Carly Rae Jepsen's return to the top of the pops is a definite maybe

Today, Carly Rae Jepsen released I Really Like You, her first single since 2013, performing it on Good Morning America. The song feels continuous with her previous singles Call Me Maybe (which reached No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, as well as being named 2012’s best song in the Guardian) and Tonight I’m Getting Over You, songs that describe the liminal spaces before or after a relationship with nuance and intensity.

I Really Like You doesn’t sound like Call Me Maybe, with its quarterturning strings mimicking the abrupt animation of nerves. At best, it acts as Call Me Maybe’s exposed radioactive skeleton. Synths surge through the track in iridescent shapes, Jepsen singing anxiously and acutely around them about a more advanced crush.

Jepsen’s voice has always had a meteorological quality; in the ecosystem of a pop song it can sound like a cloud lifting through the atmosphere. The way she sings “I really, really, really, really, really, really like you” embodies the mercurial ecstasy of a crush, each additional “really” adding significant mass to the “like”. And she sings “And I want you/Do you want me?/Do you want me too?” with such velocity that the lines inadvertently simulate the syllabic rhythms of thinking and feeling.

The song was co-written and co-produced by Peter Svensson of the Cardigans, and it bears some of the ease and precision of the best Cardigans singles (Lovefool, of course, but also Carnival). Svensson also co-wrote Love Me Harder by Ariana Grande and the Weeknd, which peaked at No 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January and which is similarly infused by 80s synth-pop, all ascendant emotions, vaporous drums and fluorescent, hissing synthesizers.

Jepsen’s new album has yet to have a release date, but her Instagram feed depicts her writing and working with Dev Hynes and Ariel Rechtshaid (who worked together on the tense and opaque synth-pop of Sky Ferreira’s Everything Is Embarrassing) and Jack Antonoff of Fun and Bleachers (who co-wrote and produced the gauzier songs on Taylor Swift’s 1989). She’s also working with Tegan and Sara, and I Really Like You definitely sounds related to their 2013 album Heartthrob, especially its lead single Closer, which described in differently specific terms the pulse and shimmer added to one’s experience of the world when caught in the vortex of an overwhelming crush.

Time will tell the relative success of this song – whose video will star Tom Hanks and Justin Bieber – especially when considering her towering initial breakthrough, which leaves her in the cultural memory as a one-hit wonder. (In fact, Good Time, her single with Owl City, was also a hit; it reached No 8.) Regardless, I Really Like You continues the bright, varicoloured pop aesthetic Jepsen advanced on her 2012 album Kiss, and on which, incidentally, both Heartthrob and 1989 seem distinctly modeled. Even if her new single isn’t as big as Call Me Maybe, at least the pop world finally caught up to Carly Rae Jepsen.