Swedish alt-pop star Tove Styrke’s new album, The Afterparty, takes the listener through a raucous night from dusk to dawn. We chat with Styrke about her unbothered era, motherhood and making music that coincides with the world’s metaphorical afterparty
For the past little while, Tove Styrke has been thinking about seeds – a lot. “No one thinks about this except for us freaks, but a seed is this small,” she says, illustrating with her thumb and pointer finger just how small a seed is. “And it becomes a tree! It is so crazy. The information is already there. It can’t randomly decide one day ‘Oh no, I’m going to become a different tree’. It’s like a little person is going to grow into a big person. You can’t stop it.” When Styrke says “us freaks” she isn’t speaking about beloved alt-pop stars (though she’s certainly that, too), she’s speaking of gardeners. For the past two years, Styrke has been studying biodynamic farming part-time (she’s halfway done her course). “It’s like, organic times one hundred,” she says when I ask what biodynamic farming is. “It’s given me so much.”
Soon a seed of Styrke’s own will become a tree. No, we’re not talking about her daughter – a little person that will grow into a big person – whom she shares with her partner, musician Sanna Sikborn Erixon. We’re talking about her album. The followup to 2022’s Hard, The Afterparty, which arrives this fall, is a sprawling soundscape that plays more like the score of a buzzy indie film than a traditional pop album. It’s a confident concept record as gorgeously, impossibly mapped and considered as a sturdy oak or perhaps a redwood.
Photo: Frida Marklund