You can listen to the full track below. We here at scandipop have now had over 24 hours to digest the song, let it sink in, and get used to it – so we now feel it’s an acceptable time to give our full and accurate assessment of it! So here we go;

Well it’s bloody fantastic, isn’t it?!

As Eric himself said in our interview with him last week, it’s not a million miles away from the sound of what we heard on ‘Saade Vol.1′, just a little bit harder. It’s still very much sounding like a natural part of this ‘Saade’ album era, but at the same time it’s definitely a progression. It’s the sound of a young artist having already found his style, now putting the finishing touches to it. Perfecting it.

We know we bang on a lot about ‘international success’, but we’re going to address it again here. It’s clearly very important to him, it’s very important to his fans, and so it’s something that needs to be thought about with each new release. ‘Hotter Than Fire’ IS the best chance out of everything he’s released so far, of having some international success. Out of all we’ve thus far heard from him over two albums, ‘Hotter Than Fire’ does have the biggest hit potential outside of his regular fanbase. In Sweden at least he’s had a bonafide hit with ‘Hearts In The Air’ – it didn’t just make the sales chart (Digilisten), but also the chart that reveals what Swedish people are streaming on Spotify (Sverigetopplisten), AND it made an impact on the Swedish radio airplay chart too. Plus, it didn’t just make brief appearances on all three – it had staying power (in fact it’s still on the Digilisten and the radio airplay chart). So we know that Eric Saade can have a hit outside of his usual fanbase and outside of a Melodifestivalen context now. And if he can get it with ‘Hearts In The Air’, then he should have no problem getting one with ‘Hotter Than Fire’, which is an even better song. And it could well be the song to make things start to happen to him outside of Sweden too. Something which, in our eyes and ears, is long overdue.

And this is all a good thing of course.

This time one year ago, we wondered if Eric Saade would ever be able to lose the ‘Manboy’ tag. Yesterday though, while listening to ‘Hotter Than Fire’ for the first time, ‘Manboy’ never seemed so far away!