When Tove Styrke put pen to paper for her sensual new single “Show Me Love,” out Friday, it was meant to be just for her best friend, whom she had “[fallen] madly in love with.” But the song was so good, “I had to put it out,” she tells Rolling Stone.
“It almost feels weird to release it to the world because it’s so much hers,” the Swedish pop artist says about the sexy track, the first taste of the “sexy and kind of raw” album she has teed up for later this year.
Accompanying the single — where she sings, “Wetter than your wildest dreams. Weirder than your fantasies, show me love” — is an equally sexy music video spliced into three parts: fantasies, performance, and “the Rapunzel guitar solo as a metaphor for masturbation.” (Yeah, you read that right.)
Like Years & Years on their upcoming album Night Call, some of the fantasy video visuals — where she lays in a sea of faceless bodies — were inspired by “longing for touch and human contact” during the pandemic. In the performance portion, Styrke tapps into her inner Fifties and Sixties rock star while “paying an homage to voguing.” As for her mid-song guitar solo, Styrke explains, “Rapunzel is pleasuring herself on top of her pedestal.”
The new single comes in anticipation for her February stint as an opener for Marina (whom she “admires so much”) during the Welsh songstress’ Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land tour. She last opened for Lorde, while she promoted 2017’s Melodrama — an experience Styrke describes as “insane and fucking lifechanging.”
“It opened my eyes to what you can do on a stage if you are a bigger artist with a bigger budget,” Styrke says. “So inspiring. Opening for other artists gives you the opportunity to connect with a completely new audience which is so amazing.”
Last year she joined Cheat Codes and Travis Barker on “All Things $ Can Do,” along with releasing her own singles “Start Walking” and “Mood Swings.” Styrke dropped her last full-length project, Sway, in 2018.