Tove Lo, the pop confessor who walked out of the hit factory to make ESTRUS

Tove Lo

Photo: Daniel Åhs Karlsson / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 29, 1987 Viken, Höganäs Municipality, Sweden
Occupation	Singer-songwriter
Known for	Taylor Swift: The 1989 World Tour – Live
Awards	5 Grammis

The new Tove Lo album opens with fifty seconds called A Lot of Feelings, No Solutions, and she has offered that title as a warning label for everything after it. “There’s no good advice on this album,” she said when she announced ESTRUS. The line would have sounded strange in the Stockholm writing rooms where she learned her trade, a system built to turn heartbreak into a chorus that resolves. She mastered that system well enough to co-write a British number one for Ellie Goulding. Her own records have been an argument with it ever since, and the latest one, made on her own label and started in a fishing village on the Swedish coast, is the bluntest version of that argument so far.

The upbringing did not predict the songs. Ebba Tove Elsa Nilsson arrived on October 29, 1987, in the parish of Viken, in north-western Skåne, and grew up in Djursholm, a comfortable suburb north of Stockholm that she has described as “pretty posh.” Her father, Magnus Nilsson, later co-founded the payments company iZettle; her mother, Gunilla Nilsson Edholm, is a psychologist. The stage name came early: a godmother called her Lo, the Swedish word for lynx, after an animal she loved at the zoo. Behind the protected childhood sat a harder adolescence, with bulimia and self-harm that she would only write about openly years later.

At Rytmus, the Stockholm music high school, she befriended Caroline Hjelt, soon to be half of Icona Pop, and after graduating she spent three years playing guitar-heavy math rock with a band called Tremblebee. When that ended, she went to work as a songwriter. A publishing deal with Warner/Chappell in 2011 put her in rooms with Max Martin, Alexander Kronlund and the British team Xenomania, and her name began to appear on songs for Girls Aloud and Icona Pop. The craft she absorbed there, hooks that land in the first thirty seconds, never left her music. What she did with it was another matter.

Habits (Stay High) was written out of a breakup and a stretch of numb, chemical nights, and she first released it herself in 2013. It took more than a year to travel, but once it did, it climbed to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 and number six in the United Kingdom, a radio hit whose chorus is a woman describing how she avoids feeling anything. Queen of the Clouds, her 2014 debut on Island and Polydor, was split into three acts named for sex, love and pain, and reached number fourteen in the United States, with Talking Body following the first single into the American top twenty. A few months later she shared the writing credits on Love Me Like You Do, the Fifty Shades of Grey ballad that gave Goulding a British number one and earned its writers Grammy and Golden Globe nominations.

The albums that followed treated the pop record as a short story with chapters. Lady Wood, in 2016, reached number eleven on the Billboard 200 and came with a short film, Fairy Dust, that YouTube briefly pulled for sexual content. Blue Lips continued its narrative a year later, led by the defiantly titled Disco Tits. Sunshine Kitty, in 2019, lightened the palette, and the video for Glad He’s Gone brought her a Grammy nomination for best music video. In between she sang the hooks on other people’s records, toured as Coldplay’s opening act and kept supplying songs to the Swedish writing circuit.

The reputation that grew around all this was a narrow one. Headlines filed her as “the saddest girl in Sweden” and the most brutally honest pop star on the charts, and the moments that travelled furthest were the provocations, chiefly flashing the crowd during Talking Body. She has pointed out the double standard: male singers describing drugs and sex rarely get asked to defend it, while her lyrics were trimmed for American radio. The sharper criticism is commercial and comes from the numbers. After Lady Wood, her albums slid down the American charts, Blue Lips stalling at number 138, and the candour that once sounded new began, on weaker tracks, to sound like a template, each song tracing the same descent towards the same morning after. The shock framing also hid what she did best, which was precision: lines about appetite and avoidance that read less like confession than like reporting.

In 2022 she left Island after eight years and launched her own label, Pretty Swede Records, in partnership with Mtheory. Dirt Femme, its first album, included No One Dies from Love, the Euphoria song How Long and Grapefruit, a direct account of her eating disorder. It won album of the year at the Grammis, Sweden’s music awards, where she had been named artist of the year twice. The same years widened the frame. She played Ulrika in Erik Poppe’s 2021 film of The Emigrants, executive-produced Pussy Riot’s mixtape Matriarchy Now and recorded the 2024 dance EP Heat with the British producer SG Lewis. In July 2020 she announced she had married the New Zealander Charlie Twaddle, and she lives in Los Angeles.

ESTRUS, her sixth studio album, came out on September 18, 2026, through Pretty Swede with distribution from Virgin Music Group. Thirteen tracks in roughly thirty-two minutes, made with her longtime collaborator Ludvig Söderberg alongside Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, recorded between Stockholm, Los Angeles, Stromae’s studio in Brussels and Torekov, the coastal village where she spent childhood summers. Stromae sings on Des fleurs; I’m Your Girl Right? led the campaign in May. “Estrus is an animal in heat. It’s primal,” she said. “It’s my mind and my body wanting different things, wanting everything.” She told NME that she is still in therapy and that she now feels “way more love for and acceptance of the messy girl.” Reviews were broadly favourable, and the album entered the Swedish chart at number thirteen.

The Estrus Tour moved through North America in September and reached Mexico City on October 1. The European leg opens in Manchester on November 5 and closes on November 19 at Avicii Arena in Stockholm, with Australian dates booked for March 2027 that she has promised will be “sweatier, dirtier and more emotional than ever.” Closing the European run in an arena named after another Swedish pop exporter is a fair measure of the bet: that a writer trained to tidy feelings into hits can fill rooms by refusing to tidy them.

Selected Discography

Queen of the Clouds (2014)
Lady Wood (2016)
BLUE LIPS (lady wood phase II) (2017)
Sunshine Kitty (2019)
Dirt Femme (2022)
ESTRUS (2026)

Tags: singers, pop, ESTRUS, Tove Lo, Ellie Goulding, Habits (Stay High)

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