Lykke Li calls herself the master of a French exit, so the announcement that her sixth album, The Afterparty, was to be her last felt out of character. As it happens, the alt-pop icon isn’t one to be bound by conclusions.
It can be a drawn-out swan song or nothing more than a nightcap, but the afterparty is always the beginning of the end.
You might, therefore, think it’s no surprise that Lykke Li looked to this particular nightlife ritual when naming her sixth studio album. Released on 8th May via Neon Gold Records, The Afterparty came four years on from predecessor EYEYE, and 18 years since the alt-pop artisan’s debut, Youth Novels. It would be her final outing – at least according to the press, and, to some extent, Lykke herself. “I said that when I was drunk at my own listening party,” she says when we connect three weeks post-release. “But I can assure you that it’s not.”
The decision to loudly call time on particular activities is a “coping mechanism” Lykke deploys whenever she’s doing something that scares her. “I say that [for] every show I do too. Every time I smoke, I’m like, ‘This is my last cigarette.’ Every flight. It’s about living balls to the wall, fully in the moment.”
She’s just returned to LA from Brazil and, this morning, from the school run (Lykke has two children: Dion, aged 10 and Ilian, two). She chats sans camera. Today is partly devoted to “putting [my] eyebrows back on.” They have been bleached during The Afterparty’s promotion, so Lykke wants a break from the invisible look. “And now that I’m putting them back on, there are only a few left,” she laughs. “I’m like, ‘That was a good party.’”
When it comes to parties, Lykke says she’s the “expert” at a French exit, so maybe the fact she announced her so-called retirement in a public setting was a clue that it was a hollow threat. Framing a piece of work as a final bow is a well-worn marketing tool. In Lykke’s case, any such motivations seem like a stretch. “If you look at the choices I’ve made, I’m the least strategic artist ever,” she says.
It is true that none of her biggest commercial wins has been achieved by design. While the candied but penetrative vocals and skeletal productions of Youth Novels conferred indie-darling status on a 22-year-old Lykke, it wasn’t until three years later that she first visited the charts. A remix of “I Follow Rivers”, from her sophomore Wounded Rhymes, by Belgian DJ and producer The Magician, claimed the top spot in multiple European countries. Today, it boasts nearly one billion Spotify streams. Incidentally, the week of our conversation, the song sees her at number one again – this time stateside, via Drake, who interpolated it on his single, “Janice STFU”.
It’s not the first time he’s drawn from her discography: in 2009, he remixed Youth Novel‘s cut, “Little Bit”. His latest rework – taken from album ICEMAN, dropped a fortnight before her Wonderland interview – gives Lykke her first career credit at the peak of the Billboard Hot 100. The stats don’t charm her, however. “It is only males who text me to clock this type of thing. I think it’s about masculinity, about numbers and winning.” But, “It is validating as a writer.”
That element speaks to her defining dream: to be respected as a writer. Similar acknowledgement came when she co-penned “Beautiful That Way” for Miley Cyrus, for Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl. Her close friend Andrew Wyatt – behind some of the most ubiquitous songs of the 21st century (Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish) – suggested Miley sing it, midway through the track’s creation. “She just jumped on and sent back the song immediately. It was a very beautiful flow.” Lykke first became transfixed by Miley through “The Climb”. So, “To have a song that we all wrote together, and have her sing it, was just so incredible. She has one of the best voices alive, and she’s an OG star.”
“Beautiful That Way” was perhaps a rare instance where a standalone song brought Lykke creative fulfilment in itself. She is, by definition, an ‘albums’ artist. “I don’t know why we moved on from vinyl A-side, B-side. For me, that was the perfect format.” She wants The Afterparty to be listened to front-to-back. “Thankfully, I made it very short, so everyone with a short attention span can get through it.” She says people have critiqued its swift sub-25-minute runtime. “But I just think about the arc. Is this work complete? Do you measure how many minutes sex was? Or how many breakthroughs you had?”
Given the fear she finds in crafting and releasing a body of work, you would be forgiven for questioning if it’s a process she enjoys. “Every single step, every choice in making an album pushes me to the absolute brink. And when it’s finally out, then it’s dead. So you just let it go.” But she can’t live without the cycle. “When [the process] gets hard, I’m like, ‘Oh, I can’t do this.’ Then I’m like, ‘But what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to do life without making art?’ When I’m working on something, that is when I’m most awake.”
