“I’m so particular about how I want everything to look and feel and sound,” she told Rolling Stone ahead of the tour. “I like to make these intricate stories that don’t help the algorithm and maybe aren’t the most commercial way to do pop releases and how you put out pop music.”
“I’m so particular about how I want everything to look and feel and sound,” she told Rolling Stone ahead of the tour. “I like to make these intricate stories that don’t help the algorithm and maybe aren’t the most commercial way to do pop releases and how you put out pop music.”
Dirt Femme was the Swede’s first album as an independent artist. “I want to feel like I’m in full control of where to spend money, and also get most of the money,” she told Rolling Stone last year. “For someone who really likes to be in control and has a very particular way of doing this, I was lucky to have a label that was like, ‘We don’t really get what you do, but put it out.’ But I just felt like I want more control than that.”
With her gold-accented skintone corset, Tove channeled “a heroine from the retro-future with a lot of sexual expression” onstage. The tour outfit resembled a mixture of her Dirt Femme album art and the dildo-accented outfit she wore in Scene 3 of her “2 Die 4” videos.
With each show, Tove strives for perfection: “The energy I’m bringing to this show is 150% of everything I have,” she says.
“It’s emotional, it’s sexy, it’s fun, it’s vulnerable,” Tove Lo says of her Dirt Femme tour. “All wrapped up in a beautiful dance party.”
After a flu “that kicked my ass” earlier this month, Tove Lo had to cancel a few shows, but she’s back for good. “it’s been very much an emotional roller coaster,” she says.
2023 is looking to be jam-packed with shows for the Swedish pop star. After wrapping her North American tour in Los Angeles on March 3, she’ll perform at several festivals and venues across Central and South America, before returning to the U.S. for some festivals. She’ll head to Europe in June.
Don’t be surprised by the fake penis. It’s all part of the show. “I believe masculine and feminine lives on a spectrum in all humans,” Tove Lo told Rolling Stone last summer. “There are so many more interesting nuances than most people wanna accept.”
Between discopop earworms, Tove Lo snuck the ballad “True Romance” into the setlist. “As much I love a pop banger, it’s really fun to get to do something this dramatic,” she said. “I wanted to make something that tells a story all the way through. That’s something you rarely see in pop music, and I feel like it’s fun to break sometimes.”
“I’ve looked back on how my femininity has helped and hurt me throughout my life,” Tove Lo says. “And I think the album has that tone to it. I’m bringing up all these questions and feelings and emotions that don’t necessarily have answers to them. It’s just more my current place of wonder.”
“The last couple of years we just felt the presence of death in a really sad way, and that impacted me maybe a lot more than I thought it did,” she says. “There’s a lot of that, like, ‘What if all this just goes away? What if I lose this?’ on the album.”
There’s no other way to put it: With her mix of emotional songs, pop bangers, and seductive croons, Tove Lo is the “motherfucking queen of the discotheque.”
Tove says she’s looking forward to “bring the Dirt Femme Tour around the world, and teases that she’ll be “putting out more music from this era” in the next several months. She already gave us “Borderline,” so what’s next?