Lauv Music Review

Lauvs+album+cover

(c) Moxie Music (Lauv)

Released on March 6, the album cover for Lauv’s album, “how i’m feeling” provided by Moxie Music.

The videos attached are Lauv’s “Tattoos Together” and for comparison, the 1975’s “Sincerity is Scary.”

Before you may have even heard of LAUV, you probably heard one of the songs he has writing credits on, most notably, Charli XCX’s 2017 single “Boys.” But now, in 2020, LAUV has broken onto the scene with his own original music. His debut album (which is more of a compilation of earlier tracks) was entitled I Met You When I was 18 and released in 2018. The follow-up (probably considered by most his official debut album) was 2020’s ~how i’m feeling~ featuring the single “Tattoos Together”, the focus of this article.

“Tattoos Together” is the type of song you would expect to be made by a guy named LAUV (at birth, Ari Staprans Leff), in the best possible way. There is a commanding bass line that outlines the rest of the song that captivates the listener. It is very simplistic in the first couple verses but has, for lack of a better word, ~vibes~. There is a very summer feel about the whole song that makes one reminisce. Which is odd, seeing as it premiered in the winter is about Portland, Oregon, not a city notable for its summers. The lyrics are ones about a lost love for the singer, someone he remembers or is in the process of remembering. It cannot be discerned whether he is currently in a relationship or if he is nostalgic for a relationship from earlier in his life. The symbolic nature of tattoos as a permanent fixture on the body is what drives the lyrics of the song. Even if you break up with a significant other you got tattoos with, you will always have the tattoo with you. There is something to be said about the relationship lasting forever through tattoos. At the end of the day, it is a pop song, but it is a pretty good one. I enjoyed it, and LAUV seems as though he is close to really breaking out. He has collaborated with artists such as Troye Sivan and BTS and his writing skills are shown off in every song off this album. The music video has already garnered 3 million views (as of March 14, 2020), and that is what the next section of this article will be about.

For a normal viewer of the music video for “Tattoos Together,” it seems as though it is a fairly innocuous video where a man leaves his romantic partner’s house in the morning and goes on a walk (for lack of a better word) through the streets. And at its surface level, it is that, it is a fairly simplistic, again ~vibey~ music video that really brings home something about adventuring and living life to its fullest in a way that helps others. There are great shots of Lauv giving a bass player outside his apartment money, or a pseudo-drug deal in which he picks a blue rose out of a man’s opened jacket. He then hands that rose off to a man he just helped beat in chess. It’s a very uplifting video. But, a year and a half prior, in November of 2018, the 1975, a British band, released a music video for their single “Sincerity is Scary” that is eerily similar to Lauv’s “Tattoos Together” video. It features an almost-identical set, the same “man walking on street to good vibes” and street performers. It also has similar choreography, and really, the whole video is almost identical to “Tattoos Together.” Lauv acknowledged this and apologized for the similarities, but it is an interesting facet of this saga.

Altogether, the song is definitely worth listening to, and the video is pretty good if you have not seen “Sincerity is Scary’s” music video, which I would also recommend. 7.5/10.