You believe, therefore, that The Afterparty won’t be her last. However, there’s still a finality looming over it – thematic rather than career-related. In a statement accompanying the project, she said: “I was twirling around in love addiction for all [my previous] albums. Now I’m going into my existential era.” The change of lane loosely coincided with her turning 40 in March. “Thankfully, in every decade you do go into a new topic.” If circling the meaning of life – mortality, religion, love, joy and all its other component parts – is to be the fodder of her forties, it will certainly keep her busy. Not least, given the world’s current state of play. As she said in a previous interview, raising children in an era of global turmoil, whether at the hands of Trump or AI, makes the planet itself feel like it’s in the midst of an afterparty careering off course, with no foresight for the morning’s alarm clock.
However, for all of the apocalyptic connotations, The Afterparty actually contains some of the most concentrated joy in Lykke’s discography, with a 17-piece string section put to good use on songs that, in places, steer into disco-inflected, Balearic confectionery. There is, after all, a need for parties in hard times. But the higher the highs, the harder the falls, and the comedown always comes.”
There is something tragic and dark to the afterparty,” Lykke reflects. A silent acknowledgement in each who makes it to a night’s final act that, for one reason or another, they’re resisting its conclusion. Closing track, the beguilingly-titled “Euphoria”, delivers time-stopping balladry reflecting on the transience of joy. The album’s arc traces both that of the night and of life itself, with its final lyrics reading like deathbed reflections as much as those of a weary head (“Least we knew ya, euphoria”).
While a dawn ride home brings a sobering clarity, in the album-making process, that comes via a homecoming too. Each record has seen Lykke follow the same path: writing in LA, before recording in Stockholm. “It’s kind of like I venture far west and have all these cosmic experiences,” before coming back to the cut-throat candour of her collaborators in one of Europe’s pop capitals. She needs their honesty. “Sweden is art, America is commerce,” she explains. “And you can’t always trust commerce because the intentions are not pure.”
As our conversation nears its end, I get the sense that her US city of residence – the centre of the global entertainment industry – with its muddied motivations, conventions and beauty standards, might jade Lykke on many fronts. In particular, currently, the latter. “Anytime I go into Instagram, I want to die. I’m so tired of this false narrative and looksmaxxing,” she says.“I love a freak.” She struggles with some of today’s generation of pop stars. “I can’t look at these faces anymore. All these girls with pumped lips and Botox when they’re like 28.”
Can she understand the draw of such procedures? “I would do Botox, but I’m so morally and spiritually against it that I can’t. But then of course, one part of me doesn’t want all these wrinkles. So I might succumb. I’m unresolved.”
Whether Botox, smoking, the permanence of her bleached eyebrows, or album making – Lykke, like the best artists, rarely deals in conclusions. She has mixed feelings on the merits of the afterparty, too. Yes, she notes their tragic undertones, but she doesn’t discount them. Her favourites, to date, have been in Mexico City (“They do require a live salsa band”) or in Stockholm (“Where you can just jump off into the water”).
It’s at this point that you might find that Lykke’s standard of after-hours activities outstrips most. “That is something you must experience before you die,” she enthuses. So viva la afterparty? “I mean, it’s an important exercise.”
WONDERLAND SUMMER 2026. GUEST EDITED BY MILEY CYRUS. SHOP NOW.
Photography Mario Sorrenti
Chief Creative Officer & Styling Alastair McKimm
Words Andrew Wright
Hair Bob Recine
Make-up Diane Kendal
Set Design Philipp Haemmerle
Executive Producer Dana Brockman
Producer Max Bonbrest
Casting Alexandra Antonova for Samuel Ellis Scheinman
Lighting Technician Lars Beaulieu
1st Photo Assistant Kotaro Kawashima
Photo Assistants Paolo Afante, Kurt Mangum
Digital Tech Charles Meyer
Fashion Assistants Taylor Wood, Kassidy Taylor
Hair Assistant Jeelan Aleem
Make-up Assistants Eduardo Jiminez, Breanna Harmon
Set Assistants Oscar Haemmerle, Xavier Mozejewski
Production Assistant Din Morris