In the modern parlance of pop, it’s no unusual thing to introduce a new album with the rhetoric of a new era. But it says a lot about Lykke Li – an artist who’s always seemed more comfortable on the fringes of the mainstream than at its centre; whose sweeping heartache anthems have seen her collaborate with Mark Ronson but also David Lynch – that even this common trope comes with a poetic, unlikely edge.
The Swedish singer’s sixth (and, reportedly, final) LP ‘The Afterparty’, she explains to NME from her hotel in Paris, where she’s out on promo duties, sees Li entering her “God era”. Don’t worry: she’s not developed a messiah complex. Instead, following a career that’s seen her trawl the depths of love in all its complex forms, from 2008 debut ‘Youth Novels’ to its celebrated follow-up ‘Wounded Rhymes’ and beyond, Li has spent the last few years looking to something “more existential, more bird’s eye”. “I feel like all great artists – Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison – get to it eventually, where you’re just starting to question the meaning of things,” she suggests. “What are the choices we’re going to make? Is there a God? Who am I talking to?”
‘The Afterparty’ attempts to answer these questions via a succinct, 25-minute journey through the hazy dregs of a night out: an analogy for a lawless, ungovernable time in society that feels like “there isn’t a thought or a plan for tomorrow”. Musically, it’s Li’s most transcendent album in years, from the huge, soaring chorus of ‘Happy Now’ to the string-laced, strangely joyful melancholia of ‘Lucky Again’ – the latter recalling her aforementioned Ronson team-up ‘Late Night Feelings’.
Lyrically, meanwhile, it is full of knotty interrogations of who to trust and how to exist. Across the record, Li talks of “spit” and “knives”; she calls herself a “fool” and a “fucking clown”. “They’ve done studies on how, if you’re able to name a feeling, then your nervous system will regulate,” she notes. “I mean, we all want to feel seen and understood, so when I’m able to use those words for what I’m feeling, then it all makes sense all of a sudden.”
There’s a defiance and an unwillingness to play pretty within all elements of ‘The Afterparty’ that feels exhilarating. Its cover features the singer sheathed, alien-like, in a pair of sheer tights with smiley faces drawn over her eyes. It’s an image that’s more performance art than pop star – a shift in presentation that, having just turned 40, Li has been considering the deeper meaning of.
“There’s so much knowledge about how to be young in all the novels, the music, the movies. We have the manual. And then, all of a sudden, you’re 40, and it’s quite uncharted territory,” she says. “You look at people like Marina Abramovich or Tracey Emin – there are a few people that continue to be completely themselves and fearless. But if you tune in on a frequency level, there’s sheer panic and fear [about women getting older]. And that, to me, is quite scary. I want the crone perspective to teach me. I want advice from my female elders, because there has to be something beyond that?”
If Li is writing her own rulebook of how to enter your fifth decade while remaining a vital, vibrant pop mainstay, then lesson one is to go all in. While creating ‘The Afterparty’, she decided to shake off any labels that the outside world might want to put on her and become something else entirely.
“As a woman, you’re judged continuously from the first time people see you, and it’s such a confined place,” she reasons. “So when I was writing this album, I was really like, ‘I’m going to be a rock god. I’m a fuckboy’. I’m channelling all the British rock gods through time: Mick Jagger, Primal Scream, Oasis, Mike Skinner, Ozzy Osbourne. I’m joining the club.” She pauses, mischievously: “I just wanted to roam free in the night with my big dick out.”
“I want the crone perspective to teach me. I want advice from my female elders”
Alongside embodying her dick-swinging new alter-ego, however, Li had also taken on a simultaneous new identity as a mother of two (her second child was born in 2023). “When I was making the album, at times I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing?!’” she laughs. “It’s crazy [to channel this] and then come home and have a tiny baby to take care of.” In a previous interview with Vogue, she was quoted as saying that she found motherhood and making art “very incompatible”, but she clarifies it’s not the actual creation that’s the issue, but the way that the music industry treats working artists who are also mothers. “You realise that it really is a man’s world. If you didn’t know that before, you definitely know that now,” she says wryly.
Change, she suggests, comes from just “keeping fighting”. “I guess we women have to somehow come together and be like, ‘Fuck off to all that’,” she shrugs. But having crafted a record of buoyant existentialism after nearly two decades spent expertly marrying life’s beauty and heartbreak, Li has always been an artist able to channel her dualities. “I feel like there’s always a side of me that has these two very opposite forces. It’s always hope and despair. You’re lying face flat on the ground, but you’re also staring up into the blue sky. It’s concrete and heaven at the same time,” she says.
Even the nocturnal world of ‘The Afterparty’ is one born of contradictions. Last night, she notes, she “did not sleep for one second”. Her own after-hours tend towards one of two extremes. “In my home life, I live like a monk, and I’m in a cocoon. But then, when I leave the nest, it gets unhinged pretty fast,” she chuckles. “When I did the listening party in LA, I took up drinking that night and had to climb through a window to get home. So it can be like that. I’m creation and destruction at the same time.”
It’s a proclamation that fits with the singer’s perhaps unexpected love of WrestleMania. Watching the “insanely over the top storylines about betrayal, revenge, all of that”, Li was struck with a revelation. “I’m like, ‘Oh wow, this is me. This is my life. This is the pop industry that I’m watching’,” she says. “You see the blood, sweat and tears in these people too, and how much physical damage [they take]. It’s so moving to me – the sacrifice, the physicality, and then you just get beaten the shit out of. As a female artist, this is what it feels like. It’s ruthless.” It seems not inconsequential that in wrestling, the outcome of who is destined to win or lose – no matter their efforts – is also one scripted by an unseen higher power.
Yet Li is firmly resisting any predictable narrative. She recently debuted her new stage show at Coachella for the first time – a set that sees her grappling with a very physical, “punk” new style of performance – and is clearly finding the challenge both fulfilling and exhausting. “I love [playing live] in the moment, but I wish that we could do it in my bed, you know? Like, I wish we could all just lie in bed,” she sighs.
Perhaps she could follow her performance art heroes and bring the audience to her bedroom? “Well, I’m friends with Lena Dunham, and there is a whole history of bedridden female artists. It’s quite interesting,” she muses. “There’s a line at the beginning [of Dunham’s recent memoir Famesick] where she’s like, ‘This industry doesn’t allow for health, sleep, family. You have to just put everything on the line to feed this beast, and then it doesn’t really matter how famous you get or how much money you make, it will still spit you out and chew you up.’ I related to it so much.”
It’s moments like these when you can understand entirely why Lykke Li might want to put a certain phase of her career to bed. She’ll never give up music (“I can’t because that’s what I love most in the whole world,” she reasons), but she’s trying to work out what the next stage might look like. Typically for the Scandinavian iconoclast, by the end of our conversation, she’s already begun to question whether a lack of roadmap is a sign that LP7 is actually the place she should be exploring after all. “Pop music is about sex, money and youth. So then what happens after that – is there anywhere to go?” she considers. “Maybe then that’s exactly what I should be doing. Creativity itself will never close the door on me. So is there a second act?”
Lykke Li’s ‘The Afterparty’ is out on May 8 via Neon Gold Records.