THROWBACK TOVE
Tove Styrke has been active in the music industry for a little under a decade now. She finished third place on Swedish Idol when she was 16 and then put out some catchy electro pop. Yet it’s her newest album, Sway, that makes it clear Tove Styrke is here to stay. The nouveau-pop album has been out for about a month now to rave reviews. The now 25-year-old star is clearly ecstatic about her newest release.
“It makes me so happy, cause I’ve been working so hard on it,” Tove says candidly. “For a long time I put so much of myself, so much heart, into this project. It just means the world that people really seem to get it and appreciate it!” I ask her how one knows when a record is finished when you’re working on it for so long. “I just know!” she answers. It’s the same with individual songs she says. Up until the point when it’s finished, it’s like an itch. “I know what I want the 100% to be like… So if I’m at, let’s say, 75%, I just know that it’s not done. I feel it within me once everything is the best it can be.”
Sway: The Making-Of
The album contains eight love songs. Some of them are sweet, some of them are bitter, yet they all tie up together wonderfully. There’s a reason for that: Tove Styrke is a girl that knows what she wants. “I don’t make 30 songs and then boil it down. Every time I start writing a song, I already know whether it gonna end up on the record or not.” Does the result meet up with her expectations? Hell yes. That’s one of the reasons she’s so happy with the album. “I really had this idea that I wanted to strip my sound down a lot. I wanted to make the productions as minimal as I could, while still keep them interesting. It was really challenging, but I feel like we’ve succeeded in that.”
However, not everything went according to plan during the making of this album. When she started writing it, it was intended to be about other people. Tove wanted to figure out people’s behavior and how they connect to one another. In the end, it turned out to be about getting to know herself instead. “When you look at other people, in one way you’re always looking at yourself. Other people are a bit like mirrors. If you like yourself with a person, you like that person. If you get a warped image of yourself, it’s very frustrating, you feel strange. It’s been a very interesting journey.”
When we start talking about what her favorite song on the album is, she starts giggling. “It’s so hard to pick!” She has a different favorite depending on the day. Title track ‘Sway’ is the one she’s into right now, the music video for it is brand new and she loves the feeling of that song. ‘On The Low’ is another song mentioned. “If you remove everything but the melody and the lyrics, that’s probably my favorite. I love that it’s so simple, that it doesn’t need much”, she explains. Favorite one to perform is ‘Say My Name’, because it always gets people dancing.
