Digital Cover Story 13: Tove Styrke

"... I always felt like it's never gonna be my problem if people have a problem with the way I look and the way I present myself. Because it has nothing to do with what's inside, and it's so none of your business and your concern"

As I wait for my Zoom call with the Swedish superstar that is Tove Styrke, I think about all the remarkable songs she’s released throughout her career: There is no doubt that the platinum-selling and Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter is a force to be reckoned with. The songstress first gained popularity after coming third on the talent show Swedish Idol in 2009 and then launched a successful pop career swiftly after. From appearing on Late Night with Seth Meyers, to selling out arenas, touring alongside Katy Perry and Lorde and collaborating with the likes of Clean Bandit, ALMA and Stefflon Don - Tove’s journey so far has been an exciting and triumphant one.

As soon as we kick off our conversation, I can’t help but feel that I’ve known the pop star for ages already. Her open-minded, witty and warm nature makes it seem that our interview is more like a chat between two friends - Tove eagerly fills me in about everything she’s been up to in the past years and gives me an engaging insight into her artistry.

Words by Antonia Künzel

The singer recently returned to the scene after taking a break from releasing music - naturally, I was curious as to why she felt like now would be the ideal time to return. “This is going to be hard to believe because it’s been so long but I really tried to come back as soon as I could.”, she acknowledges. “I’ve been so eager to get back it, it’s so boring to be off-season, like it’s the most boring thing. You sit and hide away in a studio, and I missed sharing my stuff with people. The worst thing is when you have stuff lined up, when you have amazing things that you wanna release and you can’t tell anybody, you can’t talk about. So I’ve been eager to put music out for a while so as soon as I knew what I was doing I wanted to come back.”

“It is really hard”, she admits when I ask her if she was never tempted to share anything with her fans whilst she was working on new material for the past few years. But for her new visuals she has indeed given us a glimpse into the making-of, and came to the revelation that “if I don’t share, it feels weird, so more and more I feel like sharing is caring. Because why not? I tried to be more open and shared so much from the video prior to the Mood Swings release because I feel like my listeners and my fans are involved, I feel like they are part of the process and what I’m doing and why I am doing it”, she elaborates, shouting out her loyal, ever-growing fanbase. But more about ‘Mood Swings‘ later.

“I feel like I came out better on the other side. I’m just thankful to be here and make stuff. I appreciate life and have people that I love around me, and that’s a better space of creating things than always thinking ‘I have to be number 1’, I just wanna do whatever the fuck I want.”

During her musical hiatus, Tove has been up to a variety of things, including participating in a Swedish Reality TV show. Deep down however, her mental health suffered. “It’s been a hard couple of years to be quite honest.”, she reminisces, highlighting that especially when the pandemic started, she found herself in a black hole, like so many others in the music and entertainment industry. “It stole my job! Having that happen and not knowing I could ever go back and perform in front of a life audience again.. It’s so weird when you’ve had this passion for all your life and you had a purpose and all of a sudden this purpose has been removed. I forced me to really think and evaluate my life in many ways.” Millennial blues is one of the battles she’s faced, and as a millennial myself, I can undoubtedly relate to that. So of course I just have to ask her how she overcame it. “I didn’t.”, she laughs. “I wrote a song about it, it’s the funniest. feel like it’s the weight of my generation. Especially now when there’s like a younger generation. Because we were always like the young and promising ones. And now it’s like ‘Okay boomer’.” This period has equally given her a new appreciation of life, though. “My sister went through a really difficult breast cancer treatment so it’s been a lot and I feel like I came out better on the other side. I’m just thankful to be here and make stuff. I appreciate life and have people that I love around me, and that’s a better space of creating things than always thinking ‘I have to be number 1’, I just wanna do whatever the fuck I want.”

Despite everything, Tove did come back stronger than ever, and proves it with her latest release ‘Mood Swings’. The track, an instant bop, is a reflection of the singer’s aforementioned struggles and explores the meaning of human identity and self-acceptance. Accompanied with the single, she gifted us a music video - and what can I say? In my opinion it has already reached iconic status. Portraying a variety of different characters, we can find Tove changing looks by the second, with each ‘person’ displaying distinct characteristics. The creative concept behind it is pure genius and cleverly sheds a light on how we as a society are sometimes too quick to judge a book by its cover. I am intrigued by each character. “What they are all about? Madness.”, she chuckles, when I ask her all about them. “I came up with that idea and the whole concept, I wrote it down exactly how I wanted it to be and then sent it out to a bunch of directors to see who thought it would be cool. And then I found the perfect match. You can never know who somebody is just by looking at them.”

The idea got inspired by her own experiences in the past. “I used to have a fight with mum about this, like my mum is the best and I know she means everything with love. But I used to have arguments with her about the ways that I would dress, or wear lots of make-up or whatever, and always felt like it’s never gonna be my problem if people have a problem with the way I look and the way I present myself. Because it has nothing to do with what’s inside, and it’s so none of your business and your concern. Like, you can never tell. So the concept stems from that. So I thought it would be funny to have persons who look so so different but we don’t get to know their backstory. I made backstories of course, I took it really seriously. But the viewer doesn’t know them and for all you know they could be feeling the same, or completely different things. Somebody who seems pretty normal could be the crazy one. Like, you don’t know. It’s just me fucking around with visual representation of identity.”

