Tove Lo
Queen of the Clouds (Universal)

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like the good girls get the breaks. Consider the cases of Amanda DeSimone and Tove Lo, one of them an American Idol also-ran who’s apparently toiling as a Victoria’s Secret employee in New Jersey, the other a Stockholm-spawned supermodel singer deemed worthy of her own Wikipedia page.

What they have in common is they not only seem to enjoy partying till they pass out, but also write songs about it. Google “Amanda DeSimone + Butt Drunk (The Vodka Tampon Song)” and you’ll be treated to a Gaelic-tinted house-lite epic, with lyrical highlights including the line “I don’t like things up in my ass, but in this case I’m cool with it.” The video for Tove Lo’s “Habits (Stay High)”, meanwhile, has the Swede looking bleary-eyed and tired while singing sweet electro-blues nothings about eating dinner in bathtubs and frequenting sex clubs. Guess which one has been the massive hit?

Smartly, Lo plays the horny card more than once on Queen of the Clouds, her major-label debut. The record starts off with the spoken intro “THE SEX”, in which she argues that doing it is always best at the beginning of a relationship. On the tracks that follow, the 26-year-old positions herself as a less freaky, and probably more horny, version of Lykki Li. The airy and ethereal “My Gun” contains the question “Do you think I’m easy?”, while the only thing preventing the crystalline “Like Em Young” from sounding epically distasteful is that it’s sung by a woman.

Queen of the Clouds isn’t without its great moments, including “Timebomb”, where Lo delivers a rapid-fire account of a broken relationship over driving percussion and private-dancer piano. And it’s not without its duds, with “The Way That I Am” seeming like third-generation Patti Smith with 200 percent more synths.

The record gets points for ambitiousness as it attempts to tell a love story in three parts. But let’s be honest: the big drawing card is the borderline-novelty number “Habits (Stay High)” (20,975,647 YouTube views), which quite frankly can’t hold a tampon string to “Butt Drunk” (32,997 YouTube views). Lo’s song has landed her an opening slot on Katy Perry’s upcoming Australian tour. Amanda DeSimone, meanwhile, seems to be fitting bored housewives for bras in New Jersey. Life truly isn’t fair.