‘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.

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.