Although Tove Lo hasn’t left her listeners totally bereft of her music since her last studio album’s release in 2022 (Dirt Femme), the Heat EP with SG Lewis was but a small satiation for those who have been waiting for her sixth album. Which she recently revealed to be titled Estrus. A word that, as she put it herself, means “an animal in heat [which is why the Heat EP was ultimately foreshadowing/foreplay]. It’s primal, contradicting emotional chaos. It’s my mind and my body wanting different things, wanting everything.” That sense of contradiction certainly comes across in the video for her first single from the album, “I’m Your Girl Right?” For it definitely mixes the sacred with the profane.
Directed by Nogari (who previously worked with Tove Lo on the video for “Borderline”), the video opens on a trio of men getting their long hair shaved off by another man—all of them dressed exactly the same in a wife-beater and jeans. Thus, the vibe right from the beginning is decidedly “prison” oriented. Nogari then cuts to a scene of a warehouse-looking space (in terms of its size and general emptiness) filled with women in similarly drab uniforms as they stand in formation with books balancing on their heads as if this is actually a combination prison/“charm school.” But no, it’s really something like a religious boarding school, with the video shot in a former monastery in Brazil. Yet the prison analogy remains.
Then again, the “civility” of this particular “detention center” is in keeping with Tove Lo’s Swedishness. After all, a Swedish version of a prison is far more humane and dignified than anything that a U.S. citizen is accustomed to seeing. And so it is that as a siren sound rings out—how appropriate for this “boarding school is a prison” motif—in the song (the very one that Tove used to tease in her first “promo” clip for the album, which featured a lot of chaotic shots of white and seemingly ceramic cats), Nogari cuts to an outdoor scene of the “imprisoned” men doing the kind of choreo that rivals Madonna’s backup dancers during the “Everybody” opening of the Blond Ambition Tour.
It’s here that Tove deviates from the chorus to sweetly sing, “I like your teeth, could watch you eat for days/A fancy steak, I’ll pay.” This line occurring during another cut to still more men getting their heads shaved, followed by another scene of the school’s women in the “warehouse room” as their “warden” sways a thurible back and forth (another indication that the joint is not just religious, but Catholic). As if hoping to cleanse these women of their sins and iniquities as an added “spiritual” bonus to their “tenure” at this “institution.”
While scenes of Tove Lo and co.’s daily life continue to unfold—complete with the requisite snapshot of the cafeteria—the lyrics continue, “Is that perfume, or is it you I taste?/Bite the skin thin/Tell me what I wanna hear now, don’t make me doubt/Promise me you’ll never leave me, don’t let me down.” At a certain point while in the cafeteria, Tove receives a note that’s being passed around, reads it and then looks behind her searchingly as if hoping to figure out which brilliant mind wrote it. So clearly, some kind of escape plan is being hatched.
At the one-minute-thirteen-second mark, the beat drops fully to remind listeners that Tove Lo is, first and foremost, a dancing queen. Once again produced by A Strut (a.k.a. the duo that is Jakob Jerlström and Ludwig Söderberg), the sound of “I’m Your Girl Right?” is, at times, likenable to fellow Swede Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers” (particularly during the piano parts). But of course far more overtly “dance floor-ready.” Hence, the reason why Tove and her fellow female boarders are lined up at this moment to engage in their most elaborate choreo sequence yet. A scene that occurs after two male boarders crawl on the floor together and “sniff each other out” like, well, two animals in heat. After all, “estrus” is still the theme. And one that comes into even stronger play as the video escalates and progresses, with Tove stealing furtive glances as she runs down the hallway in her knee socks (which are apparently all the rage among pop stars right now, if Olivia Rodrigo’s “drop dead” video is another indication). That hallway giving the viewer a decided “dormitory” feel.
In the following scene, Tove Lo has shed all traces of her sexless uniform as she appears in what can be described as, like, “the art room,” dancing in front of a full-length mirror in a skimpy number that evidently attracts another boarder from “miles away.” Such is the power of her pheromones, one supposes (which is why she alluded to said form of power with a lyric like, “Is that perfume, or is it you I taste?”). The boarder presses their hands against the mostly opaque panes of the door while Tove gets even raunchier with her moves, crawling on the floor as the scenes of her in these poses (which often resemble some of Madonna’s promo photos for Confessions II) are filmed in an outright red tone—as if to punctuate the lustiness, the “hot body temperature” of it all.
In another instant, that red-hotness of the scene’s color tone becomes literal with a camera pan-down to a fire outside that’s being “kindled” by one of the mattresses from the building (and there are many other mattresses piled next to that fire, as if waiting to be burned as well). The escalating “naughtiness” of Tove Lo is then punctuated by the barrage of scene cuts (a montage of things the viewer has seen already, if you will) that lead up to her amidst all her fellow boarders—men and women alike—as she crawls and writhes around them (or rather, “at the center of them” while they encircle her) like she truly is a cat in heat (since cats are often her talisman, as established by Sunshine Kitty). And yes, to once again make a Madonna comparison, there’s a quality to these orgiastic scenes that channels the “Hung Up” video as she and her dancers get extra close and personal in the darkened club toward the end (this being even more sensually mimicked for most of Madonna’s live performances of the song when it first came out).
The raw sexualness of Tove Lo’s energy spreads like, that’s right, wildfire, with the hordes then proceeding to run amok together as they converge on the cafeteria and the halls, throwing, tearing and generally destroying whatever they can get their hands on. When they’ve had their fill of that, they all run out into the freshly dawning night—wild, free and, yes, absolutely feral.
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