Another Michaels/Tranter cowrite, the track makes hooks out of Gomez’s wordless “mm-mm-mm” and producer Ian Kirkpatrick’s manipulated vocal samples, weaving them into lots of other moving pieces. If “Lose You To Love Me” is a tearful face-to-face encounter with an ex, the briskly ricocheting dance-pop track “Look At Her Now” is the sound of leaving that ex in the past and plunging headfirst into the future. Often it does so via the club, which is where the album’s other advance single lives.
The album consistently alludes to wreckage in Gomez’s past but errs on the breezy side, mostly exploring the freedom and relief of life on the other side of the trauma. It effectively communicates both the weight of her heartbreak and the glory of her triumph over it. Lyrically “Lose You To Love Me” gets a lot of mileage out of simple metaphors like “Set fires to my forest, and you let it burn/ Sang off-key in my chorus ’cause it wasn’t yours.” Sonically it’s a hall of mirrors, sending armies of multi-tracked Gomez voices cascading against each other, anchored by booming bass and tearjerker piano. Also involved were Swedish writer-producers Mattman & Robin and, notably, Finneas, whose work on the Billie Eilish catalog has proven his knack for less-is-more pop. Gomez wrote “Lose You To Love Me” with hit-making duo Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, the close collaborators who helped shape Revival’s lithe signature sound. It also helped that it’s a good song, one that expertly transplants the spacious minimalism that has defined Gomez’s best work into the the power-ballad format. “I needed to lose you to love me.” Paired with a black-and-white music video featuring Gomez emoting in vivid closeup, it leveraged her life story, popular ideas about self-care, and a promotional tie-in with Apple into the most surefire hit of her career.
“I needed to hate you to love me,” Gomez sings as grandiose balladry swells around her. As a consequence of her battle with lupus, she famously received a kidney transplant from her friend in 2017, and further complications from the disease led her to check herself into a mental health treatment facility for a few weeks in late 2018.Īll that tumult was the implied context for “Lose You To Love Me,” the titanic melodrama that became Gomez’s first #1 hit when it debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100 two months ago. (Their breakup supposedly inspired much of his EP-length 2018 project My Dear Melancholy.) The relational drama coincided with some intense health struggles. Romantically, there were a handful of presumed reunions with Bieber (before he settled down with Hailey Baldwin) and an entanglement with the Weeknd that lasted most of 2017.
If you follow celebrity news blogs, you are probably familiar with the various twists and turns. As this Billboard career overview points out, some of that probably had to do with “Bad Liar” and “Fetish” fizzling commercially in 2017, but that’s not the only way the interim since Revival has been rocky. Yet despite suggesting the so-called #SG2 was “ very close” in 2016, it has not materialized until now. Since then, she’s remained a consistent presence at Top 40 radio thanks to a steady stream of singles, some of them hits. Revival completed Gomez’s transition into full-fledged adult pop stardom, sent three songs to the top 10, and helped steer mainstream pop away from an aggressive EDM influence toward a softer, smaller, more graceful palette of sounds. (Her first for Interscope after parting ways with the teeny-bopping Hollywood Records, Gomez considers it her proper debut album, 2013’s Stars Dance and a trio of Selena Gomez & The Scene albums be damned.) Her most recent collection, the slinky career highlight Revival, dropped in October 2015.
Gomez, the former Disney Channel teen actress turned pop superstar and tabloid fixation, is part of the class of big-time pop singers who haven’t released a full-length project since the middle of last decade - a group that includes Adele, Rihanna, and her former boyfriends Justin Bieber and the Weeknd. Rare is an accurate title for a Selena Gomez album.
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