Tove Lo Lets the Little Feelings Speak

It is ten days before Tove Lo releases her next album, and our conversation catches her in the middle of a string of sleepless nights. “I’m actually walking on my treadmill right now,” she confides. “I need to walk just to keep my brain alive. So you’re getting very unfiltered answers.”

Lo, who stands as one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of this century, has been involved in every angle of music production. She sang first in Tremblebee, a math rock band, before signing a publishing deal in 2011 and joining Max Martin’s Wolf Cousins collective, where she wrote songs for other artists while releasing her own material independently. One of those independent releases, the sleeper hit “Habits,” achieved worldwide ubiquity in 2014 when Hippie Sabotage’s remix blasted it onto the top of global charts, and her debut album, Queen of the Clouds, established her reputation for candor about sex, heartbreak, and drug use that has permeated her work since.

Her studio albums followed at a steady pace: four albums in ten years, culminating with Dirt Femme in 2022, after which she left her longtime label to release her music through Pretty Swede Records, her self-generated and owned record label. Estrus breaks that rhythm. Four years separate it from Dirt Femme, the longest interval between albums in her career, much of it spent touring the previous record, DJing, and making her Heat EP with SG Lewis (and the travelling party series which accompanied its release). It is the album she has taken the longest to concoct, and the first of which she could exert complete control over.

The record waiting at the end of those ten days is a colder one than its predecessor—Dirt Femme, she explains, was gold, shimmery and confident, where “Estrus is the moody, more introspective sister who’s metallic, and dark, and writes angry poems,” a relationship she compares to the sisters in 10 Things I Hate About You, Bianca and Kat. Estrus is perhaps her most spoken, a confessional delivered at the pace of thought, and its visual world forms around a single image that keeps surfacing while she makes it. “I kept seeing a black cat throughout the whole process,” she recalls. “I even had this image of this black kitten that was jumping at the camera with reflective eyes, lit-up eyes, you know, when you take a photo with a flash. I kept seeing that as this unpredictable night creature who was roaming freely and being a bit obnoxious.”

“Representing conformity is this really intense cult imagery, which I just find quite beautiful and haunting,” she observes. “And then the free version of me is this feline creature, becoming the black cat.”

The position is an old one for her, continuous with the media-ascribed labels which have followed her since the onset of her career. She emphatically resonates with the prospect of being a vanguard of dark pop. “100%!” she replies. “I don’t know if it’s the Swedishness in me, just wanting to dig around in those feelings that people don’t really want to talk about, or that make people uncomfortable, or that people find embarrassing. I’m just like, ‘No, let’s get into it!’ I have a love for that.”

Sonically, Estrus gathers the separate strands of her earlier records into one place. In a pop landscape reshaped by BRAT, where off-the-cuff confession has become evermore prevalent, Lo’s lyricism carries a particular history—the guilt and shame that have run through her writing since “Habits” are handled differently here. Where the earlier songs dramatise the spiral, these admit the charge and accept it, a shift the tracklist states outright in a song titled “the bad one.”

Her candor hinges on a simple thought process, which she describes without ceremony. “I feel like I just have no real boundary,” she says. “Why does it matter if people know that?” The songs can carry what a conversation could not, she continues, because the form holds it at a workable distance. “It’s really personal, but it’s protected by the song, almost, I think.”

The visual world is built with her husband, Charlie Twaddle, who serves as her creative director and with whom the marriage and the work share a roof. “I work with my creative director once I have the songs,” she explains. “We kind of block ourselves away somewhere and just listen to the album on repeat, look in a bunch of art books, watch a bunch of movies, and take in a lot of different kinds of visuals and art forms.” Charlie’s voice appears on the record itself, on “Roomie,” a song of pure funk that encapsulates their relationship in domestic miniature.

This album is also her most choreographed, its movement worked out in advance down to the visualisers for “idiot” and a performance art-laced listening party in New York ahead of the release, and her preparation proceeds in the margins of her social life—friends laughing in one room while she rehearses tour choreography in the next. The discipline draws on her acting work (she starred in Vilhelm Moberg’s adaptation of The Emigrants in 2021), which she treats as a second education in expression. “I learned with acting how much you can communicate without words,” she considers. “What are your eyes doing? What’s your body doing? I realized how much emotion I can communicate through my eyes.” What unites the two practices, she explains, is the quality of attention each one demands. “I think I’m always looking for things where I have to be 100% present,” she reflects. “When I’m in the studio writing a song, as I’m writing I have to be present. When I’m recording, when I’m singing, when I’m rehearsing, when I’m on stage. And same with acting, you can’t, your brain can’t wander. You have to be so locked in, and there.”

