“Sometimes the best way to get over something is to feel it and just be in that shitty place for a bit. That’s what I realized.”
— Tove Lo, Rolling Stone (1 December 2016)
“Crushing my heart / Tear me apart / Hate on this world / ‘cos reality sucks,” Tove Lo intones on “Imaginary Friend”, and boy do we hear it.
Released just before Halloween 2016, the sophomore effort from Swedish pop artist Tove Lo immediately announced itself as a much darker, more sinister version of its hit 2014 predecessor Queen of the Clouds. Both albums detail the perspective of a woman who wants to go to clubs, get fucked up, and have sex on her terms — but what grounds it is in the way that she deals with the consequences.
Sure, “Habits (Stay High)” was kitschy, trippy fun, and her follow-up single “Talking Body” showed she still had the chops to compete with the best of the pop stars out there, but Queen of the Clouds, for all its bluster and abundance of personality, was still a remarkably hit-or-miss affair, which in turn makes the streamlined Lady Wood seem like a much more considered work in comparison. Although accompanied by the 31-minute short film “Fairy Dust“, which depicts her mingling and fighting with her own bad-girl persona, Lady Wood is less a concept album than it is her direct set of songs to date, each one designed for maximum Top 40 impact while still putting her personality front and center.
The album’s title track — about being with a guy whose reputation may be soiled with rumors — is arguably the greatest song Tove Lo has recorded, being upfront about female arousal in a world still fascinated with men’s. All the while the post-chorus vocal effects give melody and shape to a club beat that would be a hit in just about any other universe. It’s thrilling, dark, and danceable all at once. “True Disaster”, meanwhile, struts along with an ’80s strobelight synth that the Weeknd is going to be upset he didn’t cop in one way or another. “Pretty boys, they didn’t teach me things I didn’t know / ‘cos they don’t have the thing that I need / But they don’t know they don’t,” she sings, before saying that she knows she’s gonna get hurt but gives “zero fucks about it”, tackling her pursuit of busted relationships like Robyn struck with wanderlust, bruising her own ego before anyone else would have a chance to.
It’s these moments that make you think Tove Lo has completely one-upped herself, inverting Ke$ha’s bratty do-what-I-want heyday image and marrying the whole thing to actual consequences and memorable hooks, but the more that Lady Wood rolls on, the more it laps itself conceptually. The where-art-thou lyrics of closing track “WTF Love Is” only stand out due to her casual swearing in the chorus, while “Keep It Simple” works as an overdramatic breakup song with a post-chorus club thump, but, again, she expresses sentiments we’ve already heard from her before, as there’s only so many cool synth washes that can be laid over her tracks before you’re left crying out for something new.
Thankfully the wobbly single “Cool Girl” struts in a deep funk that stands out from the rest of the album, the narrator playfully pushing back against her lover’s desire to make this relationship much more serious. The acoustic Joe Janiak duet “Vibes”, meanwhile, rides a relatively simple “will we or won’t we” motif, the somewhat conversational lyrics still peppered with great lines like “I want you to lick my wounds”. It’s phrases like this that make you feel like Lady Wood could be so much more than it is, confrontational and commercial at the same time, sinister on the one hand and safe in the other.
While incredible moments abound, it feels that in navigating the urge to be both lyrically progressive while indisputably appealing as pure product, Tove Lo ultimately fell to the latter aspect more often than not on this album, pushing just enough boundaries to stand out from the crowd but not enough to leave a truly lasting document. Sure, Wiz Khalifa has a guest verse on “Influence” that is passable and “Flashes” is a postcard to a lover at home while she deals with the trappings of fame, but for all the explosive choruses and repeated synth trills, Lady Wood, a still-wonderful pop album, falls just shy of being truly great, from saying something truly memorable.
Given how much she upped her game between albums one and two, one has to sit back and hope her next leap will take her out of the clubs and indie circles and into something even greater: true icon status. She clearly has the makings of it in her: with her next go-round, we just need to see it.