Icona Pop – I Love It

Charli wrote it in half an hour. Stockholm made it shout.

On 9 May 2012, the Stockholm duo Icona Pop released I Love It as a digital single on TEN. Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo sing it with Charli XCX, whose voice stays on the finished record. The song runs 2 minutes and 37 seconds. Charlotte Aitchison, Patrik Berger and Linus Eklöw wrote it. Eklöw works as Style of Eye. Berger and Style of Eye produced it. A session note places the recording at Berger’s house in Stockholm, from work done in 2011. The single came first. It was added later to the Swedish album Icona Pop, and in 2013 to the international album This Is… Icona Pop.

Berger had sent Charli two beats while she was in Sweden. She wrote I Love It and You’re the One off them in about an hour, and she has said the words and tune for this one took about 30 minutes. She liked the song and still decided it did not fit the record she was making. While Berger was in the studio with Icona Pop on Good for You, he played them her demo. Jawo heard her own story in it, including the line about a man from the 1970s and a woman from the 1990s. Hjelt called that demo cute, and cocky. The duo took the track to Style of Eye and asked for something rougher: they wanted the rude, don’t-care feeling. On the chorus the three voices shout together, “I don’t care, I love it.”

Fredrik Etoall directed the video and shot it in a day in Paris, with friends of the band. Hjelt and Jawo play a show, then an after-party. Charli is not in the clip. In the United States the song was the opening theme of Snooki & JWoww from June 2012. A January 2013 episode of Girls pushed downloads, and ten days later the track entered the Billboard Hot 100. It peaked at number 7, and at number 1 on Billboard’s dance chart. Sweden had already taken it to number 2.