Charisma Madarang
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Lykke Li was sitting in her car and listening to the news when an apocalyptic feeling struck her. Maybe it was the suspiciously bright Los Angeles sun, but Li had the sudden feeling that she was in a spaceship watching the world unravel from afar. “AI, war, capitalism, climate change. This is what it means to be alive today,” she thought. “We’re at the afterparty. There’s a few euphoric moments left before complete chaos.”
That cosmic thinking led to her sixth studio album, aptly titled The Afterparty. Li says the LP wrestles with the question: “How are we supposed to hold on to hope and humanity when we’re at this breaking point?”
Billed as a “dance record for the end of the world,” Li’s latest LP arrives nearly two decades after her breakout debut Youth Novels in 2008. That album was followed by the excellent Wounded Rhymes in 2011, spinning off the global hit “I Follow Rivers.”
Yet the success came with an industry eager to label her as an “indie pop girl” in her early twenties, a constricting box for any artist. Despite this, Li, 40, has pursued her own identity throughout her three subsequent albums: she drew critical acclaim with the devastating I Never Learn, left fans divided on Reddit threads over her trap-influenced so sad so sexy, and reunited and slowed things down with longtime producer Björn Yttling for 2022’s Eyeye.
Now, the Swedish-born singer is re-evaluating her next move in the face of a world moving at a disorienting pace and “hanging on for dear life” amid an international summer tour. In a sprawling conversation over Zoom with Rolling Stone from her L.A. kitchen, Li reflects on The Afterparty’s existential themes, her quest for ultimate freedom, and why this probably isn’t her last album, despite implying that in the press.
During the conversation, she dons large black sunglasses and a hoodie pulled over her head. She also declares that she is giving herself permission to be a “fuck boy British rock star.” More on that later.
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“This album, and also this world, and who I am as a person, it’s full of juxtaposition and contradiction. So, there are two forces pulling at each other at all times, and I thought that struggle was really interesting. I mean, that’s how we are as people, right? We say one thing, but there’s like a whole other meaning behind it. We all live in duality,” Li says of The Afterparty.
This duality spans the album’s succinct 24 minutes and nine tracks, which were largely written by Li in Los Angeles and recorded in Stockholm. Executive produced by Li and Yttling, its 17-piece string orchestra underscores her lyrics’ mix of ecstasy and fear from “Lucky Again,” in which Li sings, “I wait and I wait/Won’t be long ’til I’m face down” to “So Happy I Could Die,” where she asks, “How long can it last?”
“My dream is to crack the code. What if I could describe what it feels like to be alive in words and music? I’m obsessed with songwriting,” Li says. “I like when something is twisting me up, where there’s a level of subliminal mystery to it.”
When making The Afterparty, Li, who is a mother of two, says her circumstances at home “were the opposite of free.” “Even just the physicality of giving life, it’s like a horror film. It’s so brutal. So, to then go to the studio and just be like, ‘You know what, I’m just gonna, like, fuck all that. I’m gonna give myself permission to just be rock and roll,,’” she says. “I gave myself permission to just become a fuck boy British rock star in my head.”
That’s been a shift since her debut Youth Novels, Li explains. She’s become more comfortable with herself as she’s moved through her career. “The beauty of living more is understanding more, knowing yourself more,” she says. “This creature that I am now is quite a strange creature that I feel very like androgynous. And I’m totally okay with that.”
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However, getting to that place of acceptance was not easy. “As women, you enter this world and the price of admission is you have to be beautiful, worthy; there’s always an expectation in a role that I don’t think you are aware of when you’re young,” she says. Men, she adds, don’t face the same expectations when it comes to their creative work: “The guys, they just get to put on a trucker hat and play guitar and immerse themselves in something that is eternal.”
She posits, “Is there a way to strip away all the physical and just be plainly an artist?”
Li says that for her next project, she wants to keep pushing the limits: “On my next album, I’d like to go even further. Maybe only limit myself to using six tracks.”
That’s interesting, I tell her, since she’d said before The Afterparty is her last record. “I just said that when I was drunk and nervous at the release party,” she replies. “Making an album for me is kind of going through like hell.” She pauses, and asks, “Have you seen Burden of Dreams about Werner Herzog?”
I haven’t, so she describes it. The film, a documentary about director Herzog’s 1982 epic Fitzcarraldo, captures the troubled movie’s production, which infamously involved Herzog attempting to lug a 320-ton steamship up a hill. “There’s so much struggle in having your vision exist, and even when it exists and manifests, it’s so different from what you dreamed of. So, just finishing something and having it exist in the world as a finished manifestation is brutal.”
She references her comment about The Afterparty being her last album and says, “I said that because that’s what I do: I lay all the chips on the table. I’m like, ‘Maybe this time I’ll get it right, and I can finally go back to being a normal person.’”
“Then she adds, “”But I don’t think I can,” she adds with a chuckle. “I sincerely can’t find another job.”
While she’ll likely always be making music, Li considers the idea of being able to “unsubscribe” from the industry’s “terms and limits and values” and having the liberty of choosing her persona at will. She brings up the finale to her Coachella set last spring, where she lit a cigarette on stage and danced to Corona’s Eurodance hit “The Rhythm of the Night.” As a handheld camera followed her backstage, she continued to move in a state of exhilaration before the scene cut.
The moment was a direct reference to Beau Travail by Claire Denis, Li says. In the landmark film, based on Herman Melville’s novel of dismantling masculinity, actor Denis Levant plays a sergeant who finds himself in a state of release and delirium at the end of the film as he hits a lonely dancefloor to the same song.
