Swedish starlet Lykke Li a little bit loopy
Words Huw Nesbitt
Like the Swedish pop star’s blistering lo-fi pop music, there’s something unnervingly cool about 21-year-old Lykke Li.
Her debut album, Youth Novels, produced by Björn Yttling from Peter, Bjorn & John, is currently only available in Sweden, but has caused a storm on the internet nonetheless. And she’s just completed a tour of Scandinavia, playing many sold-out gigs - a trend which looks set to continue with a string of dates in North America this summer. Yet Lykke appears to be taking everything in her stride.
“I still get surprised every time someone tells me they know who I am,” she says, nervously dipping into cliché. “But I don’t really think about it.”
To some extent, Lykke’s coyness could be attributed to the naivety of youth, but this idea is far too seductive. Like Youth Novels’s debut single, ‘Little Bit’, a tender ode to heartbreak containing some rather suggestive lyrics (“For you I keep my legs apart / And forget about my broken heart”), her apparent innocence is only one her many guises, as she admits: “I’m schizophrenic. I can be a party girl, but I can also be shy. I get so tired of myself, because I am always so different.”
Lykke’s proclaimed schizophrenia is hardly surprisingly - she spent her childhood between Sweden and Portugal, with winters in India thrown in for good measure. At other times too, Lykke understandably sounds like a woman on the brink of insanity.
“Journalists always talk about my look, and I don’t want anyone to,” she says while discussing the position of females in the music industry. “And they always want to compare you to other female artists, instead of taking your music for what is it is.”
To be sure, soulful female solo artists are the industry’s soup de jour, but Lykke retains a surprising degree of integrity, despite being lumbered with this inappropriate label. “If I could only have one thing, it would be a long career,” she explains “And friends, of course - I can’t be alone, or else I’ll die.”
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