INTERVIEW: Tove Styrke releases her fourth album 'HARD': "Life isn't only how you feel in relation to other people, you have to look to yourself....sometimes it's shit, and sometimes it's amazing."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Ninja Hanna
Sweden’s Tove Styrke is an artist that has an innate talent for creating incredible pop music. Since first releasing music in 2010, she may have flown under the radar in terms of major global hits, but she has more than made up for that in critical acclaim, multiple music award nominations and a current monthly stream count of 1.3 million on Spotify alone.
Today she releases her fourth studio album HARD and like everything she has released it has a foundation in electropop, but also sees Styrke explore different sounds and feels across a wide range of sonics. “With this album I really pushed myself to stray from the pop formula and get as creative as possible, while also making something that’s unapologetically fun and joyous,” she says. “It’s very much all over the place, which is what I envisioned from the beginning. To me it feels so alive.”
Co-written and produced with acclaimed names including Elvira Anderfjärd (Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran), Jakob Jerlström (Lorde, MARINA), Oscar Scheller (Ashnikko, Rina Sawayama) and Elof Loelv (Rihanna, Katy Perry) HARD is an album about the complexity of love, the joyous and intoxicating and also the brutal and painful side. “When you completely adore somebody, that person can be the softest, gentlest, most wonderful thing in your life, but they can also be what hurts you the most,” Styrke says. “This album is about that contrast.”
Latest single ‘YouYouYou’ kicks off the album and in many ways spells out perfectly the contrast Styrke is talking about. Despite being in love, she can’t forget her previous lover: “If I saw your face, I'd have a heart attack…When I'm without you, I don't feel complete”. It is a glorious blast of a song, with a glistening synth chorus and a sublime instrumental breakdown. Like much of the album, the electronica and synthpop is firmly front and centre, but Styrke builds such a fascinating and varied musical panorama in every song that it doesn't become the dominant focus of the song. Second track ‘Cool Me Down’ is a case in point. It starts with a raucous electric guitar before gradually introducing electronic components, before rolling into a tumbling chorus with Styrke’s vocal effortlessly soaring into a falsetto.
‘Free’ is an eclectic, off kilter track which features piano, R&B, a bit of gospel and a sweeping chorus, while ‘Hardcore’ is another more experimental track, constructed from little more than a single heavy beat and an impassioned, husky vocal from Styrke.
‘Millennial Blues’ explores the complexity of growing up in Styrke’s generation: “Imma get takeout on the weekend / Only thing I’m baking is depression / Thought the internet was my best friend / But it stabbed me in the back and now I’m bleeding.” It is a track that maintains the more traditional electropop sound, which can also be said of one of the standout tracks ‘24H’, with its breathy vocals, visceral beat and late night dancefloor vibes as Styrke sings about that driving need for a love interest in the early days of the relationship.
As the album closes, it introduces a mellower tone. Gorgeous single ‘Show Me Love’, written by Styrke for her girlfriend at the beginning of their relationship, is an electro-acoustic track with guitar and vocals that shift from raw and powerful to soft and gentle. Closing the album, ‘Bruises’ is the biggest outlier on the album in terms of sound. A guitar pop track with a swinging beat and only hints of electronica, it takes us back to the concept of love being a multi-faceted beast with Styrke examining her own self-esteem and why she self-sabotages relationships. “I keep on making excuses / I can’t hold onto the good things / Hate to do this / But the truth is my heart got bruises”
HARD is a remarkable album and continues to showcase the mastery Styrke has of pop music. Glorious melodies, addictive beats and full of the feels with relatable lyrics it is a collection of music you will want to return to again and again. If Styrke is an artist you have yet to discover, now is the time to give her prominent space on your playlist. We recently caught up with Styrke to chat more about the creation of HARD.
Hi Tove, how wonderful, wonderful, wonderful it is to have you calling us onto the global dancefloor again with HARD. How are things with you?
I am so great, I'm so excited to have this album out.
It's an album of all the beauty of the mess of being a human. It's celebratory in all its wonderful messiness. I feel you have poured everything within you into this album and it's such a joy to listen to. Can you talk to me about your intention going in and your experience with creating HARD?
