8 minute read
TOVE STYRKE
"It's insane," Swedish pop star Tove Styrke declares. "Both music and fashion, it's like somebody made a comedy about trend cycles." Speaking from an inside perspective, she has a point.
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In the years passed since Tove released her 2010 self-titled debut, times have indeed changed. Where once "everything back when I started was so slow," nowadays it's ten-thousand miles an hour as the world grasps at every straw it can find. Tove has no intention of participating in such modern pitfalls, however.
"That's how the world feels right now," she continues. "It's almost like you can't take it seriously when there are new trends. You're like, 'I can't jump on this because it's gonna be over literally tomorrow'. It's so consumer crazy, it's stupid. I think that it's gonna slow down eventually because our brains don't work like this, but we'll see."
Those heady days of people buying songs on iTunes – or perhaps donning their best eyepatch and peg leg to find a cheaper alternative – are long gone. A time back when the industry saw itself moving away from videos and digital, attempting to be more conducive to a physical world way before the meta one was even a pipe dream for Mark Zuckerburg: "we've come so far from that," she marvels.
"Do you have a MySpace page!" She recalls cackling. "Or a SoundCloud, it was more about the music in a way people could find music by themselves. More underground artists would find their platform through SoundCloud and stuff. I don't know…I think I would have had fun with it," she reckons on her faring if she were starting out now. "But it could have also just stressed me out to get anything out."
Fortunately, Tove isn't starting in 2022. In fact, this year sees her releasing her fourth album – Hard. Another entry for the vibrant outskirts of pop where everything feels free, and there's room to breathe amongst the lusting, yearning, and empowering facets of Tove. On how she's feeling for it to enter the world she blurts out, "It's so scary! I'm like, wait, am I ready? I don't know. What am I doing? Fuck.”
"But also, I love this album," she continues, beaming. "I think it's a brilliant album, and even if nobody fucking cares… whatever happens, I'm really happy about it, and I want to put it out. I think these days, you can push it out, see what happens and go with it. You can't really control the process that much. You never really know what you're going to get out of something or what is going to work or what is going to resonate or," she quickly adopts a mocking whispered tone, "what's going to trend on Tik Tok or whatever."
Hard's disjointed parts – where caustic guitar rouses a snarl ('Cool Me Down') or tender droplets sum up the depth of feelings ('Bruises') – play into the humanity Tove is bringing forward away from the mechanics of the industry. Mentioning that her third outing – 2018's Sway – came from her "more control, freaky perfectionist side", this time it's about embracing her "less censored" self both as an artist and as a person while relinquishing any pressure because "if something doesn't work, who cares? It's fine. There's a lot of shit music on the internet and I don't think that this is shit music!"
When it comes to being a pop star, you tend to be defined by your era. Tove's four have been filled equally with her winking attitude, but each separated by a sense of elevated self. Yet determining where an era starts once one has ended, "that's really tricky," she admits. "Because the inbetween phase, that's the worst before you find the
song. Once you find the core of the project it's so obvious, but before you often spend so much time on stuff that's not it at all. But you have to do that to eventually get to that golden little thing that's gonna spark the whole thing."
The spark that lit the fire of Hard was 'Show Me Love'. Setting the tone for the album and what Tove wanted to achieve, she mentions she wanted to "combine classic references and classic things with a more acutely, direct modern way of writing. Specifically lyrics and trust the process and trust the songs and the gut feeling you know – just letting them become what they wanted to become."
The confidence she has in this new era comes from the owning of self. It's something she's become grounded in over the years. Particularly after realising that you simply can't chase anything other than your own recognition. She happily admits that "as a body of work this album, this era, it's the best one I've had because there's a lot of different things. There's dynamic, everything is not the same. Everything is not that polished and I think that humaneness is really nice."
This setup is how Tove sees herself going forward. Lamenting the time she's spent not creating, now she's full steam ahead she encourages any budding artists to do the same. "You can never stop writing and making things because I feel like creativity sparks more creativity," she implores. "Every time I'm working on a project, I get ideas for like three new ones. So stopping, that's the worst thing that you can do usually, and I'm going to try not to do that this time just because I release the album and go out on tour and stop – I'm gonna try and stay active."
Her opinion on the state of the pop landscape is formed by the exasperating formulas that keep cropping up. "There's the Spotify streamline, very effective pop song that I've grown to kind of hate," she admits. "I feel like everybody sounds the same and rewritten through every little splice sound – I've heard it before, it's so easy to guess what a lot of things are gonna sound like in that world…there's so much that feels cynical. I don't want to make that stuff."
For all its downsides, however, Tove reckons there's an upside to the current Tik Tok A&R trend. "The beautiful thing about it, and about things moving so fast and being weird is that you can't predict it," she says with the air of someone bearing a secret. "So, it's better to just do stuff that you think is awesome and that sounds special." and then that you're having fun with and like show it off on the platform or like just live with it on the internet and interact with people on the internet. And if it happens, it has happened. And if it doesn't, it's not your fault because it's so saturated and it's so tricky to release music to that." Her ideal scenario for musical discovery would be "without everything being so scattered – I want to go into a record store but online and I want there to be visuals as well – thank you! Can somebody just programme this?!" Admitting through embarrassed chuckles that her current musical exploration only tends to stem from when she's asked to provide curated playlists. "That's when I find most new music," she explains. "because if somebody puts me to work like ‘Okay you need to put together things that were released recently that fit this theme’, that's usually when I find a lot of stuff, just researching. But then I'm really happy because then I can live off of that music and the artists that I found for like a year."
The fact the world is so borderless when it comes to genres means that
over-saturation is like trying to punch up through quicksand. Remembering once upon a time Scandipop's subgenre draw had rooted, invested fans, now it's a scope wider than the horizon. Except
Truthfully, the only artist Tove is interested in sounding like is herself.
It's that freedom which radiates through Hard. "It's fun because I love just making beautiful things that I find beautiful. I've always had a hard time understanding when artists sort of trash talk their own music – they talk as if they're not happy about it or 'No, it's not perfect'. It's never gonna be perfect because I don't understand…like if I'm not happy about it if I don't think that this is the shit – why do I want to put it out into the world?”
"Why am I going to force this onto other people? I don't understand it. I've said this a million times," she continues. "But I really believe that you have to be your own biggest fan and the biggest fan of the music you put out because what's the point," the question hangs heavy. "Otherwise, what, are you just trying to please other people? That doesn't sound like a fun life."
Digging back into those trends Tove loathes, they all have one thing in common. The aspect which is the most important of being an artist – bar none: "It's never the big artists. It's never the major labels - nothing ever comes from there. You've got a bigger chance of making something great and super insanely successful on your own with your brain, with your friends. Go nuts!"
