I knew I was an Italian girl before I knew why boys got stupid about it. The first time some guy said “I love Italian girls” to me, he delivered it with the confidence of someone who thought ethnicity counted as foreplay. Cute little effort. Deeply unserious. He had that grin men get when they think a woman’s whole history exists to make them feel cultured over one drink. I laughed because I was younger and trained to make bullshit sound charming. Now I hear that corny-ass line and immediately picture my girls with lip gloss shining and patience dead on arrival. A woman’s whole bloodline deserves better than a pickup line from a man who learned romance from airport wine. We are loud at dinner and hotter when annoyed. BERENICE’s ‘Everybody Loves Italian Girls’ takes that tired pickup line and turns it into a dance-pop power move with a raised eyebrow. It lets the women keep the heat while the man stands there looking decorative as hell.
The production slides in glossy and cocky, built for a club floor where nobody is checking the time. The percussion snaps clean and the bass keeps the hips loose. BERENICE sings with that smile-in-the-mouth delivery that makes a lyric feel slightly wicked. “Everybody loves Italian girls!” opens the door with a wink and a threat. Then she moves into “Love’s a stereotype / Got a license plate on my ass / Oooh, my girls and I / Make the dream guy look second-class” and suddenly the man’s fantasy is the least interesting body in the room. The song is shiny as hell. It knows the joke and makes the joke pay cover. That shit matters because the production never loses its goddamn grin. It lets BERENICE flex and pull focus before the hook has even finished fixing its lipstick.
In the first verse, the song gets sapphic in that delicious party bathroom way. One look from the right girl can wreck your whole alibi. BERENICE sings “Pretty ladies / Hold me tight / Make me dizzy / By your side” and the song turns friendship into something charged enough to fog the mirror. She follows with “Oooh I think I might have a crush on you!” and I love how blurry the line gets between admiration and attraction. This is a girl looking at her friends and realizing they have been the main event the whole damn time. Men can hover around the edges. Cute for them. The real chemistry is in the circle of women hyping each other until everyone else starts to look underdressed.
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Her Italian imagery is pure camp with a manicure. “Ragazza italiana / From Roma to Havana / Oh boy, we love the drama / Ha ha” turns heritage into performance with a smirk. She is playing with the fantasy because she owns the costume rack now. Then the boy tries to understand. Bless his little heart, he is failing in public before the chorus even lets him breathe. “Cute, he’s even trying, trying hard / But he don’t understand / No, no, he don’t know / No, he don’t know”. The punchline is that he cannot access the good part. He can say the line. He can admire the packaging. He cannot read the room. BERENICE makes that gap funny and kind of sexy because the women know something he does not. That is the tease. That is the damn game.
Then the song swerves fully into girl romance as survival and pleasure, which is where it gets warmer. She sings “My girls treat me nice / Treat me right / My kind of romance” and suddenly the pickup line has lost custody of the plot. The sweetest attention in the song comes from women who know how to make each other feel seen. BERENICE follows it with “So ladies, ladies / Turn it up / Got me blushing / Look at us” and that blush is the sexiest detail here. BERENICE understands that being admired by your girls can still make you stand taller and move differently. God, I love when women stop being polite and start being obvious.
My favorite little knife of a line is “Everybody wants a woman / Who’s smart and makes their exes nervous.” That is the lyric with eyeliner on. A woman who makes exes nervous knows what they lost and knows they deserved to lose it. Then BERENICE calls the count in with “Oooh, everybody loves Italian girls! / Cinque, sei / Cinque, sei, sette, otto” and the whole thing snaps into choreography. You can practically see the shoulders roll back. I am fucking obsessed with pop that makes confidence physical. This one puts body language before empowerment slogans. Hell yes, we are counting ourselves in now.
By the bridge, BERENICE stops flirting with the stereotype and starts handing out survival instructions. “Dance it off, scream it out / Never beg, never bow / Trust your gut, call it out / If he’s dull, get a cab / Say it twice, say it proud / Girls like us like it loud” has the energy of a bathroom mirror pep talk after a man has been boring for twenty fucking minutes too long. It is simple and useful, which is honestly my favorite kind of advice. Move your body and leave when he gets dull. BERENICE has said this section is the advice she would give her “15-year-old self,” the girl who grew up around pressure to be “subtle” and “composed” when her whole personality needed a bigger dance floor. She also said London gave her that endless “I love Italian girls” chat-up line and she wanted “to flip that expression on its head” and use it “to celebrate my girls.” Good. Take the line back and powder it in glitter. The men can pay attention to the remix.
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Closing with “Oooh oh, I think I might have a crush on you” sends the crush across the whole glowing circle she built. This is attraction with better taste. This is self-worth wearing perfume and making eye contact first. That last line circles back with more power because now it belongs to her.
BERENICE, the stage name of Matilde Liboni, is a Northern Italian-born, London-based pop artist who turned feeling “too much” into her whole fucking superpower. Growing up in Northern Italy she felt boxed in by a version of girlhood that wanted her quieter and easier to package then she moved to London and sharpened that outsider voltage into theatrical pop with bite. Her music pulls from big-personality pop world-builders while staying rooted in female friendship and self-possession. BERENICE writes like a woman who got tired of making herself digestible and thank goddess for that shit because polite was never going to fit her anyway.
Next time some guy says he loves Italian girls I hope he understands he is walking into a room where the women already picked the soundtrack. BERENICE turns that line into a mirror with the lipstick still wet on it. The loud girl at fifteen deserves to hear this before she starts folding herself smaller at the table. Let her dance before anyone approves of the outfit. Let her know the stereotype gets weaker every time she enjoys herself too much. That is the fuck-you in the song and it is gorgeous. Everybody loves Italian girls. Sure. We loved each other first.
