If 'Mistakes' is any indication of the invention that awaits on Tove Styrke's latest album, Tove Lo will have more than 'Disco Tits' to concern her.
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For all her talk of forbidden fruits, and her own self-defeating willingness to eat them, the musical choices made in ‘Mistakes’ show that Tove Styrke is having way more fun being silly than sexy.
Almost every metaphorical lyric matches to a sound effect: bet you can’t guess what ends the line “But really I should get some me time, ‘fore I do something I can’t rewind”; what follows rhyming “leave I” with “Levi’s” had me losing my breath; and you’ll adore the petulant self-muting when Tove realises she can’t say “fuck” here. It’s charming – several sprinkles of goofiness to offset the song’s tensions. Which you can’t help but notice, when in the chorus, the time-filler of “Hey hey, hey”, is an actual note of emotion, a hesitant commitment to vulnerability made real because the gorgeous warped synths mimicking her vocals are briefly gone.
It’s fate that her song with the most clanging possible sounds and rhymes is also the one with the tightest, cleanest and most considered production. It makes the thrill of temptation and seduction impossible to miss – and from Styrke’s artistic voice, that thrill is indistinguishable from a giggle.
‘Mistakes’ is available now via RCA Records
