Jark
PLUMP and RIPE
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2007
- Messages
- 59,221
sixth album. ESTRUS "meaning female mammal in heat, of course"
AXS leaked the press release, so the first single must be coming very soon
GIVE IT TO ME NOW
AXS leaked the press release, so the first single must be coming very soonAfter 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.
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.
“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.
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.”
GIVE IT TO ME NOW
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