Tove Lo Brings ESTRUS, Old Habits and No Easy Answers to the Greek Theatre

Tove Lo has never exactly built her music around good decisions.

For more than a decade, some of her best songs have lived in the space between knowing what would probably be healthier and doing the other thing anyway. On her new album ESTRUS, that conflict has become less about a bad night out and more about what happens when you are old enough to supposedly know better, but still do not necessarily want the life everyone assumes comes next.

At the Greek Theatre on Sept. 27, she did not resolve any of that.

She danced through it.

The Los Angeles stop came just nine days after the release of ESTRUS, Tove Lo’s sixth album and her first solo full-length since Dirt Femme in 2022. She has described its title, the biological term for an animal being in heat, as fitting the record’s tug-of-war between instinct and reason. Much of the album was written after a period of creative frustration and asks versions of the same question: what happens when the body wants one thing and the mind another?

That made the ESTRUS Tour less of a conventional album-supporting show than a continuation of the album itself.

The night opened with fragments of “a lot of feelings, no solutions” and “roomie” before dropping into “I’m the cake.” From there, the set immediately began crossing between eras: “Cool Girl,” “My Gun” and “Are U gonna tell her?” arrived alongside new material instead of being saved for a late-show greatest-hits run. By the end of the night, Tove Lo had performed essentially every substantive song from ESTRUS while still making room for material stretching back through the rest of her career.

That structure worked particularly well because the older songs did not feel disconnected from the new ones.

“Cool Girl,” released a decade ago, already dealt with the performance of emotional detachment. “Talking Body” turned desire into something blunt and physical. “disco tits” practically made self-destruction sound glamorous. ESTRUS is less interested in replacing those ideas than asking what they look like now.

That connection became clearest in the middle of the set.

“Grapefruit,” Tove Lo’s deeply personal song about her past struggles with disordered eating and body image, sat between the new “die for my art with a lonely heart” and “idiot.” At other stops on the tour, she has spoken before “Grapefruit” about overcoming those struggles and why she still considers the subject important to discuss. The placement made the song feel less like a detour into something serious and more like another part of the same argument ESTRUS is having about the body.

Then the show accelerated.

“DNH” led into “Talking Body,” followed by a run through “disco tits,” “bitches,” “Lady Wood” and “2 Die 4.” It was the section most explicitly built for movement, but even here the show rarely became a straightforward dance-pop victory lap.

The production repeatedly changed the way Tove Lo occupied the stage. At moments she was elevated above it, framed almost like part of an installation; elsewhere she was back at the edge of the crowd, pulling the performance toward something much less distant. Lasers cut through haze, video and lighting shifted with each section, and her layered costumes moved between something theatrical and something intentionally unfinished.

Other reviews from the tour have picked up on much the same contrast. Third Coast Review described the Chicago show as essentially a giant ESTRUS listening party and singled out the second half’s combination of older favorites and new material, while Melodic’s Toronto coverage emphasized the shift between large-scale production and the more personal moments surrounding songs like “Grapefruit.”

There was also something particularly appropriate about ending the North American portion of this stretch in Los Angeles.

Tove Lo has lived in the city for nearly a decade, and parts of ESTRUS were recorded here alongside sessions in Stockholm and the Swedish fishing village where she spent childhood summers. In a recent Los Angeles Times interview, she described the album as moving between hedonism and vulnerability, stability and chaos, without trying to decide which side should win.

The final stretch of the Greek show followed that same logic.

“source of life,” one of the record’s most revealing songs, arrived before “No One Dies From Love,” “are we on a break” and “F.A.M.T.” Then came “Habits (Stay High),” the song that introduced much of the world to Tove Lo more than a decade ago.

It would have been an obvious closer.

Instead, she followed it with “the bad one.”

That choice said more about this tour than ending on the biggest hit could have. ESTRUS is not really about arriving at a cleaner, wiser version of Tove Lo. “the bad one” remains interested in the mess.

After briefly leaving the stage, she returned for the SG Lewis collaboration “HEAT” and finally “I’m your girl right?,” closing a 27-song set that ran from roughly 9:10 to 10:45 p.m.

More than anything, the Greek Theatre show made clear that ESTRUS is not a reinvention.

Tove Lo is still writing about sex, bad impulses, loneliness, pleasure and the ways those things overlap. What has changed is the perspective. The person singing “Habits” once sounded like she was trying to survive the consequences of a night out. The person making ESTRUS knows the consequences perfectly well and is more interested in asking why adulthood is supposed to eliminate the desire for the night out in the first place.

There were no solutions at the Greek Theatre.

That was kind of the point.