Tove Styrke just announced her new album – which she says is about the feeling of living like we're in "the afterparty of our times"

It’s approaching four years since Swedish pop darling Tove Styrke released her last album. In that time, it turns out, there’s been plenty keeping her busy.

For one thing, she made her theatre debut, playing a pivotal role in a new production of the David Bowie musical Lazarus. She’s also been retraining as a gardener, describing herself as a “part-time garden witch at this point”. Oh, and as she reveals in disarmingly low-key fashion, she also became a parent in 2024, around the time she was starring in Lazarus.

“That’s a big thing,” she enthuses, in something of an understatement.

So, it’s fair to say that the last few years have been a period of major change for the Say My Name singer.

“It feels like a different life,” she tells HuffPost UK as she reflects on the release of her last album, 2022’s Hard. “And the world is so different now. Looking back, it feels like I made Hard in a completely different world, when I was a completely different person.”

Excitingly, Tove has also been quietly working hard on new music for the last two years, which she’s finally ready to share with the world. These monumental changes – both on a personal and global level – have been a major influence on her new material (in an accompanying press release, Tove speaks of how “becoming a mother has also meant a really powerful shift in my life – I honestly don’t care what anybody but my daughter thinks about me anymore” and insists that “gardening, my reconnection with nature and parenthood have all influenced this music as much as any piece of art or music ever did”).

Titled The Afterparty, Tove describes her new release as “all of my anxiety bundled up on an album” and “like a big, long crisis made into pop songs”.

She explains: “The album is a reflection on the state of the world as it is, the world that we’re living in today. It feels like the afterparty of our time, it feels like the best has already happened, it feels like we’re in this weird decadent time, waiting for the end, or like a rebirth.”

In other words, it’s one last party before the end of the world – and if all of that sounds a little on the bleak side, Tove is adamant that this afterparty should be a joyful one. At least, at first.

Tove Styrke recently released Prayer, the first single from her new album The Afterparty

Case and point, lead single Prayer, a five-minute burst of euphoria that kickstarts The Afterparty with affirmative lyrics like “I can have it if I want it, I am worth it, I am on it”. “I am love,” she sings on the chorus. “I’m hard and soft… I can be it, if I want it.”

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