There followed the aforementioned series of albums, in regular intervals of two to three years. Many were wrenching; I Never Learn was written after a breakup that drove her from Sweden to LA. In all of them, she was “trying to explore the — what’s it called? — the fucking guy on a horse,” she says. “The knight in shining armor.” She was leaning on romantic love, “looking for that to fill the hole.” 

After a yearslong abstinence, Lykke returned to dance with Eyeye, creating a series of deeply moving music videos. That’s when she met collaborator, choreographer, and dancer Darrion Gallegos. The pair were introduced through Eyeye choreographers Imre and Marne Von Opstal. They walked into a studio and immediately connected, and Gallegos was blown away by her sheer skill: “She’s crazy. She’s so good.”

Lykke “has such amazing movement quality,” Gallegos adds, “and she’s so stylistically diverse. She is just so about the art. She’s so about the meaning and the intention of what we’re doing.”

That kind of full-bore commitment has ramifications. More than once, Lykke indicated that she was close to tapping out. In 2015, she posted to Instagram saying she was taking a step back from performing. In 2019, she told NME that she was “probably at the tail end of my career.” She’s said that this sixth album is “maybe my final.” Yet she’s kept finding new wellsprings of energy and inspiration. “I have the same type of fighter energy that I had when I was 19,” she says. Each work was necessary, coming out of her like an exorcism. 

The idea for The Afterparty was simple enough. “It’s kind of this night creature who’s like, ‘Come with me. We’re going nowhere,’” she says. “You wander through a dystopian concrete jungle trying to make it to dawn. In a way, this album is from my lower self, trying to find my higher self.” 

When you listen to it, you can hear the contours of what she’s describing. There are the optimistic openers, “Not Gon Cry” and “Lucky Again,” which was released as a single on February 13. There’s the nihilistic “Famous Last Words” and “Future Fear.” (“I don’t trust anyone,” Lykke murmurs on the latter track. She tells me, “It’s quite literal. We’re at some dicey party, someone gives you MDMA, and both the love and the fear come out at the same time.”) At the end comes resigned acceptance: the surprisingly upbeat “Knife In The Heart” and the zenlike “Euphoria”: “Though it won’t last / Hallelujah / Least we knew ya.” 

As usual, Lykke flew back to Sweden — to the old ABBA studio — to record. “We do everything in that room,” she says. “My drummer, Lars, who I’ve been with for 20 years, he’s as white as you can be and skinny with, like, one tooth left. But he went for it. Even he could feel the sauce.” For the strings, Lykke recruited members of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, whom she’d performed with in 2023 while she was pregnant. Some 17 people would squeeze into the studio after rehearsal, play for an hour, then go pick up their kids, she says. 

That’s the scrappiness of Lykke — the way she gets things done no matter what. At one point she was watching Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, she says, and wondering what it must be like to reach that level of wealth and success: “Doing what you love and getting paid and getting to eat the cake,” as she puts it. For her, and for most people, being an artist is more like “having a tube of oxygen to help you get through life — so you can survive being a human.” At this stage in her career, she says she’s been fighting against a “compare and despair” mentality. “I can look back at my career and be like, ‘Oh damn, I thought there was going to be so much more of that,’” she says. 

“In a way this album, I’m realizing, is about loss,” she adds. “It’s about having had something and losing it and realizing how precious it was and hoping that you’re going to find it again.” 

There’s another reason Lykke wrote The Afterparty. Yes, it needed to come out of her, and yes, writing and recording and releasing music is literally her job. But the album also represents Lykke drawing her own road map. When she was pregnant with her second child, she says, she felt “scared” of what having two kids might mean. She wanted to talk about how to balance being an artist with being a mother — two all-consuming tasks. But there weren’t many people around her whom she could ask. 

So she started reading about female artists from decades before: Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois. And none of it was particularly encouraging. “No one is steering the ship,” Lykke says. “There’s no blueprint for aging in a real way. All we see is the Miranda July book that’s just a big fucking cliff.” 

She found the closest thing to an answer in her friend, the painter Tala Madani, who told her to “just lean into it — lean into everything.” She tries her best to do this. And she works toward becoming an answer herself. Because eventually, we’re going to reach a cultural inflection point: “Even Billie Eilish is going to be 40 one day,” Lykke says. “We all have to face our own mortality.” 

Not that she has any regrets. Lykke is a “sucker for full-blown life experiences,” she tells me, leaning forward in her swivel chair. I suggest that this might have something to do with her birth chart, and she agrees. A Canadian astrologer read it for her not long ago and called it “insane,” she says. 

We pull up her chart together, which is how we discover that aforementioned Taurus North Node. Also, that Lykke has an Aries Venus. (Also that we share a birthday, making us both dreamy Pisces creatives.) “Oh my God,” she says when I point out her Venus placement. “What does it mean?” 

It means that she’s passionate — that she jumps into relationships with both feet. 

“Zero patience,” she confirms. 

Still, it’s all part of the experience — a result of the richness and abandon with which she lives her life. “There’s some Instagram woman who has five kids with five men,” she says. “I’m like, ‘That makes sense. That’s me.’ Or Jane Birkin: three kids with three geniuses. She lived. She was in it.” 

That’s what Lykke has always wanted: to be in it. To be doing it. That’s the energy she has always brought to her work. It’s also the energy she’ll bring to her tour for The Afterparty, if all goes according to plan. There will be, she says again, “no tricks. It’s back to the basics. Like, no, bitch, you don’t have any budget. You can’t afford dancers. You can’t afford a choreographer. You can’t afford this and that. So it’s really a desperate one-man show — a death throes.” Gallegos says he and Lykke have been rehearsing together in preparation, honing in on a character that represents this new album. “It’s kind of therapeutic for both of us,” he says.

“It’s going to be quite brutalist and potentially embarrassing,” she adds. “Because it’s just me. And it’s like, ‘Okay, bitch, what are you going to do?’” 

What she will try to do is stay vulnerable, stay in the moment, and find her own body language. To channel the creative spirit that so far hasn’t let her down. “If I’m able to have that dialogue,” she says, “then I am in contact with something divine.”