When Lykke Li picks up the phone early Monday morning, I find her in Los Angeles, where she’s been rehearsing for Coachella. This evening, the brooding Swedish singer-songwriter and “high priestess of heartbreak and sadness,” per collaborator Mark Ronson, will be in Indio, performing material from her sixth studio album, The Afterparty (out May 8).
Li, who first burst onto the indie music scene with her debut album Youth Novels in 2008, before finding mainstream success with “I Follow Rivers” from 2011’s Wounded Rhymes, is finding the prospect of performing new music rather daunting. It reminds her of the early days of her career: “When I was 19 or 20, I always had to prove myself or win someone over.”
She’s confronting that creeping insecurity with a fighter’s spirit. “I’m going into it like a brutalist boxing ring,” Li explains. “I can’t count on there being any fans or any love there. So I have to just wrestle my way through this set.”
Li channels a similar attitude on The Afterparty, shirking her more plaintive inclinations. I ask if that shift was intentional. “Yeah, for sure,” she says. With her last album, 2022’s EYEYE, “I met those demons within myself, and now I’m somewhere else, which is very exciting.” She describes this moment as her “existential era.”
That squares with what’s happening on The Afterparty lyrically: the album is more hopeful, inquisitive, and philosophical than anything else we’ve heard from Li to date. “Baby hold on tight / ’Til the bitter end / If we’re lucky / We’ll get lucky again,” she sings on the album’s first single, “Lucky Again.” She’s open to love, but not chasing it as she once did. “When you’re young, you have this feeling that there’s someone who can save you from yourself,” Li reflects. “In my case, I had a romantic idea of what that salvation meant.”
The after-party itself serves as a nicely layered metaphor. In the most literal interpretation, it evokes a space in which “you do things you might regret” as the night ends. But she also thinks of the after-party as what comes after the messy freedom of youth. “In your 20s, you’re at the pregame and you have everything ahead of you. Are you going to fall in love? Are you going to be famous? Are you going to move somewhere?” she muses. “And now, with all this life experience, you’re a couple of heartbreaks in and you’ve been around the block.”
