On the finish of 2020, Tove Lo shot a movie in her native Sweden known as The Emigrants. For somebody who has constructed her profession on a basis of grungy, gritty, experimental pop music, taking up a serious function in a heavy drama was a brand new journey, and one which required the customarily tough means of sitting with herself. Tove Lo enlisted an performing coach to organize for the function of an alcoholic intercourse employee, and, as anybody who has taken an performing class earlier than can attest, the work of tapping into the feelings required for such a undertaking is way from straightforward.
“I’d be digging into my previous and darkness, and it was so heavy and uncomfortable,” she recollects, talking with Consequence over the telephone in late August. “I really feel like I realized a lot.”
When she wrapped the movie two months later, she remembers bodily itching in her pores and skin with the necessity to get again to writing. Flexing this completely different inventive muscle had inspired her to get again to her major artwork type of alternative, and the ensuing work arrives this Friday, October 14th.
Filth Femme is Tove Lo’s fifth studio album, and her first as an unbiased artist, an element she believes has come via within the ultimate product. Writing and recording independently allowed her to dig into extra creative facets of an album rollout — issues she acknowledges may not “essentially be worthwhile,” however which give her the house to offer perception into her work in methods she may not have been capable of in any other case.
“It appears like the primary time I’m placing out an album once more,” she observes. “It feels bizarre to say that since I’m all the time so private with my albums, however I really feel like there’s an excellent deeper factor to this one.”
Take “Suburbia,” for instance; within the third monitor of Filth Femme, she sings, “I by no means wished infants, I do know they’re type of cute/ I by no means wished marriage/ However right here I’m with you.” It’s the type of confessional that would develop into a folks track with a distinct manufacturing spin, a first-person commentary on surprising circumstances in life that feels merely, in the end human. On the aching “True Romance,” she faucets into a way of melodrama, asserting: “I’d die for love and loyalty.”