Lykke Li and the Mystery of the Obvious Calling

I have a black-and-white portrait of Lykke Li on my wall—have had it there for a while now, which for me is a kind of endorsement I give to very few people. She’s the sort of artist who arrives with an aesthetic so fully formed it’s almost suspicious. Her debut record felt like it had always existed somewhere and she’d just found it.

She talked in interviews about how it was never really a question. Life is a mystery that you can get closest to through art, she said, and the way she described her process—considering fashion, considering painting, settling on music—made it sound less like a choice than a process of elimination toward the inevitable. I don’t entirely believe that narrative, because no one’s path is that clean, but I believe she believes it, and in an artist that’s almost the same thing.

The video for Tonight is almost aggressively simple—the kind of purity that either reads as genius or as a student film depending on your patience. I lean toward genius. There’s a stillness in how she performs that most pop acts can’t fake even when they’re trying. It’s not absence of effort; it’s effort so complete it disappears. I’ve watched it more times than I’d admit to anyone who’d ask why.