Swedish popstar Tove Styrke has released her highly anticipated new album HARD alongside lead track Free, which is out now via RCA/Sony Music.
The album follows recent singles YouYouYou, Hardcore, Show Me Love and Start Walking and her US, European and UK tour dates supporting MARINA.
The new album is made with producers/co-writers like Elvira Anderfjärd (a Max Martin protégé known for her work with Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran), Jakob Jerlström (Lorde, MARINA), Oscar Scheller (Ashnikko, Rina Sawayama), and Elof Loelv (Rihanna, Katy Perry).
Tove brings her fiercely intimate lyrics to a truly visionary sound, spiked with elements of everything from left-of-center club music to experimental art-pop to early-’60s girl-group records. At turns explosive, poetic, and transcendent, the result is Tove Styrke’s most electrifying work to date, fully embodying the ineffable wildness of romantic love itself. With its exploration of desire and obsession and delirious longing HARD closely examines the savage complexity of love, a quality referenced in its title.
Tove says;
”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.”
“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.”
The tracklisting for HARD is as follows:
- YouYouYou
- Cool Me Down
- Lies
- Free
- 24H
- Hardcore
- Start Walking
- Millennial Blues
- Show Me Love
- Bruises
LISTEN: HARD