Her unadulterated dedication to her craft reflects in her considerable chart achievements and reputation amongst peers. “Habits” reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, stayed on the chart for 39 weeks, and became the highest-charting American single by a Swedish artist since Ace of Base’s “The Sign” in 1994. It has since been certified eight-times platinum in the United States and passed a billion streams on Spotify. Lo has written more than seventy songs across her own albums and other artists’ records, a body of work recognised in Sweden in 2015 with STIM’s Platinum Guitar, an award given to accomplished songwriters, and her credits from the Wolf Cousins years include songs for Icona Pop, Cher Lloyd, Lea Michele, and Hilary Duff, alongside work of her own recorded for the Hunger Games and Divergent soundtracks.

A partial catalogue of her collaborations provides an even more impressive picture. She co-wrote Ellie Goulding’s “Love Me Like You Do,” a British No. 1 record for Fifty Shades of Grey that brought her Grammy and Golden Globe nominations, and Lorde’s “Homemade Dynamite,” which placed her pen inside one of the most acclaimed pop albums of its decade. Duran Duran, making Future Past in the fortieth year since their debut, sent Lo the unfinished album and allowed her to choose where on it she belonged; she chose “Give It All Up,” took a co-writing credit, and sang opposite Simon Le Bon. Coldplay gave her “Fun,” on A Head Full of Dreams. Flume built “Say It” around her voice on Skin, which won the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album. Nick Jonas recorded “Close” with her, a duet she co-wrote that reached the American Top 20 and was certified platinum. The exhaustive list continues through Charli XCX, Martin Garrix, Kylie Minogue, and Alesso, whose “Heroes (We Could Be)” she co-wrote and sang to the top of the American dance chart in 2014.

Her collaborations run on a method she applies as carefully to other artists’ records as she does to her own. “Usually it has to be someone that I like,” she explains. “If I get asked to work with an artist, usually I do kind of a deep dive and look through their catalog, figure out if I don’t already know their stuff. And then I kind of just go in with the mindset of like, okay, what are you going through? What are you feeling? How much are you willing to share? I really try to just go into their brain, and then whatever they want to share, and then relate that to something I’ve been through.”

The long interval before Estrus had a second cause, which she describes plainly. Touring Dirt Femme occupied her into the end of 2023, and the dance music she made in the aftermath, DJing alongside SG Lewis and expanding two songs into the Heat EP, operated by looser rules than her own shows. “Just show up, just rock up with the USB,” she grins. “I’m singing on top of the track, like, whatever. Just fucking go!” When she returned to her own record, the writing resisted the significance a sixth album is supposed to carry. “I had a bit of writer’s block,” she admits. “It’s album six, I should have some kind of message, I should have grown as a person, I should be better. And then I just didn’t feel all those feelings at all. And I kind of felt like everything I was writing about my feelings felt really small and petty, and then I was like, well, that’s also me. So just accept your little feelings and go for it.” She locates the blockage precisely, in a concern with reception that her earlier writing never entertained. She was held back by a preoccupation with how she wanted to be perceived instead of simply writing what she needed to write.

She grants that the major label let her be herself even when the relationship involved, in her words, a bit of a fight. With independence, she can set the texture of her own working process. “The freedom and just the calmness around me choosing when and where and how things happen really suits me well,” she says. “I think I was always meant to be independent.”

Estrus also marks the most expansive, large-scale production of her career. The video for “I’m Your Girl Right?” filmed in Brazil, a location chosen with a freedom that still surprises her. “It’s amazing to feel like there’s no limit, the limit does not exist,” she remarks. “I can just be like, let’s go to São Paulo.” In the video, she takes over a monastery in the mountains alongside dozens of dancers in a phantasmagoric vision. Her visual ambitions predate the budgets, she is quick to add. “I’ve always fought really hard to be able to do the best video that I can with whatever I have. It sets the tone for the whole world.”

The ethic that organises her creative work runs through her public commitments as well. She is an ardent supporter of The Trevor Project, the American organisation serving LGBTQ+ young people, and the connection runs even deeper through friendship. “I want to shout out my friend Marissa Cohnen, who works at the Trevor Project, who I love and support a lot,” she proclaims. “She speaks a lot about trans rights, which is something I’m very in support of, and [The Trevor Project does] amazing work. She is just a great person and works her ass off there.” Her other example comes from home: UMO, Sweden’s national online youth guidance service, where anyone between thirteen and twenty-five can ask questions about sex, health, and relationships anonymously and receive answers from professionals, a provision attached to the country’s network of free youth clinics. It is the premise of her songwriting, administered at national scale: the frightening question, answered without punishment.

What Estrus finally argues, in its metallic and unhurried way, is stated by its maker as a reminder she addresses to herself. “Keep going your own path,” she says. “You don’t need to conform into this mold as a woman because of where you are in life. You can still keep going down your own path and listen to your gut.”

Be the first to read this story and many more in print by preordering your copy of our twelfth issue here. Tove Lo continues her tour November 5 in Manchester, and has recently announced a new string of North American tour dates next spring.