Lykke Li Turns the Page

There are moments in life when an idea takes hold that you just can’t shake. No matter how much you try to let it go, it seeps back in, growing and transforming as it makes its way into the world. The next thing you know, it’s no longer a concept but living and breathing right next to you. This was the story behind Swedish pop star Lykke Li’s sixth—and reportedly final—album, The Afterparty, released in May. “I’m always trying to quit, but then it’s also what I do,” says Li of her work as a musician, a practice she has been cultivating for almost twenty years since she dropped her first EP Little Bit in 2007. “I was sitting in my car in LA day after day, in this fishbowl with a bird’s eye view,” she continues. “There’s so much decay and suffering, the news is blasting, and I just got the feeling, Wow, we’re at the afterparty. It’s maybe one, two more hours of full balls-to-the-walls fun, and then something really horrible is going to happen.”

The Afterparty is Li’s rumination on what to many feels like a collective pre-apocalyptic state, an exploration of the emotional weight and drive for self-destructive, unfettered escapism that seems to define this era in which the ravages of climate change remain just barely out of reach, the cost of survival rises and we still get by, and the surreal dystopia of far right populism can, for some, still be distanced just enough to keep going. “It came to me as a title first, and after my last album, I was more interested in doing something visual or moving away from traditional songs,” explains Li. “But then, it was too present as a subject.”

Li is calling from her home in Los Angeles, a midcentury gem you can see in an Apartamento issue released a few years back. She’s just flown in from Berlin, where she held a record release party in the long edgy, now fast gentrifying neighborhood of Neukölln the previous evening. She says The Afterparty isn’t just about the state of the world. “I’m getting older and realizing I’m over the hump of having everything happening to me. I’m not a young girl in the world anymore,” says Li, who turned forty this year. “I have two kids. There’s also like, Oh, I’m at that stage in life. It’s a spiritual afterparty, not a literal afterparty.”

The Afterparty is just under twenty-five minutes long. It’s an elegiac, orchestral offering, blending expansive layered instrumentals with lush harmonies, dives into eighties synth and disco, sweeping rhythmic folk melodies, and experimental moments. It’s a joyfully maximalist project in which the sound often stands in contrast to the dark, messily complicated themes Li sharply explores without filter. She sings about reckless moments, embracing emptiness, allowing yourself to be harmed, and the personal costs of making art that investigates pain. The work has the feelings of a party that went on for too long, the freedom and chaos of this reality-questioning moment. The majority of Li’s music—collaborator Mark Ronson once called her “the high priestess of heartbreak and sadness”—has explored the ups and downs of romantic love. This new record dives into more existential themes while retaining the same rawness that makes her music intimate and emotionally piercing. It may be her strongest and most soul-sweeping album yet.

She says she’s leaned into a fuckboy persona for this new offering. “I’m just a very itchy and restless person, always searching for things. So to be honest, I also felt cornered by just being a woman and then a mother,” Li muses. “When I was in the studio, I was like, You know what? I’m going to bypass my bodily experiences and just pretend that I’m like a rock god, and that I’m a fuckboy, that I’m the night. Sometimes I don’t consent to the role of being female. I don’t agree to these terms.”

It’s an identity that comes out in the devil-may-care nihilism of the single “Knife in the Heart.” “I find that we’re in an era where everyone is talking about ‘my higher self,’” Li shares in her liner notes. “Fuck that. This is an album dealing with your lower self: your need for revenge, your shame, despair. It’s a journey through all the disgusting, sticky emotions. This is a journey through the night, hoping to find dawn—and it’s the dawn of yourself, too.”

For the foreseeable future, Li will be on the road touring The Afterparty, traveling from Los Angeles to Rio, Athens, Austin, and beyond. “I’m dreaming of just disappearing,” she muses, mentioning a love of her friend Lena Dunham’s new memoir Famesick and the continual inspiration of artists like Marina Abramović and Isabelle Huppert who make “hardcore uncompromising art.” Her hope is to move into another medium that allows her to live a quieter life, to go into a studio and come home at night to be with her kids. “I think it’s a really tough world. I have no idea what the impact [of The Afterparty] will be. I just want to create. It could be for cinema, it could be opera, it could be theater. Working on an installation for a long time would be my dream,” says Li. “The most important thing is just to be brave and honest at the same time in all the choices. That’s what I try to do. I’m still hungry.”

The Afterparty is out now. Be the first to read this story and many more in print by preordering your copy of our eleventh issue here.