Because Scandipop fans cannot live by Robyn alone.
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[6.00]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Do you remember when Björk performed at the Olympics and her dress slowly travelled across the floor until it covered the entire Olympic stadium? It feels like Sundemo’s doing that with this song – voice gently wavering, she unfurls her tale from quiet beginnings until it is an emotional juggernaut, celebrating the beauty of winter-bound loneliness. She starts out a dot and dominates the landscape by song’s end. “Snow” is vast, immediate and nigh-on-impossible to listen to without developing a lump in your throat. It feels special already.
[9]
Iain Mew: I like the cold echo bits at the end of the choruses, but Sundemo somehow manages to spend the song transmitting cloying wonder at the snow even while the lyrics do the opposite, and it’s a bit too much for me to take. Then someone else turns up to do amateur hour vocals at the end and I want her back after all.
[4]
Edward Okulicz: I love the Kleerup-esque pulsing bass, the braindead thump of the beat and how little snatches of vocal sustain and echo all over the place. The stretch for grandeur is stymied somewhat by twee dinkiness, but Sundemo’s voice is cute in the right way if you’ve already surrendered to any number of clinically efficient female Scandipop purveyors that have gone before.
[8]
Crystal Leww: I don’t care if this is a metaphor for something else. It is February in Chicago and this Texan girl is treating this as a love letter to the sunlight, and I am connecting to this range of emotion on a level that might seem melodramatic but very honest. I also lived in Frida’s home country of Sweden for a while when I was a kid, and I can attest to the fact that the weather there also inspires a surprising amount of emotion. (On a slightly more serious note, the way this song moves in the last minute with the belting of “I’m alone” and the introduction of the male vocal is gorgeous.)
[7]
Ian Mathers: The problem with reaching for that feeling is that if it doesn’t work for a listener, you wind up sounding hollow. And once you sound hollow, singing about snow just feels a little silly.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: Lyric and music match to evoke a vivid picture: Frida on some grand solo voyage through climes uninhabitable, desperate for nothing but warmth and light. It is, in fact, maybe too vivid to allow for anything but a literal interpretation, but even if that could be a criticism – which it needn’t be – it’s the only one it really provokes.
[8]
Brad Shoup: She’s throwing a lot of chords at you, but the success rate isn’t great. There’s no flavor to this.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Like “Dancing On My Own” if Robyn were as affected as skeptics say — and that’s before “goodbye, Mr. Cold.” I’m sure the right cinematography could make this transcend the twee; as it stands, the chord change to slush that closes the chorus is nice, but only because I wanted it at 0:10.
[6]
Alfred Soto: The sequencer and synth bed is frosty enough, and her looped vocal at the 1:30 mark thawed a few icicles, but apparently one of those icicles hit her brain in the last third: treacle replaces pop smarts.
[6]
Will Adams: Last weekend, a massive blizzard dumped 34 inches of snow in Connecticut within 24 hours. After the storm ceased, I stepped outside in my giant boots and stomped around in the powder like a child. Frida Sundemo does the same in “Snow,” spinning around in that Body Talk bass and sounding exactly like Lights. Unlike me, however, Frida is happy to keep marching in place, whereas I gave up much earlier.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: It would help if she thawed this one out a bit more.
[4]