Tove Lo

Few artists have redefined the emotional possibilities of modern pop as completely as Tove Lo. Emerging from Stockholm with a diaristic style and a defiant openness around sex, addiction, and vulnerability, she quickly became both a pop outlier and a generational touchstone, earning global hits, critical acclaim, and a devoted audience drawn to her unfiltered perspective. Beyond her own catalog, she has shaped the sound of contemporary pop as a sought-after songwriter, bringing that same emotional complexity to artists across the pop spectrum. Here is a singular artist who has never flinched from the uncomfortable, and who has continually evolved her sound to match the emotional stakes of her writing.

After years of locating truth somewhere between hedonism and vulnerability, her sixth album ESTRUS (meaning female mammal in heat, of course) dives into an even deeper, uncharted level of honesty. It is a record full of thrashy emo chic rooted in instinct that feels like both a reinvention and a return to the core of Tove Lo’s mission statement: making people feel everything all at once.

Fans will notice that this is the longest Lo has ever taken between albums. Her last album, Dirt Femme (2022), documented many life-altering changes: she acted in her first film, went independent, and got married. After the dust settled, Lo was unsure where to head next. In these intervening years, she was filled with questions she had no idea how to resolve, let alone transmute into pop music. She searched for some kind of clarity with longtime collaborator Ludvig Söderberg. After a couple of years, she realized that not having the answer “was the answer in itself.”

“I’ve got a lot of feelings but no solutions,” she sings over the opener’s dirty, metallic production. It sets the defining manifesto of this album, which can be summed up in a few words: contradictions that cannot be resolved.

On ESTRUS, Lo draws a finer line across the opposites that have always existed in her work: happiness and sadness, melancholy as content, euphoria as form. Through contradiction, she gets closer to the heart of existence itself, “what it actually feels like to be a human being,” she says. It is an album that charts the full experience: dry-humping on the dancefloor, getting drunk, insecure, and starting a fight; walking home at 6am with mascara running, coming down and wondering whether it was all worth it, then doing it all again.

On ESTRUS, the mind and body pull Lo in different directions. One wants to stay out all night, the other wonders whether it is time to stay home and have kids. “I just have all these tumultuous feelings flying back and forth,” she says. “I think that’s why the album feels so chaotic, but in this intentional way.”

The process itself mirrored the album’s emotional volatility. Early on, she and Söderberg got drunk and began yelling at each other about everything they were going through. Out of that frenzy, the shape of the album emerged. All of the contradictions, the constant fight. She was acutely aware of the expectations surrounding her: six albums in, what do fans want? What does marriage signify to those watching from the outside? What does it mean for her queerness, for the fluid identity she has always protected?

Inspired by The Knife, Robyn, and much of the Swedish indie dance music she grew up on, Lo recorded the propulsive electro-pop of ESTRUS with her longtime collaborators, as well as Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (Addison Rae), in a small fishing village in Sweden where she spent summers as a child and where she also made parts of Dirt Femme. Returning there brought everything back: “growing up, being depressed, struggling with my eating disorder, going through breakups, family drama, loss, everything.” To get to the core of herself, she realized she had to return to where she was first formed. That messy younger self is still accessible to her, now refracted through time.

With this matured perspective, Lo is at her absolute prime on ESTRUS, with songs that are among the most meticulous, observant, funny, and feral of her career. She remains a diaristic writer, but here she is more zoomed in than ever, focusing on the granular and finding, within universal feelings, her own specificity. “I like your teeth, could watch you eat for days, a fancy steak, I’ll pay,” she sings on “I’m your girl right?”, a sentiment anyone who has been obsessed with another person, and who desperately wants to bite their partner’s arm, can immediately identify with.

On ESTRUS, Lo is clearly primal and in heat, but also deeply in love and in doubt. “I’ve chosen to be with this person forever… To me, it’s the most vulnerable I could ever be.” Where pop has long fixated on the rush of first love, she finds richer material in its aftermath: the neuroses, the maintenance, and all the terrifying questions. What if you are not who you thought you would be? What if you drift? What if you find your way back?

She balances these deep ruminations with gut-bumping beats and restless basslines. Listening to it, you can almost picture the room it inhabits: dark and humid with bodies. “I just can’t escape dance,” she says. “I love DJing, I love going to raves.” The only feature, and one of the album’s lighter songs, is the instant eurotrash banger “Des Fleurs” with her dream collaborator Stromae, whom she has been a huge fan of for well over a decade. “And that song’s just too French not to have him,” she says.

In both the album’s darker and lighter moments, Tove Lo never pretends to offer enlightenment. What she gives us instead is something much more courageous: the permission to remain in the unresolved moment, to hold multiple truths and conflicting feelings at once. Because that is where life actually happens, before everything resolves. “Usually I come out of an album with distance and perspective, but with this one I’m still in it,” she says. “This is where I’m at, and I still don’t have the answers.”