The perfect chaos of Tove Lo: 'Self-destruction is part of the game'

Bar Liam Gallagher, when you meet wild music stars, it’s usually the case that they’re surprisingly soft-spoken and considerate in person, at least when on album promotion duties. So it is with Tove Lo, who we meet at the Standard hotel (no relation) and find her a model of poise and dry humour; a cool customer. A surprise, because Tove Lo was a messy brat pop girl when Charli XCX was a mere twinkle in her vape’s eye.

Filthy lyrics? Clothes-shedding? Bisexuality? Banging tunes? Terrifying straight men? Lo’s been doing it for 15 years. And with the world in love with Charli, Slayyyter and the new wave of dancefloor-filling maniacs, the timing for Lo to release her first album in four years, Estrus, is perfect… yet Lo, grappling with shifts in her life, says she felt intensely vulnerable making it, “like a crab without its shell”.

The problem? Her life had become stable. “I always write from such a personal place and the difference with this is the first album I’ve written when I’ve been in a relationship for this long. I’m not writing about the beginning of things or the end of a thing. I’ve been with the same person for nine years.”

Tove Lo

Charlie Denis)

Yes, this party girl elder is settled down with her husband, creative director Charlie Twaddle, something which has brought a fear of losing her edge. “The chaos is still very present,” she qualifies, “but it’s not affecting relationships as much as it used to. I’m more conscious of stopping before I cross the line, although I would say my line is probably a bit further away than most people’s. But it’s been good for my creativity because it taps into another nuance of being an impulsive, messy girl.”

“I’m being told that I’m not allowed to make any more mistakes”

Estrus works with the tension of moving into a new phase of life without becoming a sanitised version of yourself. She says, “I’m being told that I’m not allowed to make any more mistakes or my time for self-exploration is up. I’m just so not there.”

This record is hardly a rocking-chair country album. It’s more that her kind of club music has become physical, emotional and existential.

“I’m not saying it’s wrong to be a responsible person, it’s just I’m not ready for that. Naturally, being in my late thirties, I see where other people are going, but being creative and someone who hates routine… I’m wondering, am I on the right trajectory? These philosophical things are coming in, but also, I just want to live and not think about the future. Luckily, my partner’s very similar. Family, all those adult long life choices, are coming into play and it’s freaking me out. That’s where we’re at: freaking out.”

She wonders if she’s having an early mid-life crisis. Lo grew up in a nice suburb in Stockholm, and was always in bands at school, always writing songs. Coming out of school she began working on her own career as a pop star; by her mid-twenties she was a songwriter in Los Angeles — writing for Girls Aloud among many others — while building her own solo act, which was singularly provocative and uncompromising. Fame — notoriety — was hard to adjust to: “I was just freaked out because I felt like I went from playing to 100 people in clubs in Stockholm to late-night live TV in America — it felt like such a culture shock.”

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As was the reception of mainstream culture. “I remember getting so many questions about ‘is this really the example for you want to set for young girls?’ In pop it wasn’t common yet to sing openly about being a sexual person and being bi and getting f***ed up. Now it’s more like, ‘oh, you’re a feminist and the gays love you’, which is great. But I think the world’s changed, I haven’t changed.”

In becoming one of Sweden’s leading music lights, one with hit singles, songs on The Hunger Games soundtrack and collabs with Lorde, Ellie Goulding and Muse, it necessitated a certain lifestyle that didn’t include a life. “My music has always come first and I’ve always been aware that this unbelievable dream coming true doesn’t happen to many people. When that happens to you, you hold on to it, it’s very hard to sacrifice anything for it. But now I have found people give me the same joy. I can’t just be this shit friend or partner or daughter. I have to show up for the people I love.”

It’s a familiar story for artists, the question of whether their art will suffer if they choose happiness. She says that while “self-destruction is part of the game, I don’t think you need to be unhappy or have chaos to make good music,” but “it’s just that I thrive there creatively… like going to the studio every day, 9 to 5 is my nightmare.”

“I hadn’t found my creative outlet yet and that could put me in bad emotional states”

She acknowledges her need of chaos can be traced back to her upbringing. The daughter of Zettle co-founder Magnus Nilsson and psychologist Gunilla Edholm, she says she instinctively rebelled against the conformity of the affluent area they lived in. “It was very calm, very put together, everyone is perfect and good at everything they do. I would go in and out of depression. I hadn’t found my creative outlet yet and that could put me in bad emotional states.”

She got in trouble at school, dating older guys, drinking, all the fun stuff. “I started listening to grunge, dyed my hair pink and said I was a witch… it got bad but I always felt love, I always went home — I was rebellious in a brat way, not an arson way.”

She stops herself. “The witch imagery is something I’ve brought back with this album. I’ve added references to when I started to realise I was a creative spirit.” What is this creative spirit? “A strong feeling to go against whatever everyone else is doing, and wondering about what other ways there are to live life.”

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It’s this above anything that has made her a pioneer, paving the way for the current pop generation. And recognising this allowed her to overcome writer’s block for this new album. “I did a month in LA with Ludvig Söderberg, my main producer, and we didn’t really get anything. Four or five months later, I was like, let’s go to the south of Sweden, lock ourselves in, get hammered the first night and see what happens.”

She was prepared to walk away from music, but as soon as she was in this little fishing village and on the beer, it clicked: “I came back to the place of writing what I need, not how I want to be received. Just write your feelings and everything will work out.”

Estrus refers to an animal in heat. And the album has that sense of mind and body competing but also giving in to a kind of all-encompassing will. Musically it harks back to her early teen influences like The Knife, The Cardigans and Robyn. On DNH (drunk n horny) she says she was moving away from dance into something more melancholic, almost Radiohead-esque, while Roomie “has this dancey bassline, but it could be an indie band”. She says the track Idiot is “perhaps the defining one on the record — you could think it’s about a person but it’s really me talking to my inner asshole”.

Tove Lo’s playlist

Brand New Chanel$ — Slayyyter

“I’m a huge fan. She opened for me on my last tour.”

Talk to Me, Zara — Robyn and Zara Larsson

“Robyn’s my number one inspiration, and Zara deserves to be the world’s biggest pop star.”

Jeep — Kim Petras

“I just adore her, she’s got a really incredible voice.”

Another great track is I’m the Cake (sample lyric: How am I not hot enough for you? When I’m the cake… you should be eating me) which she describes as “peak ego bruise, jealous pop star going, I’m enough, right? I feel bad for my husband because it’s painting him in a bad light that isn’t really fair. But I was like, ‘It’s not like you’re doing anything bad.’ He’s said, you have to tell people that because otherwise I’m going to get beat up.”

Its funny, candid and quite brilliant music, one that reasserts her place as the original messy girl but also a writer of great wit, sophistication and daring. But if she hasn’t changed, what exactly has in the world since?

“I wasn’t the only artist to do that,” she states. “There was a wave of us taking more ownership of how we want to express ourselves and express desire without being judged. But I think the MeToo movement helped in terms of how people would behave towards you. Along with there just being more women in the music scene, in every space. In terms of it not being scandalous, that’s changed. I just remember having to defend myself and now I don’t feel like I need to.”

Is she also quite clean living now? “No! But I pick my moments. I have it under control.”

But would you call all of this a reinvention? “It’s more like I’m landing in myself, in a weird way. I don’t have all the answers but I’m starting to feel like this is going to be really meaningful for me — it feels like a new big step.”