- 2022-06-04
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MUSIC
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Tove Styrke Releases New Album “HARD”: Streaming
Swedish singer-songwriter Tove Styrke released her fourth studio album “HARD” on June 3, 2022 via Sony Music.
It is her first album in four years since the 2018 album “Sway”.
The album is made with producers/co-writers like Elvira Anderfjärd, Jakob Jerlström, Oscar Scheller, and Elof Loelv.
She brings her fiercely intimate lyrics to a truly visionary sound, spiked with elements of everything from left-of-centre club music to experimental art-pop to early-'60s girl-group records.
The album comprises 10-track, which is her most electrifying work to date, fully embodying the ineffable wildness of romantic love itself.
Tove Styrke said of the album, “'I need something more than my imagination, even if it breaks my heart,' is a line from Show Me Love that I think sums up a lot of what this record is about. Putting yourself and your heart at risk for a chance to feel something real. Life, feelings, bodies. Everything's hard. This album is about the pleasure and the pain, the euphoria and the misery, the love stories and the heart breaks. The contrasts. And it's about the liberation in being a free, flawed and beautiful human.”
She continued, “With this album I really pushed myself to stray from the pop formula and get as creative as possible, while also making something that's unapologetically fun and joyous. It's very much all over the place, which is what I envisioned from the beginning. To me it feels so alive.”- Tove Styrke explained of some tracks for the album.
“Free”
“To me the song 'Free' is a sexual liberation anthem. You can take what you want away from it ofc, but to me its purpose is to make me feel empowered. Help me just exist in this body without thought or hesitation or care.”
“Start Walking”
“['Start Walking' is] a song I made together with some amazing writers and producers and I'm obsessed with it," says the Swedish artist. "It's an upbeat song with sad lyrics, which is my favorite combination. It's about a person who knows a relationship is over, and how it sucks to actually be the one to leave but you know there is no other way. I love the insane music video we made for the single. It's about a Swedish 'dansband' with supernatural powers. 'Dansband' is a signature style of Swedish pop music that has drawn huge audiences dancing cheek to cheek around the country for decades. My dad played in one of these bands – they were called Max Fenders – in the 1970's, which is where the idea for the video initially comes from.” -
“Show Me Love”
“I wrote it for someone I was madly in love with. Every word went directly from emotional parts of me, that I usually keep hidden, straight into the mic. It's rare for me to write without any hesitation like that. We chew up love like fast food, yet when we truly fall for someone it's always the same big, amazing, dangerous thing. Slow love. Hard love. It grows, it hurts and it bends and it breaks. These feelings are like candy paste and cement at the same time. We've got that fun, fast food, easy side to it but it can also evolve into a war. I'm scared and obsessed with it. 'The video consists of three parts. The performance, where I wanted to channel classic starlets from the silver screen and pay hommage to voguing. The fantasies, where the mass scenes and the birth of Venus to me are representations of sex and feminine energy. And lastly, we have the Rapunzel guitar solo as a metaphor for masturbation. This is one of my absolute favourite videos I've made. It's fun and weird and serious at the same time and I think it really shows how I feel about this song.”
“Hardcore”
“'Hardcore' is definitely one of my favorite tracks on the album. It's about wanting someone hardcore. I took the term from gaming; if you die you die but it's all in. I also wanted to make the track sound drunk, like when you're lost in a person. That's why we made the tempo-shifts before each chorus. The production is so good on this one, it blows my mind.”
“YouYouYou”
“It's the sunrise and the sunset. It's the drama, the romance, the big bang of the album. To me it's an instant classic and it got all the elements that I love in a big pop song. I love the analog vibes, it almost sounds like the music on a VHS tape that you've recorded on over and over. I knew right away that the video was gonna have to be a dramatic portrayal of passion. I wanted to interact with people that kept changing throughout the song. I wanted it to be steamy, sexual and I also wanted to incorporate dance and use the body and movement as an expression as much as the music. We shot the whole thing on film, only using analog tricks for the effects. I think that approach fits the sound perfectly.” - source : Apple Music
