Tove Lo’s swearing is her USP. The Swedish singer is already notable for her effing and blinding, and it’s something she continues on this second album, boasting about how she’s “fine as fuck” on the Wiz Khalifa collaboration Influence, and revealing her tendency to “fuck things up” on Flashes. It’s refreshing – perhaps partly because the musical backdrop resembles the umpteen other breathy, EDM-flavoured electropoppers so anodyne that any point of difference is like a very dim light at the end of a very long tunnel, but also because the sense of sexual liberation her profanity has tended to be in the service of (on 2014’s Talking Body she promised a partner they’d “fuck for life”) is straightforwardly joyful. Lady Wood is her term for a female hard-on (the Os are styled as vaginas on the album artwork), and this album celebrates sex with an infectious joie de vivre, while tracks like Cool Girl – a sarcastic ode to no-strings romance – prove she’s not just posturing.