That's so beautiful, thank you I got goose goosebumps! Thank you so much. This really is my most personal album that I’ve made and I feel that was one of my big challenges going into this project. I really, really wanted to dare to put my whole heart, my whole truth, my whole life and things that I have lived through into this album. I'm very proud because I feel like I managed to do that. I’m very protective of myself, and it's scary to put yourself and all your feelings into projects like that. But it pays off because I feel like this whole album is very human in a way. When we make things, we want to make them so perfect, we want to edit it so much and make it so polished that sometimes the person and the intention behind the music gets a little bit washed away. Often it's in the imperfections and in the flaws that the creator and the human behind the music actually shows through and I wanted to do that with HARD. With a great pop album, at least to me, it's usually not the most perfectly mixed and perfectly produced things that resonate with me the most. The best pop albums are the ones that feel like a friend in your headphones, a friend on the dance floor and where you can feel that the person singing it, the person who wrote it, they live that, they are in there. There's somebody there who's speaking to you and who is there with you in that moment. And that's what I've been trying to achieve.
I completely 100% agree with the longevity or the integrity of the pop album. I feel like with this album, you've definitely shifted listeners perspective of what is pop because of that intention of ‘this is real’. Pop doesn't necessarily have to mean over produced or perfection. There's so much beauty in imperfection, it's absolutely beautiful. Let’s talk about your latest single ‘YouYouYou’, it is just joy. If this album was a film, this would be the closing credits soundtrack.
Yes, exactly! It's so amazing, and that song and the production and also the video sets the tone for this album in such a beautiful way. That's why I chose to start the album with it. It is like the sunrise of heart, and then we go on this journey with the ups and the downs of the heartbreaks and the confusion and the love and the messiness. I really love that song, I’m so fond of it.
It's like your fanfare showpiece. It's absolutely beautiful. ‘Show Me Love’ is another highlight, it is so beautiful. And then the visuals, I feel like you've gone in completely with what you want and I love how beautiful it is but at the same time, it's so fun and playful. Can you talk to me a little bit about pairing these very iconic visuals with such a human album?
For me, the visuals are one of the most fun things about what I do. With the music, I always feel like I have some pressure on me to deliver something amazing because people expect me to be good at making music. But with the videos, nobody expects anything so that's like my play time. For all of these videos, I've written the concepts and the treatments for them, I write everything myself but then I go on a hunt for a director who is stupid enough to want to do this with me! All of these videos are very close to my heart and with every song, every video project that I’ve made, I really wanted to let that thing be its own thing, I haven't tried to make everything part of one big story. I wanted each song to have its own moment. With the videos, I have this big vision of how I want them to be and luckily they ended up very, very close to what I imagined, because these directors are so amazing and so good at what they do. Often the videos start taking form when I'm writing the song, it almost helps me write the song to have images in my head to it. That's usually also a good sign that a song is good and that a sound is inspiring and interesting when I get pictures and I get an idea of what the story is behind it.
That's incredible and also it flows completely with what seems to be your integrity of the album of making it risky and pouring yourself into it. Your music is a place to sometimes put your feelings and sometimes a way of trying to contribute to the world. Being an album of heart and human celebration where does HARD lie within that desire?
A little bit everywhere! I've been making these songs through very different phases in my life. I set out when I had just fallen in love with my girlfriend. I wrote ‘Show Me Love’ around that time, I wrote ‘Bruises’ I wrote ‘Lies', about past experiences. ‘Free’ was an early one as well. I was starting to put together this album and then COVID happened, and a lot of things happened, my sister got sick and I went through a period of depression and almost like burnout. I was thinking that maybe I'm never ever going to be able to tour again. I really had a crisis, and in that I wrote a bunch of songs. I wrote ‘Millennial Blues’, I wrote ‘Cool Me Down, I wrote a bunch of things. Coming out of that, when it started to feel a little bit more like spring in my life, I wrote, ‘Start Walking’ ‘YouYouYou’ and some of the other ones. Writing through so many phases in my life, and different stages, that has given depth to the project because at first it was only about love and sexuality, sensuality. So much more of just being a human and existing as a human and trying to figure shit out came later, and that added a lot to it. Life isn't only how you feel in relation to other people, you have to look to yourself and feel ‘who am I’. And sometimes it's shit, and sometimes it's amazing.
You’ve given me goosebumps, that was beautiful! Lastly before I leave you, we have the glittering gem that is HARD playing in speakers, in headphones, in kitchens, in cars, on dance floors. What else is coming up for you this year?
Touring. I'm going to try and play as much as I can, and I'm going to do that next year as well. So even if I won't be able to make it to the other side of the world this year, definitely next year. I'm going to put out more music, I already have songs that are coming out later this year that I'm very excited to put out, they're really, really good. I even recorded strings for the first time for one of the new songs. I’m just gonna keep doing what I do and try and go as many places as I can and have fun with it.
HARD is out now via Sony Music. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Tove Styrke you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
