“Can’t love somebody who loves burning bridges…”
Alright, Miss Sigrid is not playing around.
To be fair, it was made abundantly clear upon the release of euphoric disco-pop smash “Mirror” back in May that the 24-year-old Norwegian singer-songwriter was breaking out the big guns for her follow-up to 2019’s Sucker Punch.
A few months later, she’s returned on Wednesday (August 25) – scorched, but not stirred – with “Burning Bridges,” an ode to “the moment of enough is enough.”
“It’s inspired by one of the toughest things I’ve been through. It’s a song that’s about the point where you just have to say in a relationship, ‘you know what, let’s just finish this.’ That moment of enough is enough, and you need a clean break,” she explains.
The song first premiered as our Illuminati Label Puppet Sell-Out Queen Charli XCX‘s “Hottest Record in the World” pick via Future Sounds with Charli XCX on BBC Radio 1 – and you know what? Charlotte did not lie.
Like “Mirror,” the tune was co-crafted with Sly and Caroline Ailin, responsible for Queen of 2020 Dua Lipa‘s “Don’t Start Now,” Pretty Please” and “New Rules,” among many other smashes.
The assured anthem’s an instant pop earworm, clocking in at just under the 3-minute mark, making it an epic by today’s attention-starved standards. It goes off in all the right ways, armed with a chant-along chorus, synths and delicious strings.
It’s an effective bop lyrically too, filled with succinct cautionary advice (“You cry, they don’t / That’s how you know“), providing all the right relationship advice amid red flags aplenty: “You gotta let them go, before you go down with them.” And she’s absolutely right!
There’s also some excellent pop howling throughout, especially towards the very end – you know, just to really get that message across. Between this and “Mirror,” Sigrid’s making sure that we’re heading deeper into this New Normal™ as emotionally healthy and stable as humanly possible.
Self-love and self-preservation are truly the themes of 2021, ladies – and we’ve got some fantastic pop tunes already to demonstrate how it’s done.
