Two weeks ago, Tove Lo released the most gloriously unhinged album of her career. This week, she wrapped the North American leg of the tour built around it. If you have been sleeping on the ESTRUS era, consider this your wake-up call.
Inside the album
ESTRUS arrived on September 18 through her own Pretty Swede Records with distribution from Virgin Music Group, and it is a 13-track sprint through every contradiction Tove Lo has ever embodied. The title comes from the biological term for an animal in heat, and the record lives up to it: desire and doubt, euphoria and melancholy, the urge to stay out until dawn and the creeping suspicion that maybe it is time to grow up.
“Estrus is an animal in heat. It’s primal,” Lo said of the record. “It’s my mind and my body wanting different things, wanting everything.”
That tension is the whole album. The focus track “source of life” moves breathlessly between euphoria and sadness, wrestling openly with the question of whether to keep partying or finally settle down. “I’m the cake” is a gleefully brazen anthem of self-reclamation. “DNH” is biting and cathartic. And “des fleurs,” the album’s sole collaboration, pairs her with Belgian star Stromae for a shimmering, regal standout that feels like the calm center of the storm.
The rollout told the story in stages. “I’m your girl right?” led the campaign back in May, followed by the Stromae collaboration “des fleurs” and the venomous “DNH.” Together they mapped the album’s range: visceral, body-moving pop with some of the most emotionally exposed songwriting of her career.
Behind the boards, Lo worked with longtime collaborator Ludvig Söderberg, plus Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser, and the sonic references are telling: Swedish indie-dance royalty like The Knife and Robyn. It is heavy electro-pop, built for dark rooms and loud speakers. She recorded it across Los Angeles, Stockholm and the small Swedish fishing village where she spent her childhood summers, a place tied to her past struggles with an eating disorder. The honesty of that choice runs through the record.
Reviews have been broadly favorable, and the album entered the Swedish chart at number thirteen. Not bad for a record with no interest in playing it safe.
On the road
The ESTRUS World Tour kicked off in Nashville on September 15, three days before the album even dropped, which meant the first crowds were hearing half the set for the first time. From there it hit Chicago, a Brooklyn show at Under The K Bridge with special guest Cobrah, Toronto’s Coca-Cola Coliseum, the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and, on October 1, Mexico City’s Pepsi Center WTC.
Mallrat supported across the North American dates, and the reviews from those rooms have been glowing. One Toronto review described the night as two moods trading places: the hushed intimacy of the new material, sung to a crowd still learning the words, and the detonating, decade-deep energy of a discography the whole building already knew by heart.
The tour now takes a breather before the European leg, which opens in Manchester on November 5 and runs through London, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen and Oslo before closing at Stockholm’s Avicii Arena on November 19, her biggest headline run in the region to date. Rose Gray joins for Europe. Then, in March 2027, the whole production heads to Australia for four shows with Salty supporting.
Why it matters
Tove Lo has spent a decade as pop’s resident confessionalist, the songwriter who says the thing everyone else polishes out of the lyric. ESTRUS doubles down on that identity at a moment when she could easily have sanded the edges off. She walked out of the hit factory years ago, built her own label, and made a record about wanting everything at once and refusing to apologize for it.
Closing her European run in an arena named after another Swedish pop giant who refused to play by the rules feels about right. The messy girl is doing just fine.
