When one thinks of pop artists now, one could think of young women dancing in Agent Provocateur over some emotionally barren hyper pop. This is not exclusively the landscape, and I am in no way reducing the artists or medium to something valueless. However, what I am suggesting is that 20 or so years ago, pop musicians sat within a slightly different world. Perhaps it is nostalgia warping my memory, but it felt like artists could be sadder, and less sexy, more pained than perfect perhaps? Alternatively, I could have just been a very angsty teenager some years ago that maybe saw a little more pain and less pop music, but I will spare you from a personal essay on the nature of memory and my adolescent experiences.
What I did most definitely experience was catch the train into London to go to clubs and dance with boys I would burn mix CDs for. I’m fairly certain I put Lykke Li’s Little Bit on one evening, circa 2007, drawn to the lyrics of being a little bit in love with someone, but only if the feeling was reciprocated. I loved the vulnerability, the paradox between professing affection and holding back, and the yearning. For artists of this nature, there is the greater tension than of speaking to something both deeply personal and universally understood, and constantly refining the language with which you use to express this. For nearly two decades, Li, a Swedish artist, has carved out a singular space within pop that is defined not by trend, but by emotional extremity. From the spectral minimalism of her debut Youth Novels (2008) to the landscape romanticism of Wounded Rhymes (2011), which delivered the now-canonical I Follow Rivers, through to the stark devastation of I Never Learn (2014), and later the sensual, body-forward textures of So Sad So Sexy (2018) and the immersive audiovisual world of EYEEYE (2022), Li has consistently returned to the same fault line: love and its undoing.
“I’m at that ripe spiritual age where it’s no longer about who’s going to come in on a white horse and rescue me. It’s more like, is there a God? What is the meaning of life?”
It feels as though Li has battled with topics that would be considered too melancholic for pure commercial pop, yet too melodic and infectious to exist entirely outside it. Now, with her sixth studio album, The Afterparty, Li enters what she has described as her “existential era”, a shift that feels like a widening of scope. If earlier records traced the emotional cycles of romance; infatuation, collapse, aftermath, this new work turns its attention toward something more abstract. Mortality, meaning and time: the quiet, persistent question of what remains.
When I speak to Li, she is on a freeway, having had fittings for a shoot the next day, which is a great place to start the conversation as we metaphorically and physically travel towards the albums’ release.
“I feel like this stage is strange,” she says, regarding how she feels of the record's completion. “It’s kind of a limbo. After you’re done being immersed in the work, but before it’s fully out. I haven’t done any shows yet, so it could really go either way. There’s anticipation, excitement, fear… all of it.”
It is an apt description, not just of release cycles, but of the album itself. The Afterparty unfolds as a dusk-to-dawn odyssey, a record that sits in the aftermath of something, though it never quite defines what that something is. Like how Virginia Woolf explores Clarissa Dalloway’s life in one day, Li explores her life and its meaning in 24 minutes – the party has ended, but the lights are still on. The music continues, though its meaning has shifted. “I’m at that ripe spiritual age where it’s no longer about who’s going to come in on a white horse and rescue me. It’s more like, is there a God? What is the meaning of life?” It is a question that feels both ancient and newly urgent.
Across her discography, Li has often positioned love as the central organising force: something to be pursued, followed to the depths of the ocean, lost, mourned, resurrected. But here, that axis begins to dissolve. Not entirely, but enough to allow other questions to surface. “I think we all hit this phase in life, whether you have children or not, we all have to figure out what the meaning of life is, and what is your life purpose, and ask: how are you going to spend this one life?”
Time, in this context, becomes both subject and pressure. Not just in the abstract, but in the lived sense of the accumulation of years, of work and of experience. Li speaks about this with a clarity that suggests both reflection and resistance; she is refreshingly, verging on brutally, honest. “I mean, I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. I think when you're young, you're so immersed in being young. I think you have a different concept of time. I've been reflecting, actually, a lot on my journey to becoming an artist. That started when I was five years old – you know what I mean? So, I've been doing this for so long, so, yeah, [the meaning of my life] changes. You realise also when you've been in [the industry] for this long, just how rotten the actual business is which can really discourage you at times, so you do have to kind of find a more spiritual reason for being through all this.”
