Tove Lo is topless.
Acting on the belief that this was an audio-only interview, the Swedish singer-songwriter giggles and excuses herself to scavenge for a shirt, leaving me and her publicist to contemplate the static hum of our Zoom call for a few seconds. (For the uninitiated, this is totally on brand for her.)
When she reappears on camera, fully clothed, she flashes a smile that hides the hours of video shoots, YouTube livestreams, and TikTok edits that have comprised the promo cycle for her newly released fifth studio album, Dirt Femme. Vitally, it’s her first record away from the major-label system—after her years-long contract with Universal Music expired, she opted to release Dirt Femme via her own Pretty Swede Records, aided by a small, personalized team rounded out by artist relations company Mtheory.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Doing it independently now is, like, very different, but very great for me. I really enjoy it. I feel very free,” she confesses from the floor of her home studio.
“Being with a major label—the main need is to sell records, because it’s supposed to be commercially successful music. That, and being in pop, and wanting to make weirder or darker things that don’t resonate with as many people, could sometimes be frustrating for them.” Even so, she readily admits, “I so needed a major label to have my music break the way that it did.”
That break came in 2014 with “Habits (Stay High),” a hedonistic sleeper hit about self-medicating to get over a breakup. The sonic equivalent of an episode of Skins, it was part of a wave of self-conscious, moody pop hits like Lorde’s “Royals” and Sia’s “Chandelier” that signaled a shift away from the bright bombast of early 2010s chart mainstays like LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” and Katy Perry’s “Firework.” Over the next decade, she would continue to churn out a familiar blend of danceable hooks and confessional verses. Along the way, Tove sprinkled some of her smudged-eyeliner suavity into songs by Lorde, Hilary Duff, and Dua Lipa, whose 2020 track “Cool,” written by Tove, features the lyric, “I could see us in the real life”—the sort of slight butchering of the English language that turned other Swede-penned songs like “…Baby One More Time” (written by Tove’s one-time collaborator Max Martin) into instant classics.
Meanwhile, her music videos have become events unto themselves, culminating in a 2019 Grammy nomination for the breathtaking “Glad He’s Gone” video, which featured an impressive amount of CGI for a self-described “left-of-center pop bitch.” The achievement only intensified Tove’s already insatiable appetite for pairing her music with stunning visuals.
“Honestly, I pay for a lot of my videos,” she says. “I paid for ‘Glad He’s Gone’ ‘cause it was just too much of a budget for a label to support. No one, at least when they’re at my level, would spend that money on a video. My team tells me that all the time. ‘You’re being an idiot, why are you wasting so much money on this?’ It’s my guilty pleasure, I guess. I love it.”
A few days before our call, she was in Estonia shooting the video for “2 Die 4,” the third single off Dirt Femme. In it, she coos about a handsome new lover over an irresistible sample of Gershon Kingsley’s seminal 1969 electronic composition “Popcorn.” It’s part electronic music history, part Y2K indulgence, with a video—featuring creative direction from Tove’s husband, Charlie Twaddle—that recalls the water-splashing antics of Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty.”
It’s also one of the more lighthearted tracks on Dirt Femme, which grapples with everything from Tove’s teenage struggle with counting calories (“Grapefruit”) to her fear of becoming boring (“Suburbia”). On “True Romance,” she forgoes her typically cool delivery in favor of a guttural chorus that transforms into a satisfying, full-throated shout the second time around.
If it all sounds a little bit more personal, that’s because it is.
“It’s the first time I’ve had this much time to write and be in one place,” Tove explains, simultaneously thanking and blaming the COVID-19 pandemic for giving her the space to sit with her thoughts. “The last time I had that kind of time was for my first album.”
Tove’s last album, Sunshine Kitty, was released in September 2019, about six months before the pandemic upended live performances. She finished about half of the record’s planned tour dates before postponing the rest, splitting her time between the U.S. and Sweden while life slowly got back to normal.
“In my mind, I had just put out an album and I was supposed to tour all year, and then my deal was up, and I didn’t feel like writing for the first year, almost,” she recalls. “When I first started writing music [again], there wasn’t a purpose. I was just kind of writing songs. That made them slightly more vulnerable.”
“Suburbia,” in particular, deals with a perennial concern for the party girl, who once bragged about drinking “champagne all day” to a lover stuck in a “boring bubble” on 2019’s “Bikini Porn.” It’s a fear that became all the more real in 2020, when she and Twaddle decamped to Las Vegas for a chapel wedding in the middle of the pandemic. It’s one of the few times she felt like her parents fully understood one of her life choices, she says.
“There’s only one way to live really with the people I grew up with,” she says, referring to her hometown in Stockholm. “When I got married, it was like, ‘Oh, you’re doing something normal, you’re like us.’ I felt it from family and friends in a way that’s like, so what am I supposed to do? The next logical step? Be boring straight couples that only talk about the renovations they’re doing in their houses?”
Not that she has a common living arrangement to begin with; along with her husband, Tove currently shares her Los Angeles home with three friends. One of them is producer Tim Nelson, or TimFromTheHouse, who worked closely with Tove on Dirt Femme. There’s also Sam, a musician and music manager, and Jesse, a fashion event producer.
If that’s not enough action under one roof, she’s also hired her best friend to help her shoot TikToks. “I’m actually having a lot of fun on that platform. I will say, it’s lazy of major labels to be like, ‘Oh, we’re not gonna put your song out until it goes viral on TikTok,” she says, possibly referring to artists like Halsey, who has openly complained about label-mandated TikToks. “But then to artists I also wanna say, just give it a try. It’s such a broad platform, you don’t even have to necessarily relate it to your music. You can do anything else that you like to do, and it’ll probably resonate with some people because it’s such a massive place with a lot of niche lanes to go down.”
Her house may be abuzz with creativity, but the “collective,” as she calls it, finds plenty of time to play.
“I got a friend who’s an absolute techno nerd, so I’ll just go with her to a lot of the more rave-y venues in L.A.,” she says. “Your average place [in L.A.] closes at 2. There’s a lot of cool DJs and cool places, but you have to go down to the shittier venues with not the best sound. It’s hard to find a place where they can blast until 6 a.m. without it being loud and you actually get an immersive sound system.”
Still making music, still partying, and still living with roommates, it’s safe to say Tove Lo is far from a humdrum Hollywood housewife.
“I guess I have this fear that that’s what we were subconsciously moving toward,” she says. “A lot of times you end up how you grew up, in some ways. Now that I’m back in my element again, I’m not that worried.”
