“I call ‘gravity’ a love song. But it’s a bit of a resistant love song.” So explains leoblu of their latest single, a collaboration with fellow Swedes sad dad. The ambiguity is typical of Åland-born, Berlin-based songwriter Julia Carlsson, who uses leoblu as vehicle not so much to portray life as it appears on the outside, but rather complicate things to better get at the messy truths below the surface. Be that with ‘cake‘, which bent the line between fiction and autobiography, or the dark, translucent pop of ‘dirty windows‘.
The new track follows in this lineage. A love song which refuses the certainty so common to the genre to offer something more nuanced. So when Carlsson sings “I was the ocean and he was the moon / I tried to stay in place but he was gravity,” the impression is not one of grand gesture and romantic inevitability, but rather the sense of being exposed to mysterious forces. The physics of things larger than yourself, moving life beyond your control.
I was a cynical
He said he was one too
I called him silver
And I was blue
‘gravity’ is out now and available from the usual places.
