Review: Enter Tove Lo’s messy femininity in ‘Dirt Femme’

“Dirt Femme,” Tove Lo Femininity is all-encompassing, it’s malleable and flesh deep. In Tove Lo’s fifth studio album, “Dirt Femme” — the first under her own independent label — the Swedish singer-songwriter and producer profoundly understands the female experience can be painful, messy and iridescent. In “Dirt Femme,” Tove Lo is able to analyze her marriage and rejects the traditional nuclear family in “Suburbia,” singing “I can’t be no Stepford wife.” She explores an eating disorder that plagued her teenage years in “Grapefruit” — the purposefully sweltering beats makes this song a deniable club banger — and self-hatred and self-sabotage in “I’m to Blame,” her most candid song yet. Lead single “No One Dies from Love” documents how Tove Lo’s interpretation of femininity means showing the vulnerability of heartbreak as she sings against heavy ‘80s-inspired synth, “No one dies from love/Guess I’ll be the first.