Marcel Winatschek

Stockholm in Shinjuku

How do you resist a Swedish pop singer who grabbed you years ago with songs like Call My Name, High and Low, and Million Pieces, and has now decided to film her latest video wandering alone through Tokyo? You don’t. Tove Styrke has been northern Europe’s best-kept pop secret for too long, and Ego is the track that ought to end the secret. There’s something about the Lost in Translation framing—the dislocation, the neon, the solitude inside a city of millions—that suits her perfectly. She’s always had this quality of seeming slightly apart from wherever she is, and Tokyo makes that visual.

Scandinavia keeps exporting genuinely interesting pop and the rest of the world keeps being slow to notice. Tove Styrke is not a trend, not a moment, not the next someone else. She’s just good, and Ego is the thing that finally makes that obvious to everyone who wasn’t already paying attention.