Music — Noozify Original — September 21, 2026

Tove Lo Was Told Her Messy Years Are Over. 'Estrus' Is 32 Minutes of Refusal.

By Adam Canissario

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Tove Lo makes the meaning of Estrus impossible to miss. Her sixth album takes its title from the phase when a female mammal is in heat—a deliberately primal image for a record about desire, contradiction, and refusing to tidy either one up. When she announced the album in May, she described it as "my mind and my body wanting different things, wanting everything." The 50-second opener, "a lot of feelings, no solutions," makes the point even more plainly.

Released Friday, Estrus turns that unresolved state into its central idea. Rather than treating uncertainty as something to outgrow, Lo makes it the destination: 13 compact, hard-charging pop songs about appetite, shame, relationships, and the complications of being an adult woman who has no interest in pretending everything has been figured out.

The context matters. Lo left Island Records in 2022 after eight years, founded Pretty Swede Records with the management company mtheory, and released Dirt Femme independently that fall. Estrus is her second album on her own label, distributed by Virgin Music Group, and that independence is audible. It runs just 32 minutes and 28 seconds, with only two songs passing the three-minute mark. Nothing feels padded, explained away, or designed to deliver a neat conclusion.

Getting there was hardly straightforward. Miley Cyrus completed her album in less than a year, while Estrus took four years to emerge. Lo has said she lost momentum somewhere along the way. After spending a month in Los Angeles writing with her longtime collaborator Ludvig Söderberg without finding a breakthrough, she reunited with him in March on the Swedish coast, a place tied to her childhood summers. Speaking to Rolling Stone Australia, she recalled that "on day one, we got drunk and it all just came out". The resulting album credits sessions in Stockholm, Los Angeles, Torekov, and at the Brussels headquarters of Stromae's label, where the pair also recorded together.

The first preview arrived on May 13th with "I'm your girl right?" The dance track is built around a question that carries more uncertainty than confidence, while Nogari's video turns that tension into movement. Filmed at a former monastery outside São Paulo and featuring more than 70 dancers, the clip begins with performers dressed alike and moving in synchronized formation. Lo's character eventually breaks from the choreography, prompting the others to shed their uniforms and follow her lead.

That sequence captures the album's central idea better than almost anything else. Following the rules is straightforward. Once those rules disappear, things become considerably harder to control.

Stromae appears on "Des fleurs," the June single that also connects back to the Brussels sessions. Slant described the song as a "Eurotrash hymn" that "glistens with campy glee," and the description fits its bright, exaggerated energy. At three minutes, it is probably the record's easiest song to simply enjoy. It also arrives early, just before the album takes a noticeably darker turn.

And darker it gets. "DNH" deals with the weariness of trying to cope with a friend whose drinking has become relentless. "If I could I would" turns inward, addressing self-hatred and an eating disorder. "Die for my art with a lonely heart" comes closest to spelling out what the pursuit of a creative life can cost, with Lo tying pain directly to the place where she makes music and admitting she has nothing new to say about it. Despite those subjects, these are not slow, stripped-down confessionals. They remain dance records, with Söderberg's hard-edged production keeping everything in motion even as the lyrics sink deeper.

"The bad one" may be the album's strongest example of Lo resisting the obvious route. It begins with a familiar breakup scenario, a brutal message from an ex. But instead of assigning all the blame to the other person, the song leaves room for contradiction. Lo acknowledges that she was "the bad one" while also recognizing that she escaped the relationship. Pop usually wants an ending to have a clearly defined winner and loser. This song is more interested in the uncomfortable space where both people can be right about different parts of what happened.

That same refusal to settle returns on "Source of life," the closing track. The song considers whether a career like Lo's leaves enough room for motherhood, and several reviewers have pointed to it as the record's clearest summation. Yet the album ends without resolving the question. There is no final revelation, only the same restless energy that opened the record.

That approach has divided critics. The Slant reviewer Michael Savio, who criticized Cyrus's album for lacking vision, responded much more positively to Lo's work, highlighting its "slick beats and thundering choruses" and the nü-disco song "roomie." At the same time, he questioned whether art should at least attempt to untangle some of the questions it raises, and he found "idiot" more irritating than intentionally provocative. musicOMH's Oliver Evans awarded the album four stars out of five, describing it as an unsparing confrontation with darker impulses. FEMMUSIC likewise focused on the record's contradictions, but treated those tensions as central to its appeal.

There is also a larger career story embedded in Estrus. Lo has been returning to versions of these same themes for more than a decade. "Habits (Stay High)" climbed to No. 3 on the Hot 100 in 2014 with its portrait of emotional numbness, while Queen of the Clouds organized an entire album around a relationship's progression. Lady Wood and Blue Lips explored desire and its consequences. Sunshine Kitty offered something lighter. Then came Dirt Femme, the first album Lo owned outright, which addressed femininity and the eating disorder she has discussed throughout her career. She has also written for other major pop acts, including Ellie Goulding's "Love Me Like You Do," which earned a Grammy nomination, and appeared last year on Dom Dolla's "Cave." Against that backdrop, Estrus does not sound like a reinvention. It feels more like all of those previous concerns squeezed into a shorter, sharper package, with the humor still intact.

The most revealing comment from Lo came in her Rolling Stone interview, and it had surprisingly little to do with making music. She described feeling that, as an adult, she was expected to have outgrown the period of making mistakes, being chaotic, and figuring herself out. She also pointed out how easily conventional milestones such as marriage and owning a home are celebrated, while the rest of her life and career attract less approval. Naming an album after an animal reproductive state becomes, in that context, both a provocation and a joke.

Two albums released on the same Friday offered very different answers to adulthood from women who have been famous since their teens. Cyrus made a record about happiness, treating contentment as something worth examining on its own terms. Lo takes the opposite route, arguing that the chaos does not necessarily disappear with age. Rather than explaining herself out of it, she chooses to keep dancing through it. Both approaches are candid. One simply makes more sense for a 1 a.m. dance floor.

Our view is that Estrus ranks among Lo's strongest albums since Lady Wood and may be her funniest record yet, because the jokes sit right beside the pain. Even "DNH," the song about her hard-drinking friend, is short for "drunk 'n' horny." In barely half an hour, she moves through shame, desire, appetite, and the price of maintaining a creative life without stopping to reassure the listener that everything will eventually work out. "Idiot" slows the momentum, while the closing track spells out its emotional concerns more directly than the songs around it. Those are relatively minor drawbacks on an album this distinctive.

Lo has already taken the new material on the road. The tour began September 15th in Nashville, continues to Mexico City on October 1st, and concludes November 19th at Stockholm's Avicii Arena, bringing her back to her hometown.

Noozify's overall grade for Estrus is a B+, the average of four report-card grades on an A-to-F scale.