Brixton Academy
Sigrid, MØ, Alma, Tove Lo: Scandipop is in excellent health in 2018. And happily there’s still space for its 90s and 00s progenitors, among them the still-reigning Robyn, Little Dragon and Lykke Li, who released her first record a decade ago this year. The Swedish singer has since released three more albums of introspective pop, and expanded into swaggering R&B and trap on her latest, this year’s So Sad So Sexy.
At her first London show in four years, the stage is bathed in scarlet light, with a gigantic triangle and Li’s eyes on the backdrop. Dressed top to toe in PVC and wielding a tambourine, she is a striking figure, and is soon propelling herself around, staging a dance break and explaining her crotch-grabbing choreography to the crowd as she struts purposefully.
There’s space for a clutch of tracks from 2014’s balladeering I Never Learn, but largely the focus is on her latest work. Not that the show is one-note: the bombastic club vibes and syncopated strobes during Deep End contrast with a near-a cappella version of Bad Woman, during which her band retreat into the shadows.
If Li’s patter often feels generic (there are lots of appeals for the crowd to dance) then the show is the opposite, as she segues with ease and power from swelling beats to quasi-rap to torch songs, and even a hushed cover of Usher’s U Got It Bad: unexpectedly, its admission that “I’ve been there, done it, fucked around … nobody wants to be alone” feels right at home alongside her own songs.
Li’s sound is more mainstream and divisive than ever, cloaked in occasionally overbearing percussion and the odd awkward appeal to her “bae”. Yet it retains the heavy emotive core that’s threaded throughout her past decade’s work: on Better Alone, her newfound mettle meets stirring harmonies, fusing past and present.
Hannah J Davies in The Guardian
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