ESTRUS

On her previous album, 2022’s <i>Dirt Femme</i>, the Swedish pop provocateur ditched her long-time label and added themes of domestic malaise into her repertoire of raunchy bangers. Four years later, <b>Tove Lo</b>’s sixth album arrives in a post-<i>BRAT</i> landscape—the album that mainstreamed the electroclash revival and made it cool to be a messy bitch again. Recorded between Los Angeles, Stockholm and the small fishing village where the singer spent her childhood, <i>ESTRUS</i> draws its title from the biological term for an animal in heat. But the primal references and the club-ready beats belie the thoughtfulness behind the 39-year-old singer’s core conflict: Will marriage and maturity force Lo to give up the recklessness that’s been such a potent source of inspiration? Not quite, if tracks like <b>“DNH”</b> have anything to say about it: Short for drunk ’n’ horny, it’s part diss, part love letter to a wasted friend (“You’re still my best friend when you ruin my night”). It’s a knotty tug-of-war between chaos and stability that ends, like <i>BRAT</i> did, with a moving exploration of anxieties about motherhood—naturally, over a sick beat.