Swedish singer Lykke Li has called her new album Eyeye “her most intimate work to date”. In regard to Lykke Li’s music, this feels almost impossible at this point. Her music has time and time again explored the depths of heartbreak. Is it possible to write a song more intimate than “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone”?
Eyeye is her fifth album and it sees Li return to familiar topics of love and heartbreak. She also returns to work with Björn Yttling, who worked on her first three albums. Eyeye leaves the more electronic experiments of 2018’s So Sad So Sexy behind and returns to more minimal, stripped back songwriting and production. Cheap microphones were used for recording vocals with no headphones or clicktracks and only live instrumentation was used. Despite this DIY approach the sound of Eyeye is expansive. The compositions are airy and gorgeous, the rough recording adding textures deep in the mix. Her songwriting is as strong as ever, too.
Despite the slender seven-song tracklist, Eyeye is conceptually her most ambitious album to date. The album is accompanied by seven minute-long videos which loop into a larger story. Lykke Li has always felt close to the cinematic world. Her music videos are ambitious and she has acted in films including Terrence Malik’s Song to Song and has made music with David Lynch. But Li’s music has often felt cinematic in its sweeping emotion and detail, without any actual visuals needed.
It’s an ambitious project which is cool but ultimately feels secondary to the music. The thought behind it, to “deliver the full impact of a movie in 60 seconds on a phone screen, which is where most of our emotional experiences happen now anyway”, also feels inherently untrue.
It’ll be fascinating to see how these videos are incorporated into a live show, but for now the music speaks for itself.
