnection, and most importantly, resilience.
The song has a subtle and darker undercurrent lurking beneath the smirks and smiles of her feelings: ‘You’re you not a ghost / you’re in my head’. As the song approaches its ending, the blur of the electronic beats swirl into a technicolour haze of emotion, sound, and sadness.
Supposedly a love ballad dedicated to her long-distance boyfriend during the coronavirus pandemic, Charli XCX modernises the form in all its transformative, terrifying, and tumultuous glory. Charli’s message is not one dimensional though; there is a fundamental air of hope, reconnection, and most importantly, resilience.
In essence, ‘Forever’ should show people that our lives can change; however, the power of love extends beyond confinement and physical separation. It is the memories that provide the perfect antidote to loneliness during isolation, as they in turn ingrain themselves in our minds even more brightly than before.