The spiritual yearning that celebrates survival could be the genesis of The Afterparty. As a response to Li’s years in the industry, to her feelings on culture and broader conditions of contemporary life. “Well, it's kind of like, what sparks my curiosity? The only positive thing about social media is all these memes that people are making about, their mental health [and] going off the rails. I find that so funny, I'm always watching, and thinking that is the only positive thing about whatever's going on in our iPhones.”
Li finds these embarrassing feelings that she shares fascinating as a writer, although she is not an advocate for social media in general. “I mean, honestly, I think it's really all gone too far. There are just so many things that have gone too far that are in direct conflict with our mental health. None of this is good. TikTok is not a good thing. It's not good that we're obsessed with our phone, spending like 90 per cent of our waking hours on some algorithm, or that there's plastic in our food.”
I empathise. All of this negativity could crush an artist, or anyone for that matter, yet Li remains resilient in the onslaught of the awful. But she acknowledges that the awful forces us to prioritise beauty, and Li does not find that these negative external forces prevent her from connecting with herself artistically.
“The thing is I'm always connected to my artistic self, that is what always exists for me, and I can just exist in that beautiful world. It's just the outside world that can be so ugly and harsh, maybe that is what The Afterparty is? We're just caught in a storm. But then what? What can we offer as human beings? What is something that is light and that is precious? That is art. I guess I'm doing what I can to [offset the darkness]. I'm offering something to the world. I am somehow, even for myself, transmuting the dark, ugly feelings into hopefully something that is more beautiful, like a song, a prayer, a dance, an image.”
This idea of transmutation sits at the core of The Afterparty. It is a record built on contrast. Sonically, it is lush, orchestral, expansive. Emotionally, it is steeped in something closer to desperation. “This world is so fucked up,” Li continues, "but 17 people playing strings together can still bring tears to your eyes. I think music and art are so beautiful. That is what we can offer as human beings, in contrast to all the like bullshit.”
Whilst Vivaldi is not the cure to the world’s evil, for Li, these moments of beauty remind us of the light in hopeless times. I’m curious to know if she feels that the current chaos of the world allows for greater pain in pop music now, but she feels all eras have wonderful things to offer, and highly emotional music is always able to be found.
“I am somehow, even for myself, transmuting the dark, ugly feelings into hopefully something that is more beautiful, like a song, a prayer, a dance, an image.”
It is an ever-changing industry that makes things harder for artists with giants like Spotify impacting an artists’ ability to survive. Given the difficult nature to survive, I ask Li if it takes a certain kind of person to venture into becoming an artist? “Of course! You do not go into making art if you don't have like a hole to fill or like a need to be loved.”
Within all of this existential questioning, the critique of culture and the confrontation with time, there is something grounding in the way Li continually returns to the body. Not as an aesthetic object, but as a site of endurance, expression, and truth. When I ask her what, or who, has been inspiring her during this period, she cites Serbian conceptual artist and performer Marina Abramović and the reading of her 2016 memoir Walk Through Walls that really resonated. This interest in physicality extends beyond performance art and into movement itself. “I feel like you can feel kind of like [self], pity sometimes, like ‘Oh, it's so hard being in the music industry!’ I’ve gotten into modern dance, and then you start zooming into the life of a dancer – it’s probably one of the hardest professions in art you could ever have. I've been so interested in dance and the human body. Talk about the dedication, struggle and pain for so little compensation...”
When I ask if this fascination translates into her own practice, whether she feels compelled toward physical expression, she answers simply, “Yeah.” But then expands, widening the scope of what constitutes art altogether. When not dancing, she loves graffiti, citing it as “pure, unfiltered”; she sees graffiti as an offering from one human to another. There is something profound in this, a rejection of institutional validation in favour of immediacy. No stakeholders, no campaign strategy, no algorithmic intent. Just presence, intention and communication.
