Tove Lo broke through 2013 with the single Habits (Stay High), a beautifully desperate dumped song for millennials to keep the party alive to avoid thinking about their ex. Since then, Tove Lo has become known in the United States as the Swedish artist and songwriter who makes smart, funny and honest texts about life, drugs, love and sex.
The destructive party girl has become a kind of person who is cocky and fun, but when Tove Lo is at its best, she is like the pop's answer to Girls creator Lena Dunham: when she makes songs that have been missing before, songs that you have never heard before. At least not in the commercial pop.
Like Cool girl, the last double album's biggest hit , inspired by Gillian Flynn's book Gone Girl. About being that girl who never makes any demands, who does not have to define a relationship at all and who can definitely imagine playing video games with the guy and his polar bear seven nights a week.
Or as Bad as the boys, one of Sunshine Kitty's highlights. A song about being a girl falling in love with another girl for the first time, but being ghosted. All in a musical 80s landscape. A kind of Cruel sums up from a lesbian or bisexual perspective. A gem you didn't know was missing, simply. Here, Tove Lo collaborates with ALMA, a young artist from Finland who makes pop with a punk attitude and who could have been Tove Los's little sister. A match made in heaven, in every way.
Sisterhood is one of Tove Los music's strongest themes. Something that will come again even on Glad he's gone, the album's first single: a kind but honest pep talk to a dumped girl friend, and then the happiness of getting his friend back from a boring, naughty guy. A song text completely free of clichés, all over a nice pick on an acoustic guitar and floating synth.
Also pop and disco disc Kylie Minogue is on a song: Really don't like u. Highlighting older women who are not considered to have received the respect and appreciation they deserved when it began is a kind of feminist trend. And Minogue is really an artist with lots of good music on his resume.
But unfortunately, her voice does not really come to her right on this particular song which, purely musically, is quite flat and boring and does not offer any of the flair one associates with Minogue. The question is also whether Minogue really is based in the song text which is about being a good feminist to correct himself when you notice that you are jealous of the ex's new girl. A song that feels very much Tove Lo and very little Kylie Minogue.
And it is the occasional limp and somewhat boring production that is Sunshine Kitty's biggest problem. It is too many sound-wise anonymous, low blood, thin songs. Where the Lady wood songs borrowed from house and techno, there is now often an EDM radio suit that sounds outdated and factory-made and that could belong to anyone. Not cool, brave Tove Lo, pop's Lena Dunham, who always stood out from the crowd.