“No Hotel,” the first song from Lykke Li’s fifth album, EYEYE, begins with chirping birdsong and murmuring voices and what sounds like the rattle of a clapper board. “There’s no hotel, no cigarettes,” she sings, raw and plaintive against the languid strum of a guitar. “And you’re still in love with someone else.” The artwork accompanying the song is a blurred image of the Swedish singer-songwriter, the effect more intoxicated than intentionally artful. Her eyes are red raw and glossy with tears, ready to roll into the back of her head in gut-wrenching despair.
So far, so Lykke Li, you might think; she’s always plumbed her love life for material. It’s offered a reliable wellspring of emotional turbulence that bubbled over most evidently on her torch-song ballads, but lay under the surface of her gleaming, perfectly calibrated pop songs, too. (Her previous album titles—Wounded Rhymes, I Never Learn, So Sad So Sexy—speak for themselves.) Still, while EYEYE may also be a record charting the emotional fallout from the end of a relationship, it tackles Li’s ouroboros of love and heartbreak on a more conceptual level. She describes the process of making it as cathartic, as finally closing the chapter on the themes that have coursed through her music since she first broke out as a 21-year-old making delicate, melancholic pop during the indie boom of the late 2000s.
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“Even for me, I felt, like, this is a joke,” says Li, with a chuckle. “Like, are you for real? You’re gonna write another album about heartbreak? I can’t do this anymore.” With the help of various psychedelic and spiritual practices—as well as some good old-fashioned soul seeking—Li spent much of the recording process tracing a path back through her life. “I went as far back as before I was even conceived, trying to understand what my journey was and why I repeat this cycle and then make art about it,” she says. “I wanted to close the circle that I started painting when I was so young in a kind of ceremonial way so that I can move on. I kind of made it for me as a 19-year-old starting out, saying, ‘Okay, you want to make an album about love and you want the videos to express everything you ever dreamed of—some man pulling you out of a burning car, crying. I’m gonna give you that, and then you can be done with this topic forever.’ I’m doing a favor for me and everyone else.”
For her previous album, 2018’s So Sad So Sexy, Li enlisted a rogues’ gallery of experimental pop masterminds—Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend; Frank Ocean producer Malay; the British hitmaking songwriter Kid Harpoon—and of course her ex-husband and father to her six-year-old son, Jeff Bhasker, the superproducer best known for his work with Kanye West. The end product was a sleek, trap-inflected goliath of a record that, while immaculately produced, proved divisive. For EYEYE, Li swung the pendulum back in the other direction, returning to her primary collaborator on her first three albums, Björn Yttling, to make a record that swaps wide-canvas pop for something a little murkier and rougher around the edges, the ambient sounds of the bedroom in which Li recorded most of the songs bleeding into every track. For those who struggled with So Sad So Sexy’s more abstract lyrical tendencies, they’ll find in EYEYE some of her most tender, intimate songwriting yet.
It was in her bedroom rather than the clinical environs of a recording studio, she explains, that she felt most able to tap into those deeper feelings. “Every time I go on tour and do the whole cycle, I kind of come out dead on the other end, so I’m always looking for some type of rebirth through my music,” says Li. “I’ve kind of followed a cycle in my career where I write about it, I stage it, I go on tour, and then it happens all over again. So I was trying to process that. I was just laying in my bed, completely exhausted and heartbroken again, and listening to voice memos from when I was writing, and I realized, This is so much better than any album I’ve ever made. There’s an intimacy when you sing and no one else is around, and I felt like I could never capture that on my other albums.”
After Yttling flew over from Sweden to begin work on the album in early 2020, Li’s plans to make the record in near solitude were all but enforced when the pandemic hit. “When the whole world came to a halt, I felt stuck but in a good way,” she says. From her midcentury home in the hilltops above Hollywood, she found herself looking out every evening at dusk as the lights of the city began to twinkle and watching Michael Mann’s Los Angeles crime masterpiece Heat on loop, a key inspiration for the ambitious video cycle that accompanies the album. “The only thing to do was just stare out my window, and thankfully I have an amazing view,” she notes. “At night the whole city would light up, and it was almost like the synthesizers were the only way for me to travel—through the pain that I was feeling but also physically. I had the idea at one point of putting in strings and choirs, but in the end I was really inspired by the limitation of this palette and I decided to stick with it.”
