It’s getting harder to surrender yourself—to the music, the moment—without noticing a bitter aftertaste. On her sixth and purportedly final record, The Afterparty, Lykke Li envisions a dawn when everyone’s stumbling home bleary-eyed: riding out the comedown, knotted with anxiety, disjointed and hollow. Li’s talked about her disenchantment with the music industry, from algorithm-based promotion to parasociality, and The Afterparty is positioned as a last gasp. It’s a paean to feeling lost and despondent amid the sparkling lights, suddenly all too aware that you’ve outgrown your lifestyle. Leaning into anonymity over intimacy, Li captures the anxieties of feeling outpaced and misplaced while the rest of the room keeps dancing on.
The record’s perspective is bleak, and from the outset, salvation seems fairly impossible. (The album’s first line, a dreamy “eyes to the sky,” is followed by “no angels here tonight.”) Li’s grasping for deliverance throughout The Afterparty, whether she’s evoking Madonna through ’80s synths and lyrical homage—“Down on my knees/Can you even hear my prayer?”—or chanting helplessly, “Lord, I don’t know how, and I can’t say when/If we’re lucky, we’ll get lucky again.” She’s in purgatory: “I’m a phoenix, baby/The flames no longer burn” and “I’m no Jesus, I won’t rise” are utterly exhausted.
Vocally, The Afterparty doesn’t sound nearly as downbeat as its lyrics paint it. That’s thanks to Li’s economy of words: Lines are often clipped, split, and vague, like flashes of light, so that if you dance your way through them, you’ll miss the intent of the full phrase entirely. Can’t think too hard if you never stop moving. Li’s also succinct in another way: The record’s only 25 minutes.
The devastation hidden in these fragmented moments is further obscured by outwardly sunny electro-pop instrumentation. On opener “Not Gon Cry,” Li attempts to convince herself of happiness and brighten the night through sheer force of will, picking up energy in the chorus to insist that she’s unaffected in a way that’s almost cathartic. “Happy Now”’s gated supersaw synth and spacey vocals are divine and dramatic on the surface, even as they chase a momentary high. “Lucky Again” bounds through its hopeful-sounding chorus, and “Knife in the Heart” is cheery and choral, even as she laments, “This life, this life is a knife in the heart.”
The promise of a better night—of feeling invincible and free—animates the record as it moves between ’80s-inspired pop, dissonant piano, cinematic strings, and even acoustic guitar. But any touch of joy, as on the sweeping, sincere “So Happy I Could Die” is conditional: “How long can it last?/We’re just slipping through the hourglass.” The song’s titular line is tinged with bitterness: Li places a heavier inflection on “die” as the instrumental fades, leaving the word marooned. Even “Sick of Love”’s tongue-in-cheek wail of “Oh, what the hell” feels self-aware when she sardonically adds: “Fell from heaven.”
It’s on those slower “comedown” songs, the barest instrumentally and vocally, that more direct truths slip in. “Euphoria,” whose finger-picked intro and warm, slow vocals are reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” is laced with the bittersweet promise of a temporary escape. “Famous Last Words” is a neat treatise on Li’s disenchantment, with the music business and with the party itself: Over a tinny, discordant piano, she’s despondent as she asks, “Do you have a cigarette to spare?/Take me somewhere/I don’t care.” Creeping and vulnerable, this song is where Li offers some of The Afterparty’s most explicit lyrics. She marks herself as the song’s main character and admits she “had to crash and burn to tell the tale/It takes a hammer/To know a nail.” It’s an unhappy retrospective that feels suspended by the buzzing piano chords—and it’s one of the most artistically compelling tracks, the place where she’s most willing to let us in.
We’ve had plenty of records about crying on the dancefloor, but Li’s tie-in to her career anxiety makes the approach unique: We’re walking through her weariness, knowing the crests of success aren’t quite enough. She doesn’t want to be recognized in the midst of the crowd; that’s a little devastating. You can disappear into the lights, but at some point, the music has to stop.
