Tove Lo’s Queen of the Clouds is where Charli XCX’s Sucker album meets Lykke Li’s entire oeuvre in an overcrowded toilet stall: brash, omnivorous pop, in which heartbreak and bad behaviour loom very large. The 27-year-old Swede rose to fame quickly last year, thanks in part to a shabby remix of her excellent song Habits (Stay High). The original song (now on 116 million-plus YouTube views) follows Lo on a bender — going to sex clubs, being sick in the bath, all “to numb the pain” of lost love. The Hippie Sabotage version (217 million-plus views) loops Lo’s vocal into a chipmunky travesty; a combination of the two versions did the trick though. “You’re gone and I gotta stay high/All the time/To keep you off my mind,” became one of 2014’s breakthrough pop sentiments.
Lo’s debut album has actually been out for seven months elsewhere. Chances are, savvy UK pop fans have already worn out its grooves (or whatever their digital equivalents may be), having finagled a download from some other territory. Lo has been working behind the scenes for a while too. Through her friends Icona Pop, this Rytmus music academy alumnus badgered label bigwigs a couple of years ago. She ended up writing with Max Martin, pop’s premier song factory (Lo’s credits include Ellie Goulding’s Love Me Like You Do). The UK release of Queen of the Clouds (QOTC) was tactically delayed to allow the pop tearaway to recover from surgery to her vocal cords. Her record label presumably wanted to promote the album properly here. You can’t blame them — much — because QOTC is a goer.
Last August, Not on Drugs made the case that Lo’s erratic behaviour might be down to Cupid’s arrows, not anything stronger. QOTC breaks down into three suites — The Sex, The Love and The Pain — and Lo doesn’t hold back on any front. “If you love me right, we [expletive] for life,” promises Talking Body with what non-Scandinavians might see as typical Swedish forthrightness. On the indecently catchy Like ‘Em Young, Tove Lo is teasing her friends with older partners (“Why you judging me/ When your guy’s turning 53?”), but the song’s chorus feels outrageous belted out: imagine the furore if “I like ‘em young” were being sung by a man. Lo’s songs are peppered by these “did she really just say that?” moments.
“I’m not the prettiest you’ve ever seen,” she notes on the relatively mellow ballad Moments, an(other) ode to her misspent youth, “on the good days I am charming as [expletive].” There is no shortage of attractive twentysomething women singing about lust and partying, but Lo has managed to carve out a niche in which she owns her own troubled lustfulness, and where her antics are very much secondary to her emotions. Sure, the music (produced by Swedes the Struts) draws a little too freely from everywhere, and Lo’s actual singing voice is strangely anonymous — a little Rihanna on The Way That I Am, generic elsewhere — where her turns of phrase are so arresting. But these are quibbles. This long and busy album’s crowning moment is the magnificent Timebomb, which starts with a few cheesy bars of piano and synth. Lo’s man is cutting out a line just as she is storming out: Lo’s words tumble out, an almost jazzy rap of knowing analysis. “You’re not the one,” she concludes, as the song mounts to its joyously bombastic, bittersweet climax: “You and I/ We’re a tiiiiiimebomb-bomb-bomb-bomb!” The mushroom cloud doesn’t dispel for another dozen tracks.
