Sweden’s ‘cocky’ Vera Hotsauce, as she likes to describe herself, has sung about ‘daddy’ - an homage to her father, a clever little song and in an enchanting voice, and another song, ‘Hey Boy’, which was supposed to “channel” Gwen Stefani’s ‘Hollaback Girl’ but which really wasn’t in Stefani’s class, lyrically or musically and which she described as being not actually about anything, which didn’t help win me over.
In other words I’ve got mixed feelings about her. She’s on the same label as Zara Larsson, lennixx and Icona Pop and usually attracts critical praise for what she does but I feel she tries too hard to shock. She wastes precious little time for example before she’s effing and jeffing on this one, which isn’t really necessary.
The song follows a typical Scandi hip hop – pop - club trajectory with heavily tampered vocals (which make the lyrics difficult to decipher and I suspect there’s an interesting story here), trap beats and a chorus which could be a nursery rhyme tune. Then it simply disappears at the end, like she drove Dad’s Bugatti over a cliff.
But don’t read too much criticism into this. The song is catchy, for sure. And there’s a willing audience of young females to lap it up, though they’ll probably have to Google and Wiki ‘Bugatti’. But my foremost reason for sticking with Vera is that I remember the first single of hers that I heard, the aforementioned ‘daddy’ which was in a different league altogether. She is much better at writing sad ballads like that (check it out) and I hope we hear more of them.
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