Swedish Pop Duo Talk New Album ‘Ritual’

After nearly 20 years of friendship, Icona Pop had to make a choice. The two members of the usually inseparable Swedish duo behind hits like 2013’s “I Love It” were amid the upheavals of motherhood, heartbreak, divorce, crushing anxiety, love, and rebirth — and they would have to go through it all individually in order to find themselves, and each other, again.

Now, Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo are preparing to release their fourth studio album, Ritual, due Aug. 14, an offering dedicated in part to the small, daily acts that can pull a soul out of grief.

“We were both going through a lot of changes,” Hjelt tells Rolling Stone over a Zoom call from Stockholm. “When it comes to personal stuff, you can be there for each other, but you can’t fix the problem. You have to give each other time to heal and grow.” 

When they were ready, Jawo adds, “We had to choose Icona Pop again.” In some ways, she says, that was an easy choice: “We never doubted, but we could have.” 

The result is an album of cathartic sounds where Icona Pop brazenly shed the past. “This is a new Icona Pop era,” Jawo says. The tracks are more vulnerable, biting, and self-aware than ever, and in some cases, feature lyrics pulled right out of Hjelt’s diary. “I don’t think people understand how honest this album is,” adds Jawa. “We’re so good at doing heartbreak songs and disguising them in happy melodies. But now it’s like, fuck that. Let’s just go hard.”

Ritual is also the first album they’ve fully created in their studio (a space they found toward the end of making their 2023 comeback album, Club Romantech). Being able to fill a creative space with the people they love was always a dream for Icona Pop. The record brought together the band’s main producers, Sebastian Furrer (who also writes) and Jason Gill; co-writers Ines Dunn, Erik Hassle, and Yaeger, who was featured on the last album’s “Shit We Do For Love”; their close friend and fellow Swedish singer Tove Lo; and Daya for the title track. “It’s our happy place,” says Hjelt.

Jawo gets emotional when she discusses the journey it took to get there. A year ago, she was still in a “super bad place” following the death of her grandmother. Jawo had also just given birth to her second child, and she felt a shift both emotionally and physically. “I was laying in bed for weeks,” she says, adding that she was constantly sick during this time. “Your body gives you so many signals before saying goodbye.”

She found herself questioning what she wanted from life. “When I got my first child, I was trying to fit my old Aino into a new Aino. I think that’s where everything went south. I was trying to be a ‘super cool, party pop star girl,’ and that’s not at all who I am,” she says. “I love partying — but I’ve actually had such bad anxiety most of my life, and being social can get super uncomfortable for me. All of that drained me for so many years, so I had to take this time off and start to lick my wounds and piece together how I want my dream life to be.”

Jawo says it started with small walks and meeting with Hjelt for coffee. Afterwards, Jawo would go home and sleep for hours, but eventually, she was able to step outside. She also recognizes how lucky she was to have Hjelt and her husband as her support team during this time.

These periods of gradual growth are reflected in Ritual’s title track, which holds deep significance for Jawo. “[The song] explains the small rituals you do to get back to the new you, to piece your life back together,” she says. “You can make your body heal just by seeing things differently.”

During the same time, Hjelt was going through the complex process of divorce. She says at least one song on the album expresses her “brutal acceptance”: finding the beauty amid the hurt and sadness, and having faith that it’s going to be OK.

“Suddenly, I was facing a lot of time with myself and that was very hard, but I learned so much,” says Hjelt, who began going to their studio. As she dove back into the songwriting process, Hjelt traveled to Los Angeles to visit Tove Lo, who suggested that Hjelt open her diary for songwriting inspiration. 

“We started writing, and everything came so naturally,” Hjelt says. “Then, when I was going to record just the demo, I almost had a panic attack, because I really opened up something that needed to come out.” It was a turning point that made her realize Icona Pop couldn’t control what the album was going to be and that they would have to embrace the unknown.

Doing so required Hjelt and Jawo’s friendship to evolve. “We had been so good at keeping it up for each other and almost scared of hurting each other,” Hjelt says. “Now, we’re in this amazing place where we can be very honest and straightforward, which is because we went there.”

Hjelt continues: “The whole album is about being forced to go through change, acceptance of where you are and feeling like you lost yourself, and the journey of finding yourself again.”

Songs across the LP like “Dance to This” — a love letter to being lost and found on the dance floor — and “Ritual” echo this renewal. There’s a line in the latter that speaks to their rediscovery of self, or as Jawo put it, the ego death. Hjelt says the track details the story of a close friend who went to a “medicine man searching for answers,” and was told, “Your body is cold. You need to dance and eat warm food. You need to make your body feel alive.” 

Guest vocalist Daya lends her vocals to this part of the song, before the hook repeats: “This is my ritual/Yeah, I do it to survive.”

There’s also a line that’s inspired by Jawo’s therapist, who told her, “Caroline, she’s like a Ferrari. She drives quickly and fast. You’re like a Volvo car. You’ll catch up, but you just take a little bit longer. You’re not as quick as the Ferrari, but you’re as good.” Jawo says it’s about sticking to their lanes and letting her other half “run free.”

“When you said that to me, that was the same week I found out that I have ADHD,” Hjelt tells Jawo. “Everything made so much sense. I move fast, but it’s also so important to sometimes be like, ‘Wait, let’s think about this.’ It’s all about balance….It’s so funny, because we’ve been growing a lot, getting wiser, but I feel younger.”

So, after all these years and changes, what keeps bringing them back together? 

“I think we probably lived together many lives ago,” Hjelt says, then addresses Jawo: “You feel so familiar to me. You feel like a sister. There’s just something pulling us constantly back to each other.”

In a way, Ritual celebrates the two club kids who met at a party in Stockholm back in 2009. “Everyone could be who they wanted. If you were sad, you went to the club and you cried while dancing, and then you talked to your friends, and it was fine,” recalls Hjelt. “It was such a beautiful community, and I don’t know who we would be if we didn’t have that.”

“it’s not as easy to find that today,” she adds. “So maybe that’s what we need to do. Maybe that’s our mission.”