I think Calvin is a genius and if he had to leave Scotland and England, go to LA, get a decent haircut, a stylist and personal trainer in order to fully realise his genius, then I do not begrudge it in any way (if Simon Reynolds can do it, why not Calvin?).
I don’t know if this is the culmination of his talent, as he has made more iconic tunes and there is surely more to come, but I think it’s one the perfect products of its time. He transforms Dua into an unattainable, mysterious, flickering muse, a locus of contemporary desire, filtered through screens and software.
This doesn’t necessarily kill the reality of feeling, it simply reflects the filters that transform the way feelings are framed, encountered, understood: the feelings here being romantic longing and physical yearning. This song is a perfect encapsulation of the new phenomenology of desire: immediate, transparent, captured and even enslaved by the surface, but as deeply felt and difficult as emotion and lust have ever been.