30 Jun 2026

The Music of ‘Love Island’

by jj skolnik

Peacock

Over the jaunty rhythm of “Return to Sender”—the 1962 Elvis hit in which a lovelorn man refuses to accept that the woman he’s writing to is simply not interested in reading his letter—a recent episode of the reality matchmaking show Love Island USA opened, with a series of quick shots of clearly perturbed twenty-somethings reeling from the new indignities soon to be revealed.

One of the recurring gimmicks on Love Island is Casa Amor, in which the men and women are split up into neighboring villas and introduced to a whole set of new bombshell Islanders with whom to “test their connections.” The producers then send photos of contestants canoodling with the new recruits to their former Island partners, and chaos predictably ensues. The choice of “Return to Sender” for this year’s edition of Casa Amor is thus way too smack on the nose. This is the wacky world of Love Island music supervision—hamfisted, offputtingly direct, and completely ridiculous. It’s also a key part of the show’s aesthetic in a way that other reality shows have never quite mastered. The effect is like being hit on the head repeatedly with a cartoon mallet. And it totally makes sense, once you’ve watched for a while.

Love Island is a perverse show. I don’t mean that in terms of fetish content, though that certainly seems to have been amped up on the U.S. version lately—possibly because it’s a streaming-only show on Peacock, unfettered by the regulations of network TV. Recent seasons have brought us a number of challenges I can only describe as “Double Dare, but for horny adults,” including one in which the men were handcuffed and the women blindfolded and covered in paint, in order to track who’d kissed who; the women had to locate their partners by kiss and then handcuff themselves to them; in another, the contestants played musical chairs by plopping their asses into cakes when the music stopped. There was also a truly egregious amount of toe-sucking.