The Inner Voice Costs Ninety-Nine Euros
Tove Lo has always made darkness sound like something you’d choose voluntarily. Her songs—Habits, the chest-open rawness of Talking Body, the spiral of everything on Lady Wood—operate in a register that mainstream pop rarely touches without flinching: desire as grief, pleasure collapsing into its own aftermath, the comedown baked directly into the hook. Born Ebba Tove Elsa Nilsson in Stockholm, she’s spent a career dismantling the idea that a pop star should be aspirational in any comfortable sense. Grammy-nominated songwriter, yes. Provocateur who keeps her best wounds for her own records, also yes.
So when Urbanears wanted someone to put their name on a headphone, they called her. The result is the Plattan 2 Bluetooth in a Tove Lo edition: holographic ear cups, a glitter-gradient headband, no two units exactly alike because the production process doesn’t allow for perfect duplication. The stated creative inspiration was her song Disco Tits, which is either the most Tove Lo creative brief imaginable or proof that she’s getting better at working within commercial constraints.
She described the thinking behind it with more care than most artists give to tie-ins: We’re constantly bombarded from the outside with impressions and information, and it’s difficult to keep a clear and free head and to follow your own path. To create some space, we put on our headphones and listen to music we like. Music that evokes emotions. Those are usually the moments when I notice things and my attention isn’t constantly being distracted.
The collaboration grew out of Urbanears’ "Listen to Yourself" campaign—an initiative framed around creative people expressing their inner voice, which sounds like the kind of mandate that ends in platitudes and branded tote bags. With Tove Lo it landed differently. She took their characteristically minimal product aesthetic and turned it into something that glitters the way her records do: iridescent, slightly confrontational, visually singular on the shelf.
I probably don’t need another pair of headphones. But there’s something to be said for an object with actual aesthetic intention behind it—something that exists because someone thought about it rather than just approved a colorway. The Plattan 2 Tove Lo edition looks like her: holographic and a little bit like wearing a secret.