On August 10, 2010, Cherrytree Records released “Mirrors,” the lead single from the debut studio album Perfectionist by the English singer Natalia Kills. Akon, Giorgio Tuinfort, and Martin “Cherry Cherry Boom Boom” Kierszenbaum wrote and produced it. Kills added writing of her own. Critics generally filed it as disco-pop. The lyric core is sexual sadomasochism, vanity, and arrogance. On the radio the bright arrangement sits next to a dominatrix-styled persona. For adult listeners who know BDSM, the single is one clear line of mainstream pop borrowing SM images: after “Sweet Dreams,” a synth pulse plus power-play innuendo, not underground dungeon music. It is a commercial single with a video, not a how-to.
Recording was at 11th Street Studios, Chalice Recording Studios, and Cherrytree Recording Studios. Tuinfort and Kierszenbaum also played instruments. Mark “Exit” Goodchild and Tony Ugyal engineered. Robert Orton mixed. Gene Grimaldi mastered. The track uses electric guitars, a bassline, and a grinding synthesized beat: bubbling 1980s synth-pop bass, stadium-rock guitars, and a slogan-like falsetto chorus. Jack Stevin at AltSounds heard a gothic feel in the arrangement. Jon O’Brien at AllMusic and Matthew Wilkening at AOL Radio both compared it to Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” O’Brien was talking about the beat. Wilkening called it that classic on Red Bull and steroids. On the chorus Kills sings in falsetto, “Turning the lights out / Burning the candles / And the mirrors gonna fog tonight.” The words point at sadomasochistic sex and a dominatrix persona. Alex Young at Consequence of Sound read the mirror as two-sided identity, hubris, and objectification, and he found those easier to read than some of the broader ideas on Perfectionist. The mirror is a vanity prop and a control surface. The single sells self-display and power as the same glossy problem.
Reviews and charts
Reviews were generally positive. Young called it an essential track on Perfectionist. O’Brien called it a standout and pretty stellar. Lewis Corner at Digital Spy gave it four stars out of five. Blair Kelly at musicOMH praised the chorus as great and very catchy, and criticized the spoken section. Stevin found the song enjoyable and the lyrics uninspiring. The adult-pop consensus was a sleek, slightly dark single that still worked as an album highlight when individual lines split the writers.
In Europe the numbers were solid. On Austria’s Ö3 Austria Top 40 it spent 20 weeks, peaked at number 7, and finished 50th on Austria’s 2011 year-end chart. On the German Media Control singles chart it reached number 10, and it ranked 80th among the most successful singles of 2011. Its highest peak was number 2, not number 1, on Poland’s Airplay Top 20 for the week ending April 15, 2011. In the United Kingdom it entered at number 101 and missed the top 100. Switzerland had a one-week peak at number 52. In Flanders it landed at number 18 on the secondary Ultratip chart, not the main Ultratop. North America was thinner: number 35 on the Canadian Hot 100, and number 3 on the US Hot Dance Club Songs chart. Dance radio and the European pop charts were the strong lanes, not the UK top 40.
The video and the live dates
French director Guillaume Doubet directed the video, released December 2, 2010. Robbie Daw at Idolator called it creepy and cinematic and praised Kills’ wardrobe. It opens on the instrumental, with Kills putting on red lipstick in a car mirror. She leaves the car and passes a man who later appears between two women wearing plastic masks of her face. She walks toward a cracked mirror, the music drops to footsteps, there is a loud noise, she and her reflection look at each other, and she is pulled into the glass. Three titled sections follow. Vanity: a metal skull, and she lip-syncs at a mirror. Control: Kills with an axe on top of a glass box while a man films from inside. Sex: she sings to a skull, then is handcuffed and chained on the floor while seducing a blindfolded man. The clip makes the SM flirtation visible as restraint, surveillance, masks, and mirrored doubles. It is not an instruction video.
Kills first performed “Mirrors” in public on September 8, 2010, at Prince Peter’s fashion show during New York Fashion Week. On April 25, 2011, she sang it on the German ProSieben game show Schlag den Raab. A month later she sang it again at the 2011 Life Ball in Austria.
The dominatrix posture, the fogged glass, the candles, and the control fantasy were packed into a European chart single and a dance-club hit in early-2010s disco-pop. The SM here is fashion and a persona. It is not the negotiation rules of a community. The record still left power exchange on commercial radio.
