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.”
But endings, she reminds me, can also mean new beginnings, like “the sun rising.” “Sick of Love,” the album’s third single, is all about that comedown—when the high of the party fades and you’re left to contemplate it all in the sobering light of day.
The recording process couldn’t have been more different from her last LPs, which she made in her bedroom in Los Angeles. “I love to work in extremes,” Li admits. “I wanted [the previous album] to be so raw. I wanted the environment that I was in to bleed through, like the crickets and the imperfect noises.” The Afterparty, by contrast, was recorded in Sweden with a 17-piece string section, as well as a slew of drummers and vocalists. “I wanted to make something super maximalist, over the top, and use every instrument I’ve ever been curious about,” Li says. “I was rebelling against [the last] album.” The orchestral approach was also influenced by a series of concerts she did with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra while pregnant, which she describes as the best musical experience of her life.
While creating the record, Li—who has two children—sought out work by other artists who were also mothers. “I read this book, The Baby on the Fire Escape, which is about Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois, and all these female artists,” she says. In her own experience, she’d found mothering and making art “very incompatible,” she tells me frankly. Shifting gears from one to the other became akin to adopting an entirely different personality. “The alter ego that I created for myself when I was working was this kind of masculine, hedonistic fuckboy,” Li explains. “So I had these dual realities.”
The division was so stark that when she listens to The Afterparty now, “I’m like, Wow, how did I make this?” Li admits. “It’s almost like it came from this hallucinatory state, which motherhood does to you.” Ultimately, she doubles down on the distinction between the two parts of herself: “Who I am as a mother has nothing to do with who I am on stage.”
When I ask about her suggestion that The Afterparty would be her final album, she demurs. At the end of the day, Lykke Li is not done making music. “I think it’s the final album in this incarnation of myself that started out as such a young person,” she clarifies. “I’ll keep making music, but is it as a solo artist, where you put so much out there? Or in another form?” Li is content not having that answer just yet.