A quick heads-up: Later in this conversation, there’s discussion about bulimia and anxiety caused by food disorders.
Hot mess became an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, the same year Tove Lo broke out with her sleeper hit “Habits (Stay High).†A post-EDM song that channeled heartbreak hysteria, it established Lo as pop’s histrionic hero, supercharging the crying-on-the-strip-pole aesthetic that has overtaken the genre in the years since its release.
Tove’s songs have remained diaristic and non-didactic, a space for her to inject her most hot-mess emotions with an indelible sense of humor and Eurotrash fun (only Lo, it seems, has had the foolhardiness to name a song “Disco Tits†or sample Crazy Frog while wearing a gold-plated dildo). But her latest album, Dirt Femme — the first release from her independent label, Pretty Swede, and an obvious career best — delves into thornier topics as well. “Grapefruit,†the project’s highlight, feels historic: a retroactive reckoning with her teenage bulimia, it may well be pop’s most explicit treatment of disordered eating yet. Femme is also her first album as a married woman, and the emotional stakes feel higher than ever as she trades in the danger of infatuation for the terror of true love.
You’ve been promo-ing this album for almost a year now, ever since you released “How Long†for the Euphoria soundtrack. Does release week feel extra intense for you?
[Laughs.] Yeah, it’s been pretty intense. Everything is full speed ahead. I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been fun going around the world and being on tour again. It’s so funny; you can tell that no one’s used to it. There’s that fear of COVID looming, but I feel like I’d forgotten that it was this intense.
Do you think the audience’s behavior has changed? I was just watching a TikTok where you said that someone in the crowd threw an ice cube at you.
Here’s the thing: So much worse things have been thrown onstage, but my shows, usually it’s like a dildo or flowers or bras or panties. This guy threw it and really aimed at me. I feel like a little bitch, too, because I know people have had things like bottles and shoes thrown at them. But this thing hit really close to my eye and jolted me, took me out of the moment. Imagine if someone threw an ice cube at you on the street — you’d be like, What the fuck?! Just don’t throw shit at artists, that’s No. 1.
In that video, you asked your viewers how you should have reacted. It’s been interesting seeing you use TikTok as a way to negotiate your relationship with your audience this past year. Has it become a medium for you to feel known?
Yeah, I feel like I gave it an honest shot. I had a conversation with another artist who said that she felt like she wanted to be a part of pop culture and wanted to be moving with the times rather than reject it just because it’s something she hadn’t used before. And I was like, That’s so true. You find a way to communicate with fans on one platform, then there’s another you have to figure out. I’m used to making very curated posts, even though I also love to be funny and silly and not take myself too seriously. And on TikTok, it’s the place to be stripped of anything artist. I’m using it as my outlet to show my silly personality and to have more direct conversations where I’m not trying to curate in any way.
I see you becoming more of a meme now, too — someone filmed a yonic-looking apartment recently and referred to it as your “apartment complex.â€
Also, the sound of Megan Thee Stallion saying my name and I’m just like, This is hilarious; how’d it get to this point? I feel like you can find me there and then when you listen to my music, you’ll be like, oh, wait, she’s actually a serious artist.
Are you finding that more people are pronouncing your name correctly now?
Yeah, and people are apologizing. But honestly, it’s not their fault; I adopted the international way of saying it. In my private life, people would say Too-veh. It felt like a good line. Like, okay, when I’m working, I’m “Tove†and when it’s me at home, it’s “Too-veh.“ It’s really interesting seeing it change. One trailer of RuPaul saying “Too-veh-loo†and it’s like, Oh my God! We all fucked up!
There’s often a lot of emotional intensity in your songs. Have you met many people in your life who possess a similar level of intensity?
Maybe a few, but I feel like it turns into way too much chaos when there’s multiple of us. I feel like the friends I have who are the most like me are the ones who annoy me the most and whom I fight with the most. There’s only space for one! But I’ve gotten better at telling people to just ignore everything I’m saying when I’m having an intense day; to be able to have a space to let my feelings out without others having to feel responsible for them. A lot of the time, people end up feeling responsible because I have an intense energy. People get affected by it, my breakdowns.
So your music became the space for those breakdowns?
Yeah, definitely. It’s a place where I don’t have to modify my feelings. I think it’s important to have people in your life who accept you fully and who you can be yourself around, but I think it’s also important to respect those peoples’ space. I can’t always just launch at everyone with my feelings. In my music I can. I think part of the reason why this record is so dramatic is because I really needed that emotional outlet. I live in a collective, there’s five of us in this house, so I really needed that space during the pandemic to be extremely dramatic. There wasn’t any other place to do that. When I’m on tour, I’m usually the most emotionally calm because I can get those feelings out on stage every night.
How do you relate to your feelings after turning them into pop songs?
I think it really helps me to free myself from that state. If I’m feeling unreasonably anxious or unreasonably jealous, writing about it lets it go, and I’m also able to make it into a beautiful song. I do it a lot when it’s a returning feeling too. Those are the songs people relate to most, when you’re being honest about your flaws and being a flawed human, being vulnerable. It’s what connects me the most with my fans. I’m always happy to not censor that part.
I sometimes think of pop stars as professional love addicts — I know a lot of your songs have been inspired by your dramatic love life — but are you able to still find the chaos in marriage?
