There is a particular kind of pop song that only Sweden seems able to manufacture: three minutes long, emotionally unhinged, and engineered to be screamed by 50,000 people at once. “I Love It” is the platonic ideal of that song, and it made Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo, the duo known as Icona Pop, famous on every continent.
Two friends and a breakup
Hjelt and Jawo met at a party in Stockholm in 2009 and started making music together almost immediately. The story they have told for years is that the duo was born out of a shared romantic catastrophe: both had been through brutal breakups, and the music became the outlet. Their early EPs were raw electro-pop, recorded in bedrooms and released on small labels, and they had a small but devoted following in Sweden before the rest of the world had any idea who they were.
Then came the song. “I Love It” was written by Charli XCX with Swedish producer Patrik Berger, and it is, on paper, a song about trashing an ex-boyfriend’s car. “I crashed my car into the bridge / I don’t care, I love it.” It is not subtle. It does not need to be. Icona Pop’s version took that chorus and delivered it like a riot: two voices, zero polish, total conviction.
The year the world screamed along
Released in 2012, “I Love It” did something songs are not supposed to do anymore. It climbed charts in country after country: number one in the UK, top ten in the US, massive across Europe and Australia. It soundtracked a thousand TV shows, films and adverts. It became the sound of 2013, the year every party ended with a room full of people shouting about not caring.
The debut album This Is… Icona Pop followed in 2013, and the duo spent the next years touring relentlessly. They were an odd fit for the pop machine and that was the appeal. Where other pop stars were polished to a shine, Icona Pop showed up looking like they had just come from the afterparty, and performed like the afterparty was the main event.
The career after the anthem
Here is the thing about having a song as big as “I Love It”: it can eat everything else. To their credit, Hjelt and Jawo never tried to make “I Love It 2.” Instead they built a catalog of sharp, loud electro-pop: “All Night,” “Emergency,” “Girlfriend.” They collaborated across the pop world, wrote for other artists, and kept touring. They never recaptured the lightning of 2012, but they also never embarrassed themselves chasing it, which is rarer than it sounds.
There is also a specifically Swedish coda to the story. “I Love It” was written by Charli XCX, a British artist, but produced and finished in the Stockholm pop ecosystem that has been quietly running global pop for three decades. Icona Pop are part of that lineage and also its rowdy exception: the same city that gave the world Max Martin’s precision gave us two women screaming about crashed cars. Both approaches work. Only one of them gets the neighbors calling the police.
Why they still matter
Icona Pop’s real legacy is not a chart position. It is the template: two women, no interest in being demure, making pop music that sounds like the morning after. In an era of hyper-curated pop personas, their whole act was joyful messiness, and it opened a door for a wave of Scandinavian pop that refused to be polite.
Fourteen years on, “I Love It” still shows up everywhere: sports stadiums, wedding playlists, the background of your life. Play it at any party in any country and watch what happens in the first ten seconds. That is not nostalgia. That is songwriting. And it came from two friends in Stockholm who were having a terrible year and decided to make the loudest possible noise about it.
