Four years after a minimalist “Eyeye”, the Swedish artist enhances her electro-pop with beautiful, expansive orchestrations that convey joy and desolation, euphoria and fear for the future.
It’s astonishing what the mind can conjure when the heart is beating, when the night promises to be unique and bodies are too electrified to sleep. One tells oneself that the opportunity is too good, that perhaps it’s time to let oneself drift into the most hedonistic thoughts, without rejecting those that rarely have a place in contemporary societies: being vulnerable, gnawed by despair or overwhelmed by the emotions that weigh on us no longer feels embarrassing.
The night is a journey: it offers everyone the possibility to reinvent themselves, to gain self-esteem, before the daylight—or the club’s—lights bring bodies back to reason, before we are once again in sync with the ordinary world. With all the questions and fears that come with facing it.
Indulge in One Last Euphoric Dance
The Afterparty was conceived with this idea in mind, to gift oneself one last euphoric dance before the hangover crushes desires. According to Lykke Li, this album grew from a necessity: to explore her inner self and strive toward a certain form of pleasure, without ever turning away from the questions that flood the mind when feelings of shame, vengeance or desolation persist.
The titles of these new songs are therefore deceptive: in Happy Now, Lucky Again, So Happy I Could Die or Euphoria there is a desire to reveal nothing of existential doubts, morose moods, those downward moments that inevitably follow highs, in melodies that, themselves, allow for voluptuousness, lightness and triumphant refrains.
In contrast to Eyeye (2022), which favored purity, The Afterparty is a maximalist album, even in its conception, split between Los Angeles and Stockholm, with a seventeen-piece string section. “I tend to evoke the same themes over and over, so it’s better to innovate musically,” she admitted in 2022, during our last interview.
Twenty-Four Minutes of Pure Ecstasy and Release
For this sixth full-length, which she presents as potentially her last, she needed to go in the opposite direction of what the lyrics typically dictated, to steer away from lines that ignore our vacuity, our finitude, or even the absurdity of this world. To the heavy melancholy, the Swedish artist simply preferred disco strings, Balearic rhythms, flutes and soaring cinematic charges, all those lush arrangements that attest to the degree of excellence (and rigor) Lykke Li aimed to inject into each track, the most exalted (Not Gon Cry) as well as the most ethereal (Future Fear).
Because The Afterparty is not only that—twenty-four minutes of pure ecstasy and release. “This life is a knife in the heart”; “I sink into the darkness”; “I am bruised, I am broken”… Clearly, it is also an album that questions the fear of the future, that speaks of death to better celebrate life, that evokes love without fearing its loss, that seeks carefree moments while knowing they won’t last.
That is where, when her songs play with contrasts, when Lykke Li sings in a single breath both suffering and its remedy, when her writing escapes the romance’s framework— recall that the fourteen tracks of Youth Novels, in 2008, were conceived as complete chapters— to explore the tensions between joy and sorrow, that her music enchants. Because it helps to better accept recurring anxieties. And because all these contradictions, voiced with a sharp sense of orchestral detail, create the richness of this album, suddenly more expansive and lush.
One could, indeed, dissect every melody, meticulously describe their adornments, marvel at each listen at the pop surges of Famous Last Words and Knife in the Heart, or the opposite, say how they leave one speechless, how they unsettled, but the truth is that The Afterparty simply contains too much beauty to be reduced to a handful of superlatives. It is one of those albums that, through its apparent serenity and its disarming sincerity, invites repeated, obsessive listening, and manages to make one believe, as if by sheer normality, that nothing else exists around. Even when the first lights of day appear.
The Afterparty (Neon Gold Records/Virgin Records/Universal). Release on May 8.
