“Why is that? Why do we see emotional as a negative thing?” You’re in charge if you’re the most chill,” she said. “You have the upper hand if you show the least amount of emotion. In the lead single off Lady Wood, the buoyant banger “Cool Girl,” she murmurs, “Now you can’t tell if I’m really ironic.” Like the “cool girl” in Gillian Flynn’s book Gone Girl, she’s a woman who doesn’t betray emotion, who plays it cool. While, like many pop artists, Tove Lo’s music dwells on tropes like hookups and breakups, it’s only to undermine them in the same breath. After she recovered, she pushed her voice to places she hadn’t been able to reach previously, resulting in the nimble vocal show she puts on in Lady Wood - the album is all about pushing herself to uncomfortable places both physical and emotional, she said, “chasing that thing that scares me and gets me excited and turned on at the same time.” (The new album isn’t short on collaborators, either, including Wiz Khalifa and Joe Janiak.)
In January 2015, Tove Lo underwent surgery for vocal cord cysts. The past two years of touring, writing for other artists like Ellie Goulding as well as for herself, and guest-starring on tracks with Alesso, Broods, and Flume, took a physical toll. This impulse to brace against convention is reflected in Lady Wood.
#SPEND MY DAYS LOCKED IN A HAZE FREE#
“Where do you draw the line between nudity and liberation and feeling free and being in control of your body, to just objectifying?” “I like confronting people about it,” she said. So she’s approaching the long-awaited follow-up album, Lady Wood, out October 28, with a newfound appreciation of how her image is received. “I’ve had to make a stand for things that I thought was just normal things.” She’s a self-identified feminist, openly bisexual, candid about sex and drug use, identifiers she once took for granted but are now very much part of her public persona. “I never thought of myself as a political person,” she said, sitting in the lobby of the Ludlow Hotel in downtown New York. (Then, in “Not on Drugs,” the reference is metaphorical: “I’m not on drugs, I’m just in love / You’re high enough for me.”) She didn’t approach Queen of the Clouds intending to make a statement about sex-positivity or her drug use, but these were the lines that critics scrutinized, both in the press and in the public at large. “Spend my days locked in a haze / Trying to forget you babe, I fall back down / Gotta stay high all my life to forget I’m missing you,” she sings. Her lyrics are filled with references to sex and drugs and her impulsive tendencies “Habits (Stay High),” as its name implies, discusses using substances as a form of escapism following a breakup. “Habits” and the subsequent debut album Queen of the Clouds, catapulted Tove Lo, now 28, into the spotlight, but also placed her under the microscope. Now she and her Swedish contemporaries regularly dominate the charts. Tove Lo is of a different generation entirely, having grown up listening to Ace of Bass and Robyn.
Eventually, of course, it became the highest-charting song on the Billboard Hot 100 by a Swedish musician since Ace of Bass’s “The Sign” two decades prior. The Swedish singer-songwriter Tove Lo first released her song “Habits (Stay High)” in early 2013, but it wasn’t until 2014 - after she signed with Island Records and Max Martin’s songwriting collective Wolf Cousins - that the track really gained momentum.
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