Lover Girls Just Wanna Muck About in Tokyo and Dance on Rooftops in a Whimsical Reverie

Since “Tough Luck,” Laufey’s second single from the forthcoming A Matter of Time, evidently missed the boat on getting a music video, the neo-jazz chanteuse didn’t pass up the opportunity to give her latest song from the record, “Lover Girl,” a visual accompaniment (one that goes beyond a mere “lyric video,” which is a notch below the effort level that goes into an “official visualizer”). Even though said single was already released over a month ago at this point. 

Still, it’s entirely possible that Laufey was timing the unveiling of the video to fall closer to when the album at last comes out, which isn’t until August 22nd (though she still has plenty of time to put out another song and video right before then as well). Whatever the reason for waiting this long to showcase it, “Lover Girl” is a welcome addition to Laufey’s music video canon.

And yes, in many ways, it feels like a continuation of the carefully curated bizarreness of the “Silver Lining” video. Indeed, it appears as though Laufey is doing her best imitation of Jess Day-meets-Wednesday Addams (mostly because of her sartorial choice: a white-collared black dress with sheer sleeves) throughout the “narrative,” directed, of course, by Laufey’s twin and frequent creative collaborator, Junia Lin.

As for the mushy, love-gushing lyrical content itself, there can be no denying its muse is Charlie Christie, Laufey’s boyfriend and a senior VP of A&R for Interscope Records (something about this detail smacking of Lorde’s relationship with Justin Warren, an American promotions director at Universal Music in New Zealand—granted, Christie seems much more age-appropriate). To play up the romantic whimsy of Laufey’s verbal sentiments is the fanciful bossa nova beat, one that’s complemented by a series of claps at the beginning of the song. Claps that Laufey gamely pantomimes during the opening scenes, which immediately establish the setting as Tokyo. This because her first verse is, “This skyscraper’s causing vertigo/The countdown begins in Tokyo/Twenty-seven days alone/Means twenty million ways to cope without you.” 

The allusion to this city in particular, per Laufey, is because she was starting a tour (more than likely the Bewitched Tour) that landed her in Japan’s capital at a moment when she was feeling particularly attached to this new love. So it is that we see her dancing whimsically through the streets of Tokyo, as though to do her best to channel all of her profusive feelings into movements that might better express that which can’t be expressed effectively enough in words (something Britney Spears knows all about). 

In another scene, Laufey is seated alone at a restaurant—even though many a Tokyo restaurant is quite literally designed for people to dine alone [think: the Ichiran concept], so it’s really not that “sad” of an image. It’s while seated here that Laufey, in typical loner fashion, takes a pen out to jot something down in her notebook. Only there’s already something written in the page that’s shown from an overhead angle: “The independent lady in me’s nowhere to be found” (one of the lyrics from the song). She then uses the pen to cross that statement out, as if to further emphasize that her “independent lady” self has all but disappeared ever since she went down the rabbit hole of becoming a hopeless lover girl. The very sort of girl she used to make fun of before she became one (as mentioned in the lines, “Lovestruck girl, I’d tease her/Thought I’d never be her”). 

The black lace gloves she accessorizes with her Wednesday look are especially prominent in this “crossing out” moment. And, in other moments, so is the fact that her entire Wednesday aesthetic is belied by the Lolita foot combination of patent-leather heels and frilly white ankle socks (a far cry from the clunky “anti-seduction” shoes of Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday, who wears Prada’s Monolith leather lace-up shoes). The heels in question come off during certain scenes, like when she’s dancing in what appears to be the empty room of a geisha house (later confirmed when she’s also shown dancing outside of it)—a room that also just so happens to have a Super 55-style microphone available for Laufey to sing into (perhaps a nod to the many karaoke options available in Tokyo, in addition to playing up Laufey’s jazzy aura). 

As night falls upon the city, Laufey’s amorous musings only become all the more intense as she sings, “I wait by the phone like a high school movie/Dream at the shows you’ll come running to me/Think I see you in the wings, god I’m hallucinating what a/Reckless fever…” Such a reckless fever that perhaps she’s even hallucinating her “grand finale” of a choreographed number, complete with two occasionally appearing backup dancers, on a rooftop as the video draws to a close. The hallucination factor coming in because, as everyone should know, choreography on a rooftop is a distinct trait of 00s music videos (the peak example being Lindsay Lohan’s “Rumors”).

So sure, maybe all this yearning and burning has led her to hallucinate (to the point of going back in time), thanks to her main character in a rom-com syndrome, that she’s on this rooftop dancing and singing her heart out to a lover that might actually be able to see and hear her cry of l’amour. Because, undoubtedly, love has a strange way of making people believe that the impossible can become possible. That all it takes is pure earnestness and intensity of feeling for one’s lover boy to receive her remote, shall we say, missive.