Dirt Femme by Tove Lo | Album Review
Reviewing the fifth studio album from the independent, Swedish artist
Making the rounds on TikTok, due to a certain flair for on-stage antics, Tove Lo looks to power forth the resurgence of pop — a genre marred by uninspired homogeny — with the release of her fifth studio album Dirt Femme. In her first ever independent release under her own record label Pretty Swede Records, Tove Lo looks to reap the benefits of the exploration of femininity and its interconnection to the compensation of masculinity used to “get ahead in life” shown throughout an album described by the artist as “extremely personal.”
Dirt Femme opens with high synth selections that are combined with juxtaposing, relaxed vocals that lament over the loss of long-term relationships. Despite its rapid BPM, the opener, “No One Dies From Love,” still harbors the melancholy feelings of an artist plagued by love compounded with feelings of loneliness as a result of a pandemic. As this relationship came to an end, death felt literal in shines through in the chorus as Tove Lo somberly declares she would be the first to die from heartbreak and love.
Smoothly riddled with a decorative disco-pop sonic inflection, Tove Lo puts together a conglomeration of sounds that amount to what modern pop music can be. We see the influence of a seventies and eighties disco pop, the modern heart racing flowery pop music, mixed with an electronic, futuristic synth and robotic (beep-boop) pop that is especially evident in tracks such as “2 Die 4” and “Call on Me”.
The rawness of emotion is on display as well as the artist traverses the implications of the aforementioned femininity in the real world — a confusing, seemingly clandestine, dystopia of “bodies left to bleed” in the dangers of romance, as emphatically put in “True Romance.” Inspired by the 1993 movie of the same name, this song encapsulates partners-in-crime literally as the artist would do anything, including breaking the law, to be with their partner (Genius). The aching rasp and lamentations of an infatuated lover is chill-inducing and swooning in the same instance.
Notes of darkness, melancholy, and grunge outline Dirt Femme in a way that is enticing and sometimes countered by songs that don’t quite live up to the billing. The boorish simplicity of the middle third of the album, specifically, “Grapefruit”, “Cute & Cruel”, and “Attention Whore,” fail to excite as the first and last third do. It looses those raw, emphatic vocals relies on subpar features and isn’t revelatory on those aspects of femininity those more intimate songs do. But because the rest of the album doesn’t fall victim to this simplicity, its best tracks stick out even further, thereby elevating their effectiveness.
I liked this project more than I expected to and I think it opens up new revenues of pop that haven’t been explored in depth much in recent years. The mix of high-synth and clarifying vocals presents a mix that is equally enticing to a variety of audiences. While some artists suffer from the curse of generic, non-specificity in pop (see Charlie XCX and Rina Sawayama’s latest projects), Tove Lo doesn’t fall in this category. In an album of discovering the nuance of femininity, love, sex, betrayal, and denial, the artist aptly covers the bases of the tenants of modern life — most seen in her closer, “How Long,” featured in the ever popular “Euphoria,” fittingly.
Rating: 8.0/10
Favorite Tracks: Suburbia, True Romance, Call on Me
