‘Estrus’ opens with fifty seconds of pure premise-setting before a single proper lyric arrives: I'm going through a lot, and you're about to hear all of it, without any tidy resolution at the end. It's a fair warning, and a well-chosen one. Tove Lo has said the title comes from the biological term for an animal in heat, a state where contradictory things get felt all at once, primal and vulnerable in the same breath, and her sixth album spends fourteen tracks proving that isn't just a clever piece of Latin. Recorded across Los Angeles, Stockholm, and the small Swedish village she grew up near, it's her first record since 2022's ‘Dirt Femme’, and the first on her own independent label, Pretty Swede Records.
The opening run doesn't waste that thematic setup. 'I’m Your Girl, Right?’ is a banger built entirely from desperation, the neediness as audible in the production as in the words. ‘If I Could I Would’ takes the same anxiety and turns the volume down: ‘I can't really decide if I want to look fragile or hot, whatever gets your attention,’ she sings. Tove Lo has called it one of the most honest things she's ever put on a record, and it plays that way: quieter, but no less raw than the track before it.
'I'm Your Girl, Right?’ is a banger built entirely from desperation.
‘DNH’ insists it isn't an attack while sounding exactly like one, an oddly familiar portrait of a friend causing a scene mid-spiral, leaving others to deal with the fallout. It's the kind of brutal honesty Tove Lo does better than most, and it pays off two tracks later; ‘The Bad One’ finds her, over glitchy percussion and synthetic strings, admitting she used to be exactly that kind of mess herself.
The record's funniest moment is also one of its most confident. ‘I'm the Cake’ pairs a fun, popstar topline with moody electropop underneath, Tove Lo comparing herself to something far too good not to devour and demanding to know how anyone could pass it up. ‘Die for My Art With a Lonely Heart’ moves at a much higher tempo but turns more inward, wrestling with whether she could still make something worth hearing without the loneliness that's fuelled so much of her writing before, while ‘Idiot’ turns that same self-scrutiny inward with a chorus that's just the word repeated at itself, gleefully, until it stops sounding like an insult and starts sounding like a shrug.
‘Are We on a Break’ is a genuine highlight, built on the specific ache of someone else's presence lingering long after they've left the room. ‘Roomie’, cocky and low-effort in exactly the right way, male backing vocal included, feels like the record catching its breath before ‘Source of Life’ closes things out with real swagger. The final lyrics, wanting something new, something with new life in it, read like the first hint of a woman who's spent a whole album insisting she never dreamed of settling down quietly circling the idea anyway.
Tove Lo has always been at her best when she's embracing being “too much”
This is, obviously, an unabashed pop record, but Tove Lo brings an edge to it that most of her peers don't bother reaching for: dark and moody in one breath, sassy and very funny in the next. Her real strength here isn't sonic variety so much as her ability to hold genuinely contradictory versions of herself inside the same song without flattening either one. She's spoken publicly about how girls are given room to be extreme while women are expected to be tamed, and how quickly people get uncomfortable when someone refuses to shrink. Tove Lo has always been at her best when she's embracing being “too much”, and six albums in, on her own label, with no obvious commercial pressure left to answer to, she still is.
