Lykke Li releases sixth studio album ‘The Afterparty’ out now

Today, Lykke Li unveils THE AFTERPARTY, her sixth and final studio album and a stunning, 24-minute dusk-to-dawn odyssey that distills the chaos of the human experience into something euphoric and confrontational. Written in Los Angeles and recorded in Stockholm with a 17-piece string section, multiple drummers, and a full chorus of voices, the album is her most sonically expansive to date, disco-glowing, gospel-bright, and Balearic in spirit, while lyrically plunging into shame, revenge, mortality, and the void. “This is an album dealing with your lower self,” Li explains. “Your need for revenge, your shame,
despair… a journey through the night, hoping to find dawn—the dawn of yourself.”

Across a career that has quietly but definitively reshaped the emotional language of modern pop, from her breakthrough debut Youth Novels to the global, generation-defining success of “I Follow Rivers,” and the stark intimacy of Wounded Rhymes, I Never Learn, So Sad So Sexy, and EYEEYE, Lykke Li has built a reputation as one of music’s most devoted melancholics, a master at navigating the space where love, loss, and longing collide. With THE AFTERPARTY, she moves beyond heartbreak and into something more existential, trading romantic fantasy for what she calls “Ram Dass for fuckboys”: a spiritual reckoning filtered through ego and chaos.

The album unfolds as a single continuous scene, the afterparty itself. It’s 4am. The music is still playing. The bodies are still moving. But beneath the surface, something is shifting. Opening moments feel cinematic and expansive, introducing a world suspended between life and death, where swelling choruses clash against percussion. From there, Li moves fluidly between emotional extremes. Songs that shimmer where ABBA-esque stacked harmonies suddenly rupture into raw, unfiltered rage, anger pushed into the void, only to echo back in cycles of destruction and rebirth. Elsewhere, cascading disco strings and relentless, maximalist arrangements create a sense of lift, of survival as spectacle, before collapsing inward again into moments of stark intimacy: a single voice and a slightly detuned piano.

Visually and conceptually, THE AFTERPARTY marks a new chapter for Li. On the album artwork, she appears as a warped, Cindy Sherman-esque figure—her face distorted, her identity unstable, her role somewhere between performer and fool. It’s a deliberate rejection of perfection, an embrace of the grotesque and the embarrassing as pathways to truth. “Especially in pop music, no one really talks about this,” she says. “It’s too disgusting and vulnerable and embarrassing. This passing of time. Having had something and lost it.” And yet, even in its darkest moments, the album pulses with life.

THE AFTERPARTY is not just an album about the night. It’s about what comes after: the comedown, the reckoning, the fragile, flickering possibility of becoming something new.

THE AFTERPARTY TRACKLIST

Not Gon Cry
Happy Now
Lucky Again
Famous Last Words
Future Fear
So Happy I Could Die
Sick Of Love
Knife In The Heart
Euphoria

LIVE DATES:

22nd May – Vivo Rio – Rio de Janeiro
24th May – C6 Festival – São Paulo
10th June – Malahide Castle – Dublin, Ireland+
11th June – KOKO, London
19th June – Metronome Festival, Prague
22nd June – Odeon of Herodes – Athens, Greece
28th June – Live is Live Festival, Belgium
2nd July – Roskilde Festival, Denmark
5th July – Finsbury Park – London^
10th July – Pohoda Festival – Slovakia
14th August – Way Out West, Sweden
16th August – Flow Festival, Finland
22nd August – Pstereo Festival – Trondheim, Norway
27th August – Rock En Seine, Paris, France
31st August – Superbloom Festival, Munich, Germany
19th September – Palacio de los Deportes – Mexico City, MX*
* w/Robyn
^Wolf Alice
+Nick Cave