Ace of Base

“It's poker, he can't see it in my face / But I'm about to play my Ace”

Community readers hear "play my Ace" as a wink to Ace of Base, the Swedish pop institution — fitting for a song whose producers, Max Martin and Shellback, come out of the same Swedish hit-factory lineage (the Denniz Pop / Cheiron school). The nod plants a marker of the genre's heritage inside a song that is itself an homage to an era. It runs alongside the song's existing scarlet-letter reading of the same family of imagery, not in place of it.