I suggest that this might be what we’re circling, this idea of immediacy, of something that lands without excess framing? But she gently corrects me, telling me it’s “more like truth and honesty” over immediacy. “I'm tired of all this stuff that doesn't mean anything. I want to feel something. I cannot go to a movie and just look at an actress who has a completely Botox-ed face. That's like an insult to me, to the audience. It's an insult to the craft.”
It is one of the most striking lines of our conversation, not because it is controversial, but because it is so direct. There is no cushioning, no softening of the sentiment. For Li, the erosion of expression, literal and metaphorical, is not so much aesthetic as it is ethical. The inability to read a face is the inability to read emotion, and therefore the inability to connect. The conversation inevitably returns to the structures shaping contemporary culture, attention, speed, consumption. I ask her whether depth itself is becoming rare, will reading Dostoevsky become an obsolete activity, whether the act of sustained engagement is quietly disappearing?
“I think the big superpower will be someone who will sit and write or read Crime and Punishment” she tells me. “That will be a very special person in the future.” There is something almost dystopian in that observation. It is here that The Afterparty begins to feel not just like an album, but like a response to this condition, an apocalyptic pop record for the embers of time. When I ask her about the album’s brevity, whether concision was a deliberate decision Li grounds it in reality and practicality. “I mean, first of all, I have two kids, and I'm a present mother. So, those are the circumstances that I'm working with.” However, it’s as conceptual as it is pragmatic, wanting to give her best with the time she has, and to be economical with her work so that “every word hits. Art comes in the form it comes, and for me this was the form – like, this is the night, this is the play.”
“I don’t know, is it even fun to feel beautiful? Isn’t it best to forget everything and just be immersed?”
The theatrical comparison allows the listener to see these vignettes and a tableau of familiar after party scenes, but heightened through their performed nature. The length of the record ensures that, like a play, it is a duration; a defined experience. And yet, Li is acutely aware of the conditions under which that experience will be received, noting that people’s attention spans have been eviscerated, she humorously states, “this is a perfect album for our destroyed brains.”
We start to discuss aging and returning again to the body. “I think, thankfully, I have sons, so I think they are not going to have to go through the same self-hatred as maybe if I had had daughters,” Li explains. “I am shocked at how little we all think about the message we send to the younger generation of women, how we understand life, and the passing of time.” Li cites the ‘Maiden, Mother, Crone’ cycle and notes how we seem to be skipping other important parts of our lives in pursuit of the idea we can be a perpetual maiden. Yet, having lived in the public eye and performed to thousands, it would be impossible for Li not to consider her own looks and aging.
When she observes her own ageing, Li explains that she has to dig deep to really not hate herself, to go within herself to resist what society and culture is teaching young women. “When you've been around for so long, imagine how many emotions you've had to wrestle with? It's so beautiful.”
It is what some might see as radical reframing, not of ageing as decline, but as accumulation. And yet, she is not positioning herself as resolved. Like most of us, she wonders if she is beautiful too. So, there is no false sense of arrival here. If anything, there is an acknowledgment of how much further she wants to go. “I kind of wanted to see if I could, but I don't think I was brave enough to go into actual ugliness and distortion,” she says. “I'm still struggling with that, but I understand that it’s what I need to do. To see what is there when we're not chained by the male gaze, or trapped trying to be beautiful?” In this, she aligns herself (consciously or not) with a lineage of women who have resisted this confinement. When I mention public figures who have aged visibly, unapologetically, she responds with immediate recognition.
“I love seeing Charlotte Rampling, you know, or Isabelle Huppert. Someone who's really lived life.” There is reverence here, not for youth, but for presence and experience.
After much discussion, I want to know what brings her back to joy. Li’s answer is instinctive: “I love to dance, or just to be immersed in a feeling.” Li also loves to be naked, oiled up at the Korean spa and enjoying the bodily flaws with everyone in their raw unfiltered selves. Ideally, laughing. She asks, “I don’t know, is it even fun to feel beautiful? Isn’t it best to forget everything and just be immersed?” Li fundamentally just wants to laugh and sing, and if that is the kind of afterparty she is hosting, I would graciously accept the invitation.
Experience the Noise and Disorder issue in its entirety this May, available on newsstands from Monday 18 May 2026, and through our online shop. Find a stockist near you.
