THE FUSE

Tove Styrke was ugly-crying, and she wanted the world to see. In May, the Swedish singer-songwriter posted a TikTok of herself sitting in her car, her cheeks flushed and glistening with tears. She wanted to preview a song from her new album, I Thought This Story Wasn’t About Me, but broke down as she tried to softly sing along. In the captions, she confessed to struggling with the looming judgment of streaming numbers, chart positions, and ticket sales. Could those metrics really determine the value of what felt like her life’s work? “The way things are right now, the pace at which we consume music and art, makes me question if there’s any space for it to even be heard,” she wrote.