‘Is this something I want?’: Tove Lo, pop’s messy genius, ponders motherhood and domesticity

It took a decade, but the world finally caught up with Tove Lo. For years, the Swedish musician has been pop’s professor of provocation, its scholar of squalor, its expert in excess, carving out a niche of gorgeously explicit filth with breakthrough albums like Lady Wood and Blue Lips (its title a feminine take on “blue balls”) that spun art from the personal chaos of drugs, drinking and wanton sex.And then Charli XCX’s Brat Summer happened, sending messiness mainstream and making the internet’s prevailing “clean-girl aesthetic” a relic of a naive age. In a culture where electroclash is the defining influence (again), Slayyyter is pop’s new trashbag star, and hedonism is celebrated, it seems the world is finally vibing with ideas Lo has been playing with all along. Does it feel that way for her?“Um … it kind of does,” she laughs coyly. “It’s nice to get to sing about these things without needing to defend myself any more.“It’s in the ether right now. I don’t know if it has to do with female artists taking control of their own narrative, or if it’s just the state of the world. Whenever our feelings are in a pressure cooker for too long, they tend to explode, and I think that’s what’s happened.”Few modern pop stars have turned sex into such a vital driver of their artistic process as Lo. Why is it so creatively inspiring?“It’s something I’ve been trying to put my finger on – if it’s me just being a sexual person, or if it’s just the fact I do think music and sex have always gone hand in hand for me,” she says. “Maybe it’s because it comes from the body and it’s an instinctual form of expression; singing and dancing and working with emotions and everything that’s running through your body naturally makes it sexual.”She grew up in the northern suburbs of Stockholm, among family and friends who were progressive and open-minded. “It never occurred to me that saying I’m a feminist and I’m bi and being sexual were political. To me, that was just the baseline of what everyone should be. But when I started touring the world and going to places where that wasn’t the baseline, I realised, oh, maybe it is political.“But in terms of how I choose to express myself – the bluntness, directness, and it being provocative to some people – I just think it feels good to express desire without being judged. Or even if you do get judged, just having the freedom to play with that anyway.”Lo is speaking from her home in Los Angeles, following a brief stint in Stockholm where she’s been rehearsing for an upcoming world tour around her new album, Estrus. The biological reference behind the title is to a female animal “in heat” and ready to procreate.‘I’m still messy and I party too much and I say the wrong thing a lot.’It’s funny, and perhaps typically defiant, that just when the world has caught on to her trashy wavelength, Lo is pivoting. On Estrus, the pop star – on the verge of turning 39 – is singing about settling down and contemplating the logistics of having a child.“I’m thinking about these things, but I’m in no way ready for it,” Lo explains. “I feel I’m being told by the outside world that I’m a grown woman now and I’m supposed to set roots and settle down and act accordingly and be responsible and have answers for everything, and I’m just not there at all. I’m still quite messy, and it’s the only thing I’m good at.”Inspired by her long-term relationship with husband Charlie Twaddle – a Kiwi producer and creative director she married in 2020 – the album finds Lo contemplating domestic malaise, and the expectations around 30-something women, with her usual brand of outrageous humour. On highlight I’m the Cake, her pent-up desire explodes to the point she’s yelling at (presumably) her husband for taking for granted what he’s got at home: “Babe, I’m a pop star, did you just forget?” she sings with carnal frustration.She’s called Estrus her “Peter Pan record” – driven by a desire to never grow up, but feeling the burden that she might have to. “Being in a relationship for this long and having found someone I want to be with for the rest of my life is quite a new feeling for me in terms of my creativity. But I’m still messy and I party too much and I say the wrong thing a lot. So there’s some growth but this album is thinking about, ‘Is this even something I want? And what does growth look like when I still want to be me and I don’t really want to change?’ ” Lo ponders with a laugh.The album closes with Source of Life (“the place between my thighs”), a moving song where Lo explores her anxiety about motherhood. As a man, I’m self-conscious about asking Lo to discuss her apprehension about something that obviously doesn’t affect us in the same social, physical or biological way – so, instead, I tell her that before I had two kids, I was so nervous about becoming a parent that I once Googled “I regret having children” just to see how many search results came up. It wasn’t many, which was very reassuring.Lo bursts into laughter. “I mean, [parenting] does feel like the ‘final boss’ of adventures, right? So I am very curious about it. But, for me, I have a hard time picturing it. I’ve never dreamt about it, it’s never been something I’ve wanted, but now my body is telling me ‘It’s time!’ and my brain is like, ‘No!’ So I’m in that place … but also, I have said that if my husband could get pregnant, we probably would have a few kids by now. I think there’s a toll on the body that’s also clearly challenging for me. But everyone seems to be doing it, so I don’t know!”Lo had already explored the idea on Suburbia, the conflicted centrepiece from her last album, 2022’s Dirt Femme. It’s a song that presaged the current wave of Millennial pop stars exploring their mixed feelings around impending motherhood, from Charli XCX and Taylor Swift to Carly Rae Jepsen and Robyn.“It’s cool to see all my peers working through this, and no one’s shying away from talking about something that wasn’t that common to sing about in pop. Because I remember when I sang about it on Suburbia, I got a lot of different reactions – there was a lot of ‘oh my God, I relate to this so hard’, but also a lot of ‘how the f--- can you talk like this, you’re such a selfish bitch’,” Lo recalls drolly.“Women speaking about struggling with this picture of motherhood as only a positive seems to really trigger something in people. So I love that the topic is just out there, and in pop as well. It’s really beautiful to see.”Tove Lo’s new album Estrus is out on September 18. She will perform at Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on March 1, Melbourne’s MCA on March 3, Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on March 5, and Perth’s Ice Cream Factory on March 7.Want more music stories and reviews?Adela: Missing out on Katseye was the best thing to happen to this rising pop star.Mike D: After grieving the loss of a bandmate, the Beastie Boy makes his solo return.Jem Cassar-Daley: How the daughter of a local country music icon became one of Australia’s sharpest pop songwriters.VV-Ace: The Congolese-Australian rapper proves that local hip-hop has a new hotspot.Sidney Phillips: The ‘trans adlay’ rapper is Australian underground hip-hop’s brightest star.Slayyyter: After a decade in the doldrums, she was on the verge of quitting music. Now Slayyyter is the year’s breakout pop star.