TOVE LO GETS PRIMAL ON “ESTRUS” AND SHE’S NEVER SOUNDED MORE FEARLESS
More than a decade after turning heartbreak into a generation-defining anthem with “Habits (Stay High),” Tove Lo is back in full emotional chaos mode with the announcement of her sixth studio album, “ESTRUS,” arriving September 18 via Pretty Swede Records and Virgin Music Group. Alongside the announcement, the Swedish pop antihero dropped the project’s first single and video, “I’m your girl right?” — a hypnotic, emotionally spiraling track that feels engineered for late-night dance floors and questionable decisions.
If the title sounds intense, that’s intentional. “Estrus” refers to the period when female mammals are in heat, and Tove Lo fully leans into the concept’s primal energy. “It’s my mind and my body wanting different things, wanting everything,” she shared of the album. “There’s no good advice on this album… just a lot of feelings, no solutions.”
The project reportedly dives deeper into the emotional contradictions that have always fueled Tove Lo’s music — euphoria tangled with self-destruction, intimacy colliding with anxiety, desire blurring into emotional wreckage. Sonically, “ESTRUS” draws from Swedish electro-pop and indie dance influences including Robyn and The Knife, while bringing in collaborators Ludvig Söderberg, Elvira Anderfjärd, Luka Kloser, and a standout collaboration with Stromae.
The tracklist alone reads like an emotional spiral playlist: “a lot of feelings, no solutions,” “I’m the cake,” “die for my art with a lonely heart,” and “des fleurs x stromae.”
The video for “I’m your girl right?” pushes that atmosphere even further. Directed by Nogari and filmed in a former monastery outside São Paulo, the visual features more than 70 dancers moving through dreamlike choreography that feels somewhere between ritual, rave, and emotional breakdown.
Alongside the album reveal, Tove Lo also announced the “ESTRUS TOUR,” kicking off September 15 in Nashville before hitting Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and more. Brooklyn’s Under The K Bridge stop on September 19 will feature special guest Cobrah, which feels destined to become one of the best nights of the fall. Support across the tour includes Mallrat and Rose Gray.
Long before Tove Lo became one of pop’s most fearless voices, The Untitled Magazine featured the artist in an exclusive interview and editorial photographed by Indira Cesarine in 2014, just as “Queen of the Clouds” and “Habits (Stay High)” were exploding globally. Even then, her refusal to sanitize her experiences or soften her perspective felt radically refreshing.
“I wanted to show me because I’m not perfect. Nobody is,” Tove Lo told Cesarine during the interview. “I want to show the imperfections, so that people can see that I’m serious when I say that I’m honest about who I am.”
She also addressed the double standards surrounding women expressing sexuality, vulnerability, and self-destruction in pop music — themes that remain deeply embedded in her work today. “Good people can do bad things too,” she said. “Some people are going to be offended and some people are going to relate.”
That tension between liberation and collapse has always been central to Tove Lo’s music, and “ESTRUS” feels like the next evolution of it — less concerned with neat resolutions than documenting the emotional aftermath in real time. In an era where pop can often feel algorithmically polished, Tove Lo still sounds gloriously human: messy, self-aware, impulsive, vulnerable, euphoric, and occasionally spiraling at full speed. Exactly how we like our pop stars.
