Talk Art

Robert meets Lykke Li to discuss her new album The Afterparty, collaborating with artist Monty Richthofen on the cover artwork, and her powerful, ongoing creative partnership with experimental filmmaker and director Theo Lindquist. We explore her friendship and duet with the late David Lynch, and also look back to when Lindquist, Lykke Li, and artist Nick Verstand created their immersive, hyper-sensory multimedia installation at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition projected Lindquist's visual loops in high-resolution spatial audio to simulate a "cathedral of female romantic fantasy".

We learn about the inspiration Lykke finds in the work of artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, Pina Bausch, Tracey Emin, Marina Abramović, Jordan Wolfson, as well as Patti Smith, Joan Didion, Claire Denis and Isabelle Huppert. Plus, this week also sees Lykke Li perform live at The Met museum in New York, just as her song I Follow Rivers reached one billion streams on Spotify.

Lykke Li is a singular force in Swedish pop, where fragility hits the bullseye every time. She makes music as if it were both a diary and a spotlight, an intimate confession and a cold, unblinking stare straight back. They

She broke through with her debut album Youth Novels in 2008, in which the echoes of 60s girl-group pop took on a new kind of electric solitude. Her second album, Wounded Rhymes, tightened the rhythm and the shadow until it started to glow. In that era, I Follow Rivers became an international breakthrough moment. This song escaped into clubs, festivals, and headphones as a shared language and found a second life through remixes.

Her third album, I Never Learn, made heartbreak big, bare, and unflinching. Then came a turn toward a shinier present on the so sad so sexy era, and Eyeyequieted everything again until even a whisper feels like bass. Now she is already pointing toward what comes next. New music is now here, with the new album, Afterparty, and its monumental first single Lucky Again.

Lykke Li is an artist the whole world watches, but she refuses to pose for that gaze. She creates a space where pop is art, emotion is physical, and beauty is allowed to be a little ugly. It is confident, a bit ruthless, and dangerously addictive at the same time. The kind of music you dance to, only to realise later that something went straight under your skin.

And even though attitude does not need metrics, the scale is still there. She is not just a critic’s secret favourite, but a maker who has taken major Swedish honours, moved across the world’s biggest stages, and written songs that stay alive in a way very few can manage. This is the point where she stops explaining herself and simply owns the room.

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The Afterparty is out now on Vinyl and CD via Neon Gold Records. Buy the limited blue or clear vinyls from LykkeLi.com