A mournful voice sings “even though it hurts, even though it scars, love me when it storms, love me when I fall” over a strummed acoustic guitar which shares the lyrics dolefulness. As the centrepiece of her set last night, Lykke Li’s delivery of her new album I Never Learn’s “Love Me Like I'm Not Made of Stone” asked a lot from the audience at her first London show for three years. With the familiar came the new. With the upbeat came the sorrowful. And lots of it.

The Swedish writer-director Lukas Moodysson first burst onto the scene in 1998 with the chaotically romantic Show Me Love (original title Fucking Åmål), a story of a love affair between two teenage girls which shocks a small Swedish town. He followed that with commune comedy Together (2000) before eventually segueing into darker territory with films such as Lilya 4-Ever (2002), A Hole in My Heart (2004) and Mammoth (2009) which focussed on sex trafficking, amateur porn and the ills of globalisation respectively.

For a teenager, a parent’s birthday party is never comfortable. As We Are the Best! opens, it’s worse than that for Bobo as she holds a torch for punk rock and her mother is determined to have a good time. It’s Stockholm in 1982 and no matter how liberal-minded the adults, Bobo cannot fit in with the forced jollity. Punk rock is supposed to be dead but for Bobo and her friend Klara, it’s the light at the end of a tunnel of stultifying conformity and frustration.

The British Museum's exhibition The Vikings: Life and Legend promises to redefine the Viking age for a new generation. First seen at the National Mueum in Copenhagen, it has now travelled - much as the show's subjects once did - across the North Sea. It includes objects from 25 lending institutions spread across nine countries - 10 if you include Scotland, whose national law requires export licence. To celebrate the exhibition, theartsdesk invited Dr Gareth Williams to pick 10 exhibits that walk us through the Viking story.

The Saga saga is over. An eco-terrorist plot to kill off the top tier of Europe’s environment ministers has been foiled, with nails bitten to the quick. Various Nordic marriages are in tatters, like a boxed set of Strindberg. Justice has been done but the smiles on faces in the Malmö police station at the end of episode nine had been wiped an hour later. We can’t talk about why or the spoiler police will stick us in prison and pay us periodic visits with gifts of designer coffee. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good night for Danish law enforcement.

How come there is always a free parking space right outside the police station’s front door as Saga Norén draws up? If she has malodourous armpits, what must her manky leather trousers smell like? What does her partner in investigation Martin Rohde do to distract himself from her personal hygiene issues? Wouldn’t he do better to downsize his expensive car and use the money saved on renting an apartment rather than kipping in a hotel? All burning questions raised by the second series of the Danish-Swedish co-production The Bridge, currently being aired by BBC Four.

Why has Nordic noir been such an addictive novelty? Yes the plots are great, the locations moodily cool, the flat dialogue enigmatic. But in the end it’s all about gender. The detective who is a genius at work but clueless at life – we’ve seen it all before in a suit and tie and a battered mac. What’s different in equal-opportunity Scandinavia is that the dysfunctional crimebusters are beautiful bug-eyed Valkyries. Up north it’s the blokes who are the sidekicks.

Queer as Pop (****) was as much about social as musical history, and Nick Vaughan-Smith’s film told its story with a combination of outstanding archive material and some incisive interviewees, the archive taking fractionally more of the weight. Subtitled “From the Gay Scene to the Mainstream”, it started loosely in the Sixties, then jumped back and forth across the Atlantic until the present day as the story demanded.

The bleak opening of Don’t Ever Wipe Tears Without Gloves is set in a nursing home where a man is dying of AIDS, tended by nurses who themselves know next to nothing of the disease. The phrase one nurse utters as a warning gives this Swedish drama its title: any human contact, even if it’s intended as the smallest act of kindness, risks passing on the infection. Simon Kaijser’s three-part drama will show us the varieties of response across society to these extreme new circumstances.

Madness: Take it or Leave it