For the lead single of her second album, Tove Lo chose as inspiration one of the most-circulated and least-understood literary quotes of the past decade, the “Cool Girl” monologue from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.” People circulating this quote almost always leave out the fact that the woman delivering this soliloquy is a psychopath who will go on to rack up a body count. But why they circulate it is more telling: that in her misanthropy she’s elucidated something very real about relationships, and very bleak.
Tove Lo knows a bit about bleakness and misunderstanding; she’s courted both from her first single. The bluntness of “Habits (Stay High)” ensured it’d cut through the crowd of anodyne rising pop stars but also ensured that for the next year Lo would field interviews about whether she actually lurked in sex clubs and picked up daddies on the playground. As a student of confessionalism, she knows audiences have an endless appetite for scandalous female writers, from Mary McCarthy to Cat Marnell to Fiona Apple to Britney Spears, and that they crave their honesty less than they do their imagined autobiographies, their self-destruction and bare flayed skin. As a student of pop, she knows that her industry parses women's vulnerability as empowerment, their pain as sexiness, their point as pop as usual. Lo certainly leaves herself open to misinterpretation—her Sticky Fingers-via-creepshot album art, her music’s endlessly quotable debauchery. Perhaps knowing this, she practically spells Lady Wood out: putting an explanatory interlude in the outro of “Imaginary Friend” (“I don’t know... I guess it’s kind of like a voice in my heart reminding me that there's nothing to fear”), all but defining “lady wood” on the title track, or addressing the audience on “Cool Girl”: “Now you can’t tell if I’m really ironic,” Lo sings, absolutely correctly.
“Cool Girl” is equally a pop song, a delivery device for a sassy, stuttery chorus about being a cool girl. It's the line all smart music walks, and Lady Wood walks at album length. The album’s a showcase for Wolf Cousins, the Max Martin-affiliated songwriting collective that includes Lo and nearly a dozen others, including Swedish writer Ilya Salmanzadeh, Iranian producer Ali Payami and production duo the Struts. They’ve written about half the charts, but Lady Wood is as concentrated an outlet for their sound as you’ll find. But it’s equally a platform for Lo to argue, as she did on Queen of the Clouds, that the self-destructive affairs of a particular sort of woman are a subject worthy of four-part concept albums.
Lady Wood is the first two parts: the high and the comedown, the party and the afterparty. The structural resemblance to the Weeknd’s EPs isn’t accidental. When Abel Tesfaye worked with the Scandinavian claque he became Lo’s direct colleague, and the debauched tableaux and nervous vocal tics of tracks like “Don’t Talk About It” and “Keep It Simple” sound almost tailor-written for him. The sound is basically the same, too: nocturnal, minor-key synthpop, less suited to dancing with tears in your eyes than waking up alone and disheveled the morning after. It’s the same sound the Wolves have worked for over a year, but in Tove as in Abel they’ve found an ideal collaborator, one who goes as dark as they do.
For the most part, Lady Wood abandons the shock value of its predecessor; the title track and a couple nods to being “under the influence” are about as explicit as things get. But her ruminations and obsessions are the same: the fleeting freedom found in bad behavior; the compulsion of her women to tamp down their desires and their inability to do so; envy of the men in her misadventures, who have it easy. It’d be easy to play this as melodrama, but Lo sings most of the album without affect, so when she *does *emote, it counts for more: sneaking cutesy Betty Boop inflections into the backing vocals of “Cool Girl”'s chorus, belting into the void on the ballads, exclaiming “I’m gonna get hurt!” like it’s her deepest desire. That’s on standout “True Disaster,” which begins as Marr-like feedback haze and turns into one of the year’s best pop songs, a perfectly wrought instrument of self-laceration. (The effect’s somewhat ruined when the titular disaster reveals himself two songs later as mealy-voiced Joe Janiak, who barely sounds capable of manipulating a coffee machine, let alone a woman. This is why “True Disaster” should be a single.)
That said, “True Disaster” isn’t a perfect pop song. It suffers from Tove Lo’s primary weakness as a songwriter: her compulsion, at least once per track, to include a line that her Scandinavian colleagues might call “juicy” but that comes off more like a brand saying bae. At least on a track called “Lady Wood” you know what you're getting, but nothing about “True Disaster” prepares you for the line “I can’t hide my feels.” Even the tracks free of such nonsense are so unrelentingly bleak and so professionally done that, at album length, they become interchangeable well-produced malaise. Yet when Lady Wood tries to go upbeat—as on “Imaginary Friend” and “WTF Love Is”—the resulting tracks are the weakest by far. The bridge to “Cool Girl” is designed to be the emotional core of the whole album, the moment Lo lets her guard down and reveals her true desires, but it just sounds like she’s emulating Sia.
Proportionally, these are trivial complaints. Lady Wood is short, but Lo finds ample darkness to plumb. “Don’t Talk About It” recasts the girl squads so ubiquitous in pop culture as nihilistic cliques hazing each other into empty highs and dead-eyed selfies. “Flashes” does the same without the squad, Lo lamenting the effect on friends back home of so much mining her life for content: “When I fuck things up in front of camera flashes, what about you?” “Vibes” is deceptively chill, the supposedly lighthearted flirting of two parties with nothing between them but contempt. “What's your line, though?... Heard that before,” Lo teases, only to be negged down by Janiak. And “Keep It Simple”—befitting the title, just Lo and Cousins standout Payami—presents a scenario both hyper-specific and likely relatable: lying in bed with a rebound at some garbage hour of the night, flipping through an ex’s old sexts, feeling nothing. Payami’s synths land fast and loud like thunderclaps, and Lo pushes any impending connection or intimacy back into the dark. Then she pulls herself together for the drop, the cool girl once more.
