EMMA JENSEN - SOMEONE TO BREAK YOUR HEART

Norwegian singer/songwriter/indie popstar Emma Jensen gives you a reason to cry with "Someone To Break Your Heart".

EMMA JENSEN - SOMEONE TO BREAK YOUR HEART

Pop Music tends to be bright, brash, bold, painting in primary colors rather than faded shades or hues. It's music for having fun, for getting pumped, forgetting to go out with your friends or getting faded on a Saturday night. As such, Pop Music tends to be optimistic, energetic, upbeat. There's not much room for introspection or melancholy with the Katy Perry's and Meghan Trainor's of the world.

It's not always been this way, though. There've been numerous times in Pop Culture's history when moody, melancholic, introspective Pop Music could be found on the airwaves - from the sensitive singer/songwriters of the '70s to the sad sack emo art rock of the early 2000s, a la Radiohead or Coldplay.

With "Someone To Break Your Heart," Norwegian singer/songwriter Emma Jensen serves as the heartbroken specter of the bright, bold, brash Poptimism of T-Swift. With most Pop Music, like Hollywood movies, a happy ending is pretty much mandatory. With "Someone To Break Your Heart," Jensen seems to be offering the opposite, someone worthy of a dalliance or a distraction but maybe not ride off into the sunshine with.

"Someone To Break Your Heart" matches these themes beautifully with its orchestration - simple, stark piano chords with occasional flashes of fluttering beats, tremolo guitars emerging from the shadows like half-remembered dreams, or intrusive thoughts. If you've been looking for the place where Adele meets Lana Del Rey and Cigarettes After Sex, you've found it.

Heartbreaking Pop Music seems to rise and fall like the seasons, like El Nino or cicadas. It's hard to suss out what exactly causes it, whether it's political malaise or economic insecurity or simply a reaction against Poptimism.

Either way, "Someone To Break Your Heart" could be a weathervane, alerting us to a sea change, that we're about to enter a new era of sensitive, heartbroken singer/songwriters. We Are: The Guard are ready for it, tissues out and at the ready.

J. Simpson occupies the intersection between criticism, creativity, and academia. Based out of Portland, Or., he is the author of Forestpunk, an online journal/brand studying the traces of horror, supernatural, and the occult through music, fashion and culture. He plays in the dreamfolk band Meta-Pinnacle with his partner Lily H. Valentine, with whom he also co-founded Bitstar Productions, a visual arts collective focused on elevating Pop Culture to High Art.