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Cry for You – September

Score: 8.1

In 2006, Petra Marklund, better known by her Europop nom de guerre September, released Cry for You, a track that felt less like a song and more like a government-mandated vaccination against sadness. Somewhere between a breakup anthem and an IKEA flat-pack instruction manual for melancholy, the Swedish queen of cry-while-dancing gifted the world a chorus that managed to be both nihilistic and euphoric, like Robyn if she’d been trapped inside a Ministry of Sound compilation CD for three months.

“Cry for You” is built on a trance-lite backbone that sounds like it was engineered specifically for provincial nightclubs where the carpet is sticky and the smoking area is just a bench. Lyrically, September delivers existential devastation with all the emotion of someone reading out loud from a bus timetable — and that’s exactly why it works. Her stoicism turns heartache into a communal ritual: we’re not crying for him, we’re crying for ourselves, for 2000s fashion, for the tragic return of shutter shades.

Pitchfork has long maintained that pop music is at its best when it convinces you that your heartbreak is part of a collective European experience. Cry for You achieves this in under four minutes, which is more than you can say for most PhD theses on postmodern ennui.

Is it high art? No. But like all essential dancefloor classics, it turns personal despair into a group hug where everyone smells vaguely of Jägerbombs.

Best moment: the chorus, which sounds like the soundtrack to every MySpace breakup ever.
Worst moment: realising you actually did cry for him.

Final verdict: September gave us the perfect reminder that tears and glitter coexist. And sometimes, that’s enough.

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