Tove Styrke Interview: 'The World We're Living In Feels Like The Afterparty Of Our Times'

It’s approaching four years since Swedish pop darling Tove Styrke released her last album. In that time, it turns out, there’s been plenty keeping her busy. 

For one thing, she made her theatre debut, playing a pivotal role in a new production of the David Bowie musical Lazarus. She’s also been retraining as a gardener, describing herself as a “part-time garden witch at this point”. Oh, and as she reveals in disarmingly low-key fashion, she also became a parent in 2024, around the time she was starring in Lazarus.

“That’s a big thing,” she enthuses, in something of an understatement.

So, it’s fair to say that the last few years have been a period of major change for the Say My Name singer.

“It feels like a different life,” she tells HuffPost UK as she reflects on the release of her last album, 2022’s Hard. “And the world is so different now. Looking back, it feels like I made Hard in a completely different world, when I was a completely different person.”

Excitingly, Tove has also been quietly working hard on new music for the last two years, which she’s finally ready to share with the world. These monumental changes – both on a personal and global level – have been a major influence on her new material (in an accompanying press release, Tove speaks of how “becoming a mother has also meant a really powerful shift in my life – I honestly don’t care what anybody but my daughter thinks about me anymore” and insists that “gardening, my reconnection with nature and parenthood have all influenced this music as much as any piece of art or music ever did”).

Titled The Afterparty, Tove describes her new release as “all of my anxiety bundled up on an album” and “like a big, long crisis made into pop songs”.

She explains: “The album is a reflection on the state of the world as it is, the world that we’re living in today. It feels like the afterparty of our time, it feels like the best has already happened, it feels like we’re in this weird decadent time, waiting for the end, or like a rebirth.”

In other words, it’s one last party before the end of the world – and if all of that sounds a little on the bleak side, Tove is adamant that this afterparty should be a joyful one. At least, at first.

Case and point, lead single Prayer, a five-minute burst of euphoria that kickstarts The Afterparty with affirmative lyrics like “I can have it if I want it, I am worth it, I am on it”. “I am love,” she sings on the chorus. “I’m hard and soft… I can be it, if I want it.”

A simple message, perhaps, but one that, regrettably, feels somewhat at odds with the world around us in these dark times.

Tove explains that if The Afterparty is intended to represent the course of one long night, “it starts at sundown with Prayer”.

She enthuses: “To me, it feels like the kind of song that, when you listen to it, you can forget about the world for a little while.”

“Carefree” and full of “anticipation and excitement”, she wanted the song to be evocative of summertime, and a feeling that “the world is ours and anything is possible”.

“I will put out songs that are doing the opposite, that are looking at the world quite intensely,” she insists. “But this one is more carefree. It’s about, like, driving through the city, it’s early summer, sundown, smoking cigarettes, just lost my phone somewhere – whatever! – going to a festival, or a show, or a rave. It doesn’t matter!”

Put simply, she says: “I hope people can feel free when they listen to it.”

The thought of performing the anthem of self-love live is a particularly enticing one for Tove as we speak just days before Prayer’s release.

“Imagine singing that song in a crowd!” she says dreamily. “That’s one of my biggest things that I wish to happen this year. When we wrote it, what I really loved was that the feeling like it would be such a powerful thing to put that in a room with many people, and have them singing that at the same time. I can’t wait!”

Work on The Afterparty started around two years ago, Tove says, “completely on my own, without anyone else”.

“Back then we were living in an apartment where we had a roof terrace, and I would go up there and be completely alone,” she recalls. “You couldn’t hear the city below or anything – it was just me. And I would stop and sit there and just write sort of stream-of-consciousness writing.”

Before long, she continues, “this concept started developing… this story, this world, and titles, and themes”.

“I wanted to explore about motherhood, about the state of the world, about social media, about feeling like you’re constantly being watched, but also craving attention because otherwise you feel like you don’t exist,” she continues.

From there, Tove says she “very carefully” started selecting collaborators to help bring her vision to life, beginning with her long-time friend Magnus Larsson, who eventually became the album’s co-producer.

“I was like, ’should we meet in the studio and maybe just listen to some music?’,” she says of the early stages of their collaboration. “Then, it turned out that we had been listening to the exact same music, so our tastes were very aligned, and we wanted to explore the same kinds of music styles.”

Once Tove had put together her dream team – a “really, really tight crew” made up of herself and Magnus, as well as Boko Yout drummer Joel Kiviaho and singer-songwriter Linnéa Martinsson – she set about recording the album entirely “in secret”.

“I didn’t even show it to my label or my manager, nothing,” she says. “I just made everything on my own with three other people. I was really careful with who I brought in and what time, and it just ended up working splendidly.”

When the work was close to done, Tove recalled “literally walking into my label with the finished album” and asking: “‘Do you want to work with this or do you not?’. Just tell me as it is.”

“And they loved it, thankfully,” she notes.

This new way of working – “keeping everyone outside of the process, until it was done” – was a new approach for Tove, and was partly inspired by the creation of her last album, Hard.

“I still love many of the songs, but I feel like that album wasn’t as cohesive as I would have wanted it to be when I set out making it,” she admits. “I feel like I was too influenced by people around me – and maybe that’s why I ended up working the way I’ve been doing with this one.”

As a result, Tove says that her stamp is all over her new music, with authenticity being one of the most important factors when putting The Afterparty together. 

“This feeling has become stronger and stronger with me throughout the years, but I really, really, really feel like the most valuable thing any person can give the world is your unique point of view,” she says. 

“Any kind of replicating what others are doing, trying to guess what others want, that’s a burden to the whole creative space right now. There’s so much music – we don’t need more music if it’s not something that is really valuable to you and that is unique to you.”

Perhaps, there’s no better indicator of this than lead single Prayer’s five-minute runtime, a rarity in pop when that space is skewing towards sub-three-minute, algorithm-friendly songs.

“I love it this way,” she says proudly of Prayer’s extended length. “You have to get that sort of long build to really get the release in the end when the drums come in.

“We need slow TV, we need longer songs – we need to stay in a feeling for longer than two minutes. If we can.”

Tove also observes that The Afterparty is “definitely more DIY than anything I’ve done before”.

“You know that Tyler, The Creator quote, ‘create like a child, edit like a scientist’? We really did that,” she says. “We just went for it.

“It’s not about capturing the perfect take, it’s about capturing a performance, and capturing a feeling, capturing our intention. Whether or not it hits the mark and is going to be like a ‘perfect’ version of something – I don’t care about that. There are other people that can do perfect. I just want my intention to be as obvious and like to trigger as much emotion as possible.”

On Prayer, that feeling being triggered is one of liberation, joy and unity, but the full album will be a journey through “different moods”.

“The whole concept, like a story, just came to me,” she says of the early writing process. “I started making music for it almost as if I were writing the music as a score for a movie.

“It’s very dynamic and it is a story that unfolds, as the night unfolds. There are big moments and then there are more low-key moments or resets that feel like a recharge, and then going into the big moment…”

Prayer, she says, just “felt like a good starting point” for the project.

“And then, as we move on, we can explore other feelings, as well. And then maybe end up sort of where we started. Maybe. In the end.”

With The Afterparty, Tove agrees that it feels like her new era feels like a hard reset – “even more than usual” when she’s releasing a new album.

“I’m pretty nervous!” she admits. “I’ve been working on this passion project of mine for the past two years.

“Letting people in… it’s so scary. But also fun, of course. And I am excited too, to share it, because I love it. So, it’s a mish-mash of feelings.”

Tove Love’s The Afterparty will be released in the autumn. Watch the Prayer music video below: