I've been waiting for this for a long time

Months and months after its debut, the best American boy band song properly released in years--only fighting for that title against New Kids on the Block's "Twisted," which was never a single--has a music video. V Factory's "Love Struck" is helped in no small part by the fact that it's co-written by Darin and one of his collaborators for his last album, sounds like a Darin song, and still has Darin on backing vocals, but as Swedish as the song's credentials may be, it's exactly the sound American boy bands should be making (and the American boy band singing Swedish-penned songs combination is one that gave us some of the best songs of the last boy band boom).



Edit: people outside the U.S. can watch the video in lower quality here.

Seeing an American boy band in a music video doing bits of a dance routine while performing a song that I can actually legitimately stand up for as great is an experience that triggers all the right nostalgia parts of the brain, but "Love Struck" is still modern. I keep hoping the song, which has struggled up towards the bottom end of the chart, will fully take off: with more of a promotional push, it has the potential to become a mid-size hit, even if my dreams of a smash are probably pie-in-the-sky. For a while, I hoped that the release of Fame (yes, it's a movie remake of what you're thinking of) might provide a boost, with one of the group's members having a significant role in the movie from what I understand. With Fame's release not until the end of September, though, that seems too far away to be helpful.

To some extent, though, even cracking the top forty of mainstream radio airplay, as they've done for the past three weeks ("Love Struck" currently sits at #37), is an achievement in this environment. The long time it's taken other songs to take off, though, means that despite it slipping in radio plays this week, I can't stop myself from thinking there's still a chance for this song to do even better.

In short: best effort at doing the boy band thing--speaking of technical, traditional boy bands--that the U.S. has had for quite some time.

V Factory's debut single "Love Struck" is for sale now at major U.S. digital stores.