Beats by Innis: romanticynicism
Tracklist:
Side A:
- One Last Time — Summer Salt
- Lover — Taylor Swift
- Valentine — Suki Waterhouse
- I Adore You — Molly Burch
- Falling In Love — Cigarettes After Sex
- EVERYTHING — The Black Skirts
Side B:
7. I Wanna Boi — PWR BTTM
8. Crush Culture — Conan Gray
9. How to Be a Heartbreaker — MARINA
10. Hit Me Where It Hurts — Caroline Polachek
11. Do You Think We’ll Last Forever? — Caroline Rose
12. Hard Feelings/Loveless — Lorde
Are you a hopeless romantic who savours all the butterflies in the honeymoon phase and daydreams about slow dancing in a dimly lit room with your lover? Or are you a cynic who wants nothing to do with love and all its sentimentalities? If you’re the former, Side A of this playlist is for you. With six dreamy, intimate songs, full of saccharine lyrics (like “My heart’s been borrowed, and yours has been blue / All’s well that ends well to end up with you”), it’s the perfect soundtrack for living room slow dancing (or shameless yearning, if that’s more up your alley).
But if you’re the latter, listen to Side B. Yes, these tracks carry a “romance makes me want to puke” attitude, but beneath the bravado, there are often thinly veiled traces of panicky desperation and a fear of heartbreak. MARINA’s song is a guide of how to be a heartbreaker — at first, it seems like it’s just all in good fun, but with the bridge and the punchline, (“Can’t risk losing in love again, babe!”) the song dramatically reveals that it was all to protect your own heart from being broken. Tracks 10 and 11 are for all the anxious attachment-girls out there: these songs perfectly encapsulate the feeling of always expecting pain, hurt, and negative outcomes to transpire from relationships, and emotionally spiraling over irrational and unfounded worries.
The closing song of this playlist, just like this playlist, has two parts that juxtapose each other both sonically and thematically. My favourite detail are the distorted, industrial-esque synths at the end of “Hard Feelings” that sound almost like a train screeching to a halt on the tracks. Although the first half is about a devastating breakup and the ensuing heartbreak, the second half is a commentary on our generation’s relationship culture, ending with Lorde repeating “L-O-V-E-L-E-S-S generation,” growing fainter and fainter until it eventually fades out.