I am stunned by how authentic, and also much-needed, the creative concept is, and how she hit the nail on the coffin with her explanation. I can’t help but think about the effort it took to turn this idea into a reality though. When you see the video, you will immediately realise that Tove has transformed herself into more than just two roles, and the attributes couldn’t differ more from each other. “We had to do two full days, and some of the looks took so long. Like the one with the tubes for instance, and also the last look. They took 5 hours each. We had to meet up at the make-up artists apartment at 4 in the morning because the studio wasn’t open yet. I was like sleeping on a mattress on the floor while they were painting me. Everybody had such long days and really went in. I practiced for a week, I even practiced blowing bubbles. It was a lot of prep and effort. It was fun and I loved doing it. It’s almost more fun than making music”, she recalls.

‘Mood Swings’ is only a taste of what’s yet to come from the Swedish superstar this year. Describing her upcoming album as ‘fun puke’, we can only imagine that we will be rewarded with more pop anthems. After asking her if she can reveal more about the project yet, she clarifies that “it’s all over the place which I think is gonna be really great”, but according to her won’t live up to her hugely celebrated album ‘Sway’. But, with her new mindset, she declares: “I loved my last album, I think it was so perfect and would never even attempt to do something that’s in the same universe. So this time around I went for something really different. So instead of stylistically coherent, it’s more all over the place. You get lots more emotion. It’s less restrictive and less thought behind it but it’s more real.”

Like many musicians, Tove is a perfectionist and goes “over every word a thousand times until it’s perfect.” I was wondering how she managed to ditch that habit, and that’s when Kanye enters the chat (not literally, so don’t get too excited!). “Sometimes perfect doesn’t have to be the best or at least not the only option. I listened a lot to Kanye this past year and there’s something about his music, the way he makes it. It’s never perfect but it feels like the communication between us and his brain is so direct and I think that’s pretty cool and inspiring. When you hear music like that it makes you want to create music. Sometimes there is music which is so perfect that it makes me creatively depressed.”

Our conversation continues by talking about the phenomenon that is Tik Tok. Especially in the past year, throughout never-ending lockdowns, the social media platform has seen an enormous rise, particularly among the Gen Z and young millennial audience. Short videos with mostly music in the background, viral challenges and everything spanning from DIY to travel content - whoever uses the platform is at risk of becoming seriously addicted to it. “It’s such a fun platform, if I look tired it’s because I fell asleep watching Tik Tok. It’s the worst! I need to take control, but I love Tik Tok.”, she confesses after we find out about our mutual addiction to the app, and I couldn’t agree to more to it. The main reason we started talking about it though, is because funnily enough, her 2016 hit ‘Borderline’ recently saw a revival on there, after Tik Tok sensation Charli D’Amelio used the track in one of her videos - this coverage then resulted in roughly 300K more videos by various users. “The thing with Borderline is, it had a moment on Vine, and on Musically and now it has a moment on Tik Tok”, Tove tells me when I wonder out loud whether she had expected that. “There is just something about this song and short video formats that I guess really works. People keep rediscovering it which is really cool.” And the numbers don’t lie: To this date, ‘Borderline’ and its remix have collectively racked up over 70M streams on Spotify alone - and they’re increasing continuously.

“I listened a lot to Kanye this past year and there’s something about his music, the way he makes it. It’s never perfect but it feels like the communication between us and his brain is so direct and I think that’s pretty cool and inspiring. When you hear music like that it makes you want to create music.”

With an impressive catalogue of collaborative songs under her belt, including tracks ‘Last Goodbye’ featuring Clean Bandit and Stefflon Don, and ‘Love Me Back’ featuring RITUAL, to name but a few, I was curious whether there was anyone who is still on her collaboration dream list, and her answer doesn’t need much consideration. “I think that Doja Cat is such a genius and I thought that for a long time! I even met her when she played in Stockholm in 2019, and I’m not lying - it was not a big crowd, people were watching Post Malone at the big arena and she played a small club and she was so, so good.”, she tells me, and our conversation swiftly turns into a mutual fan discussion enthusing over her artistry. “I’m genuinely happy that she has become so big. Because she does things with thought behind it. She did this heavy metal version of ‘Say So’, it’s insane. And the next week she brought us a ‘Cabaret’. And then ‘Planet Her’. You know when people get big and then their artistry isn’t as good anymore? She gets better and better!”, Tove swoons.

I don’t know about you, but I’m certain that if those two teamed up, they’d come up with an absolute smash hit. So needless to say, our chat is drawing to a close by us manifesting a collaboration into the universe. We wholeheartedly agree that “it’s going to happen, because we’ve manifested it.”

Watch ‘Mood Swings’ below!