We’ve reached a point at which the once-hyperbolic term overnight success is literal. Catchy songs and videos find huge audiences instantly but quickly lose their adhesive; stars burn ultra-bright and ultra-fast. But we’re also in an era of quiet, slowly spreading hits—polished, anonymous-seeming pop songs that percolate and achieve ubiquity over many months. They take root on small blogs, find homes in cosmopolitan retail stores and overpriced fitness classes. They’re used in TV shows; they excite a cappella groups. Eventually, as if by some abstract force designed to counterbalance the internet’s star-making warp speed, some begin gradually inching up the pop charts. Songs now become full-on phenomena years after their initial recordings; Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Disclosure’s “Latch” bubbled up forever, it seemed.
Another artist making such an upward crawl is Tove Nilsson, a 26-year-old Swedish singer and songwriter who goes by Tove Lo. Her résumé includes writing credits for artists like Cher Lloyd and Lea Michele from “Glee”, and she’s firmly rooted in Sweden’s current network of pop characters. In high school, she played music with Caroline Hjelt of Icona Pop (for whom she’s also written songs); she’s linked with Max Martin and production duo the Struts. After listening to her music—bruised, brightly arranged pop songs that feel grand but not excessive—it should come as no surprise that she graduated from Stockholm’s Rytmus music school, the place where Robyn was trained.
Nilsson released a song called “Habits (Stay High)”, and the accompanying art showed the singer with mascara tears streaming down her face, in a photo that looked like it could have been snapped on an iPhone—about a year-and-a-half ago. It’s a big, sticky song, but not so big that it stuns your senses or numbs you into enjoyment. The single, which just recently cracked the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100, is an exclamation of lost love and self medication; it contrasts a giant hook and chorus (“I gotta stay high all the time/ To keep you off my mind”) with snappy verses filled with quietly distinct, often strange imagery: of Nilsson eating her dinner in the bathtub, getting drunken munchies, seducing dads on playgrounds.
This sort of color—which might feel whimsical, were the content not so dark—pops up frequently across Nilsson’s assured major-label debut, Queen of the Clouds. Her foibles and off-kilter perspective on heartbreak offer shape and personality to a record that might otherwise be written off as too slick or inert, or indistinguishable from a host of peers making competent, spacious, and downcast pop music. She thrives on understated contradictions and grim quirks: While her friends are dating guys who are “turning 53,” she sneers on “Like Em Young”, she says prefers younger men. She gets drunk during the day and stays that way into the night, not the other way around, she tells us on “Talking Body”, a song that turns a lustful gaze on a male partner. On that song, seemingly low stakes are given great weight, and delivered with dead seriousness: “If you love me right/ We fuck for life.” On a song called “Moments”, she resents her cushy, happy childhood, as though it’s caused her to work doubly hard in order to become an interesting artist.
“I can get a little drunk/ I get into all the ‘dont’'s,” Nilsson continues on that song, before delivering the kiss-off: “But on good days I am charming as fuck.” It’s this sort of disarming honesty, a coupling of self-doubt and boldness in well-phrased lyrics—not necessarily Nilsson’s great hooks—that stick in the brain while listening to Queen of the Clouds. In two months time, she'll join Katy Perry on an arena tour, and by then, that the majority of the audience members will most likely be quite familiar with her music—and assumedly, they'll be just as delighted to hear the odd, charismatic little asides in her songs as they will be to belt out the choruses.
