Tove Lo was lying on her kitchen floor in Stockholm when the first idea arrived. It was late 2022, and the Swedish pop artist had been trading voice notes with Sam Lewis, the British producer known professionally as SG Lewis, since they connected at a London festival afterparty months earlier. What started as mutual admiration—Lo's raw, confessional songwriting; Lewis's crate-digging approach to dance production—had gradually become a genuine creative dialogue. The voice note she recorded that night, a murmured melody over nothing but her phone's ambient hiss, would eventually become the backbone of "Grapefruit," the opening track on their collaborative EP, Heat.
Released May 17 via Pretty Swede Records and Ministry of Sound, Heat arrives as both artists navigate transitional moments. Lo, 36, is two years removed from her fourth studio album, Dirt Femme, and has been testing a more overtly club-oriented direction in recent singles. Lewis, 29, spent 2023 producing for Dua Lipa and Channel Tres while quietly rebuilding his own artist project after the sprawling AudioLust & HigherLove double album. Their four-track EP—clocking in at a lean 16 minutes—represents a deliberate constriction of scope: one voice, one producer, one uninterrupted night-out arc.
From Voice Notes to Vocal Booth
The collaboration's physical distance proved unexpectedly productive. Lo and Lewis never spent more than ten consecutive days in the same studio, instead building songs through asynchronous experimentation. Lewis would send Lo skeletal instrumentals—often little more than a drum pattern and a single chord voicing—then wait for her to layer melody and provisional lyrics. She, in turn, would receive his expanded arrangements and push back against obvious choices: more filter sweeps, fewer predictable drops.
"The first thing Sam sent me had this very polished, almost finished quality," Lo recalls during a joint video call from her Stockholm apartment. "I had to ask him to strip it back, send me the weird stuff, the mistakes. I wanted to feel like I was discovering something with him, not just singing on top of his production."
Lewis, calling from his London studio, describes a reciprocal education. "Tove's not interested in the architecture of a track unless it's serving some emotional function," he says. "I'd spend hours on a bassline and she'd ask, 'But what feeling is this?' It forced me to stop showing off my references and actually commit to a perspective."
That perspective, both artists agree, crystallized around a specific imagined space: not a mainstream festival stage or streaming playlist placement, but the smaller, sweatier rooms where queer club culture persists against commercial pressure. Lo, who has identified as bisexual throughout her career, and Lewis, who came out publicly in 2022, found their personal experiences converging with a broader creative intention.
The Tracks, Unpacked
Heat's four songs function as a deliberate sequence, each calibrated for a different phase of physical release.
"Grapefruit" establishes the EP's tactile production vocabulary: live congas recorded by Lewis in a Brixton rehearsal space, Lo's vocals processed through an Eventide H3000 for a frayed, overheated quality, and a bassline that enters not at the expected first chorus but at 1:23, after she's already established the song's anxious desire. The lyrics reference specific queer nightlife rituals—"I cut the fruit, you roll the thing"—without explanatory footnotes for straight listeners.
"Desire" pushes toward classic disco structure, with string arrangements by Swedish composer Mattias Bärjed that Lewis deliberately constrained to single takes. "I wanted the slight imperfections, the bow noise," he explains. Lo's vocal here is more frontal, less processed, building to a bridge that drops all instrumentation except handclaps and her multi-tracked voice.
"Sweat" is the EP's most explicitly physical moment, built around a four-on-the-floor kick that enters precisely at 0:48 after 47 seconds of teasing percussion. The song's central metaphor—"You're in my clothes, you're in my hair"—extends the EP's preoccupation with bodily permeability, the self dissolving into contact.
"Cool Down" closes with intentional ambivalence. Where a conventional dance EP might peak and release, this final track maintains tension, ending on an unresolved chord that leaves the listener in sustained anticipation. "The night doesn't really end," Lo notes. "You just move to different rooms, different states."
Beyond Allyship Tourism
The EP's queer framing risks the very specificity it aims for, particularly in a market where LGBTQ+ identity has become commercially viable. Both artists acknowledge this tension directly.
"I've seen the 'grab your gay friend' marketing," Lo says, referencing a common promotional trope. "