Naturally, as a result of her reunion with Yttling, Li’s sound on EYEYE harks back to her earlier records—in particular the swirling analog synths and mournful guitar licks of I Never Learn, and the misty-eyed languor of its Phil Spector–tinged production. But with the confidence of 15 years in the industry under her belt, Li wasn’t afraid to get a little weirder. “I had to set a series of rules for myself,” she says of her decision to record without click tracks, headphones, or any digital instruments, lending the record an audibly organic feel. On “Carousel”—an apt metaphor for the album’s interest in cycles (the title is itself a palindrome and the record’s length of 33 minutes and 33 seconds no accident either)—a sparkling synth line plays on a loop in an eerie echo of a fairground ride. “Spin my heart around and around / Flying and I can’t come down / Yeah, I’m high as hell / And I can’t let go / Oh, carousel,” she sings, in a sugar-sweet cadence that carries a touch of something more sinister.
This shadowy, dreamlike quality was one that Li spent many months refining, with the spare time afforded by the pandemic allowing her to go deeper into the production than ever before. The lengthy mixing process also provided an opportunity to home in on the sound she was seeking—and it turned out that for the self-described perfectionist, that was something a little messier and more visceral, with dishwashers gently clattering in the background or doors opening and closing. “I’m always slightly unhappy about my work,” Li says. “I always feel like I start with this pounding heart and trying to capture whatever it is I’m feeling, and then a lot of the time, it just gets lost in the process. So I really have this grand ambition to nail it for myself and only for myself—to make something that I would actually be proud of.” Did she succeed this time? “I can’t tell if I will be proud in the future when I listen to it, but I really tried to not let anything come in between my vision and what I was feeling, and I realized I can simmer in that space for a really, really long time.”
An equally important facet of the album are the seven so-called visual loops that accompany it. Li explains that EYEYE is more of an audiovisual project than a traditional record, with the loops—directed by her friend Theo Lindquist—charting the doomed romance at the heart of the album through a noirish, celluloid haze. Li conceived them as a response to how we consume visual media today: in short, repetitive bursts without the focus required to watch a music video in its traditional format.
“It’s kind of just accepting where we are in the world and trying to find something interesting within that,” says Li. “I spend a lot of time on my phone, and I hate it, but you can sometimes just be stuck, like, watching a loop over and over and over again, and you realize there’s a ritualistic aspect to it. But you kind of get to the core of the scene, you know? It’s like, if I were to tell you about Heat, I would probably tell you about a few key scenes. I was really interested in taking a grand form like moviemaking and cutting it all up, as that’s where we are right now. I was thinking about Marina Abramović’s Relation in Space, where she’s continuously running into a man, or Pina Bausch, when she’s falling down over and over again. There was something in the repetition that felt so true to me, almost like a perfect action—a kind of slicing into the truth.”
This heightened sense of reality also speaks to the sense of remove Li now has from the ideals of romance and career success she once prized so highly. “The ideas I had about love, I was attaching them to a narrative that’s unattainable,” she says firmly. “It’s a simulation, almost like a movie, realizing that the ideas you had were wrong. I had to look myself in the eye and confront all those shadow parts of myself and dramatize it to move on.” This 360-degree world building is something Li has always wanted to do, but it was only with the vast pockets of time she was afforded to work on the project that she was finally able to realize her vision fully. “I think what I really love about this album is that it’s one long journey, and you’re really supposed to listen to it from beginning to end with the way we mixed it,” she adds.
Next up for Li is a tour in the fall, for which she’s already planning something equally experimental, thinking about how to use movement work and spatial audio to make the experience as immersive as possible. What will it be like reliving the turbulent emotions charted across the album? Does she feel like she achieved the closure she needed? “I have in my personal life, for sure,” she says. “I’m in a completely different space than I was, and I’ve really done some deep healing. I feel curious and ready to move into other landscapes now.” For those who fear the end of the EYEYE project will mean no more heartbreak anthems, however, worry not. “I feel like my currency is raw emotion, and that’s always where I want to live,” Li says. “I think all art is about love in one way or the other, so of course it will always be there. But maybe just in a different shade.”
EYEYE is out May 20.
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