For the second single off her forthcoming fourth album, How Could I Prepare For This, Swedish electronic pop artist Vanbot returns today with a euphoric and melancholy dance track, "I Will Never Not Have Had You."
Carrying on in the tradition of shimmering tear-jerking dance pop we've seen from fellow Swedes like ionnalee and Robyn, Vanbot's latest sees her straddling the line between tender melancholia and release as a cascade of twinkling synths, warm electro bass and soaring vocals wash over the listener. Inspired by an unrequited love from her teenage days, the song is tinged with a bittersweet nostalgia that lingers less on regrets or what could have been and more so fondly looks back on naïveté and the rawness of the ephemeral emotions.
"It’s a melancholic dance anthem about an impossible love story," Vanbot says of the track. "The story is a flashback from when I was young and impossibly in love and I really couldn’t wrap my head around why things didn’t workout. Obviously he was into that other guy, and even when it ended I was obsessed about the fact that we were beautiful while we lasted. I wanted to write about it as an homage to those big feelings and what got lost."
Leaning further into this nostalgic sense of Swedish ennui, the single arrives alongside a new music video that dramatizes the queer love triangle that originally inspired song as they navigate industrial countrysides, ride dirt bikes and enjoy the carefree bliss of youth.
"In the video you’ll meet a younger but cooler version of me, since I was a dork," Vanbot says of the visual. "We wanted to build a world around this teenage love drama in the boredom of a small town in Sweden, youngsters killing time with racing cars, drifting aimlessly and having parties in abandoned places."
She goes on to add about the making of the music video, "Doing this video was crazy, the budget was super low and we shot it all in one day. I was really stressed, I mean, being an independent artist means doing literally all kinds of jobs besides being the artist, and it’s hilarious, because you have no idea of what you’re doing. But the feeling when we wrapped it up was everything."
Directed by Sune Chee, who Vanbot previously worked with on "Bored Like Me," the new music video picks up where the duo last left off, continuing to follow the same characters on their shared journey. "It’s a bliss working with Sune. He’s got this super power sight for the scenes, he is very ambitious and it’s fun because he’s taking all my weird ideas seriously."
Check out the PAPER premiere of Vanbot's "I Will Never Not Have Had You," below.
Photo courtesy of Vanbot