Lauv you like a Lauv song…
[Video]
[4.75]
Katie Gill: Bitch, me too. And this anemic and overproduced song certainly isn’t fixing that.
[4]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: After Lauv’s duet and eventual breakup with Julia Michaels, he returns to square one: “I Like Me Better.” He’s despondent this time around, and the similarities between both tracks only make this clearer. Shorter and reduced to the most basic of elements, “I’m So Tired…” is a hook and (wisely) little more. The verses aren’t meaningful; Lauv just wants to recite the chorus to keep himself at bare minimum-levels of alive. Sivan is only here for emotional support, his presence nothing but an excuse for Lauv to continue his loathing.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Robyn’s “Because It’s in the Music” for those brokenhearted singles where “their song” wasn’t transcendently gorgeous but in retrospect kind of ass. Good situation if you can swing it, at least for ensuring you can listen to your 201X playlist without tears. Not so good a situation to write a transcendent song about.
[6]
Danilo Bortoli: This is the song of someone whose attitude and lyrics are too blasé to believe in the remote possibilities of romantic love (put that blame on crush culture and Tinder and social media, says the New York Times). Lauv’s tone is one of indifference — and Sivan is doing the best he can to convey warmth to this song. He aimed at unabashed hopelessness. Amidst the process, he became the dude complaining about being a third wheel.
[3]
Thomas Inskeep: What’s the point of Auto-Tuning the fuck out of Sivan’s voice? I mean, I suppose it makes no less sense than this dull, utterly generic EDM-pop track.
[2]
Iris Xie: With “I’m So Tired…,” Lauv and Troye Sivan has managed to create a depleted world that’s the inverse of Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION and its atmosphere of bursting sincerity, and is the spiritual sequel to the bright-eyed hope of “Gimmie Love.” Seriously, you can sing the lyrics of each song over the other and note how they complement, especially if you sing the chorus of “Gimmie Love” over the chorus “I’m so tired…” I find this discovery a little startling, considering Carly Rae is queen of the queers and Troye Sivan is, well, queer, but they both access that interiority of suffocated and repressed desire with emotions that are held close to the chest, which would be familiar to those with queer lived experiences. Unfortunately, this song sounds underdeveloped, unfinished, and coarse. It’s marred by how Lauv decides to tatter Sivan’s voice in order to mimic the heaving nature of post-breakup depression, and the production is so fuzzy and indistinct, it sounds like it was corroded by a 240p Youtube video upload. The noise, intentional or not, lifts slightly for a moment of mild acknowledgment at the drifting post-chorus, “Strangers/Killing my lonely nights with strangers,” which unfurls into a forlorn melody that ends with “Can’t un-miss you and I need you now.” This is a moment of fragile clarity that pinpoints the cause of the malaise, before the cloud of noise covers again, and the dogged repetition of the chorus continues the song to its abrupt, too early end. A little disappointing, considering the song could have been much more evocative of its atmosphere, but it’s not bad.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Troye Sivan’s mild perky electropop, swathed in dolor thanks to a voice that sounds as if it were tattletaling on a sibling, can accompany a multitude of settings because it asks nothing of listeners. If he were a woman and more, uh, robust of voice, he’d guest on a Black Box album, where I’d appreciate his anonymity. “Sorta okay” is not what he needs after last year’s breakthrough.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: It’s the Wings paradox: you’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs, but looking around you see it isn’t so. Dare anyone write a rejection of them that doesn’t belie romantic regret, or is love just pop’s magnetic north? (Test case: John Lydon’s effort being a paean to himself, as with everything he has ever done.) “I’m So Tired…” sits solemn on timeless anti-sentiment — perhaps its palpable exhaustion could even be at the generational generalisations and narcissism of small differences it is bound to be bound to — but the torpidity is also what keeps it from captivating. The best Troye Sivan song of 2019 is therefore still “I Love It” by Oscar Enestad.
[6]