Oh, yeah. [Laughs.] Our relationship is great, though: We’ve been together for six years now, and I’ve really found my person. He’s amazing. He definitely has his fucking weird quirks, just like me, but I feel really loved and respected. Even if we’re in a fight, I still feel like he’s being good to me. It’s very new and weird. I have a lot of material to grab from. What’s ended up happening is that I kind of have a dream where he dies or he’s an asshole to me and then I wake up with the biggest fear — like, what if this actually happened? Then I write a song about it because I can’t let the scenario go out of my mind. But whenever there’s intense love, there’s always going to be intense fear or irrational worries. It’s that bittersweet feeling: I’m so happy with this person, but what the fuck do I do if it doesn’t work out?
I love that lyric in “Suburbiaâ€: “If we had a baby you’d love them more than meâ€
I played it to some of my friends who had kids and it did not go over well. They were like, This is so provocative, you don’t understand. But that was my point. Why am I supposed to want this if I don’t know that I do? You can’t tell me that every single second since you’ve been pregnant has been blissful. I also do respect and understand that it’s probably one of the best, most primal experiences you can have. It doesn’t mean that I want babies — or maybe I do. That’s where I end up all the time.
How has this rollout been for you as a newly independent artist?
It’s a lot more work. I have to decide the plan. But I have full creative control without having to fight for it. It’s kind of scary to trust my gut on everything, I feel very free but also very overwhelmed.
Had you fulfilled your previous contract?
Yep, it was all done. I’d met wth some major labels after. I got some offers and they were fine but I didn’t feel that they couldn’t fucking wait to work with me. I feel like everything’s changed so much in the last three years since I put out my last album. I will say, though, that I’d never have gotten the platform I have without a major label. I’d never have been able to break out in America as a Swedish artist. The things I care about are not the most commercially successful ways to go about things, but they’re so important to me, so it feels right to do it the way I’m doing it now.
Are you looking to release any other artist’s music on Pretty Swede?
In time I will, but I feel I have a full plate right now. I’m also not really a business person, it’s not where my passion lies. If it was an artist I could also help creatively develop, I think that’d be super fun, but I’m just not feeling the energy from the world right now. I feel people are just wanting a different pace, not in a bad way, just in a different way than I’m used to. As an artist, you now have to want to do it all. If you want the career as a big, sufficient musician, there’s a lot of things you need to do that aren’t related to music.
Can I ask you some questions about “Grapefruit†and why you chose to write a song about your eating disorder?Â
Yes, of course.
First of all, how do you feel now that you have to talk about it?Â
Every other day I’m like, Why am I putting out this song? But then I do feel it’s been so long since I struggled with my eating disorder that it doesn’t trigger me to talk about it. I also don’t really know why I wrote this song now. Maybe it was the stillness of the pandemic. I think about how if I would have become a public figure during that time, I’d never have been able to handle being an artist, the way you get scanned and criticized from head to toe. I’m very grateful that I did all the therapy, did all the body-positivity classes, and did everything I could to find a way to love my body and then deal with whatever was actually going on. I feel that might not be the case for everyone. A lot of the time, with an eating disorder, food is not the real issue; there’s something deeper. First, you have to go to therapy and break the behavior and bad cycle you’re in and deal with what actually caused the disorder. It’s a very long process that you have to stay so strong through. It’s a disease where you feel a lot of shame, a lot of failure, mountains of self-hatred. I think having gotten through that, I feel more confident in my body now, maybe more than I would have if I’d never been through it. I notice when I go home sometimes, a lot of people in my old circle will struggle with anxiety around food. It’s a constant issue. It used to be triggering for me, but now I think, Thank God I’m not stuck in that anymore. I think back and wonder why I let myself ruin so many of the crucial years of my life. I was so focused on that. That makes me sad sometimes.
That one line in the song, “Sweet girl you’re so disciplined, keep it down,†makes it sound as though the disorder was something external to you. Was that the case for you as a teenager?
I was feeling a lot of pressure from various parts of my life, and combined with the ideal of the time — the world around me as a teenage girl was the skinnier the better — I felt that anxiety and depression of not being good enough. I looked for proof in my environment that nobody thought I was good enough. You will find that if you are looking for that. You collect those small criticisms. Then food became the one thing I could control, even though I couldn’t. I had pretty severe bulimia. With that, I didn’t have the control to not eat so I binged and purged and then had so much anxiety. I hated myself even more. It’s a vicious cycle that ruins your body. That was kind of my wake-up call.
I went to a voice doctor after maybe five years of it. I was 20. The doctor felt my vocal cords and said, “I can tell you’re bulimic. All I can say is that if you keep doing this, you will ruin your voice and you will not be able to sing.†So I was like, What am I doing? This is the one thing that makes me happy. Am I going to also lose that? Obviously, I didn’t get fine that day, but it was a boost in taking therapy seriously. I think that probably took another five years and then I was good.
I assume the Diana you mention in the song — “Diana, how she guards the clock / She’s in control / Now why is everyone in shock?†— is Princess Di?
Yeah, that was pretty wild, the scene [in The Crown] where she’s counting from when she binged to when she threw up. It jolted me back into the memory of me doing that
There’s this iconic section of your live show now where you flash the crowd during “Talking Body.†Does that feel like the end point to your eating disorder?
Yes. Some of my friends who have heard this song, whom I hadn’t told about my past, say that they can’t believe it because I seem so confident in my body. Well, that was down to all the work I did. I think being so naked onstage, so sexual, to flash my tits — it feels like a victory to me every time because I used to hate my body so much. It’s also just become such a fun part of the show. Half of the crowd are basically flashing me back and it’s this hilarious moment. It makes me feel really powerful, too.