Good Looking

Album: Milk Teeth (2017)
Charted: 92
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Songfacts®:

  • London-born Suki Waterhouse was known by most as a model and actress before footage of her performing "Good Looking," a hypnotic pop ballad about a romance torn apart by secrets, went viral on TikTok in 2022 around the time she released her debut album, I Can't Let Go. The song was originally released in 2017 but its newfound success prompted the singer to rerelease it, along with her other early tunes, on the EP Milk Teeth later that year.
  • Waterhouse wrote the moody ballad with her frequent collaborators Jules Apollinaire and Natalie Findlay, the duo behind the English psychedelic-rock band Ttrruuces, along with the British-Syrian poet Lisa Luxx. The singer explained how they wrote about a love that was real but wasn't meant to be:

    "'Good Looking' is a representation of desire, attachment, and intimacy that captures the real moments in life, while uncovering the secrets buried within each of us. A girl and a boy embark on a journey that leads them to a burning love where nothing is what it seemed. Sometimes people are not destined to end up with each other. Nevertheless, the reflection always remains..."
  • The music video was written and directed by Eva Doležalová aka Eva Vik. Shot in New York City in the summer of 2017, it follows Waterhouse and her lover, played by Australian model Jordan Barrett, during a day of lovemaking at The Bowery Hotel.

    In 2019, Waterhouse told Hunger magazine that the concept was inspired by "deep horrible blues and a frequency of trouble," which is reflected in some ominous moments, like shots of the bed sheets streaked with blood. The singer sacrificed her own blood for the scene, but it wasn't for the sake of realism - she accidentally cut her hand on a fan during filming. The director was thrilled to have a cost-free element of gore in the low-budget clip and incorporated a hospital scene to take advantage of Waterhouse going to get her hand stitched up.
  • If Waterhouse had listened to her record label, she would've erased the song that made her famous. When she signed with Sub Pop, the Seattle-based indie label that spearheaded the grunge movement with Nirvana and Soundgarden in the '90s, they wanted her to make a fresh start by deleting her old singles, including "Good Looking." Waterhouse didn't even consider complying with their wishes.

    "I'm like, 'No way,'" she told Alternative Press in 2022. "Those songs are everything to me. They’re where everything started. They came from a real need to start putting them out."
  • After it was reissued in 2022, the single peaked at #92 in the UK and reached #14 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in the US.

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