Lykke Li is cute, but she doesn’t want to be. Or, she doesn’t want you to notice it. Or at least not right away. “I want to be an artist,” she announces, and everything about her demeanor says she is serious about this: her long tangled hair, her all-black clothing and, most of all, the permanently furrowed brow that lives between her intense, heavily lined, almond-shaped eyes. Today, she’s cozied into a velvet booth in a downtown New York café, slicing away at a slab of chicken. It’s really good to see her, because, at least as an artist, she’s been away for a while. Since she stopped touring on her beloved, club-oriented debut album Youth Novels in late 2009, she has only engaged with fans to release the single “Possibility” for the New Moon soundtrack last fall. The gorgeous, gothy song was a setup for the heart-heavy material on her new album, Wounded Rhymes, which she’ll release in March marking the second chapter of a career path dotted with dreams and dolor.

You can really hear the conflicting emotions on the new album. Apart from the barrage of sad, sad songs, there’s the already-famous first single, “Get Some.” The track opens with punishing, tribal-sounding drums before Li starts singing a song that is widely thought to be about a blowjob. “That’s silly if people think that,” she says, scowling between bites. “I mean, scratch the surface please! I’m talking about the war of the sexes, the power play, the perception of women, how the things that you do are seen as sexual even when they’re not.” She’s getting at the crux of the identity crisis she experienced while promoting Youth Novels upon its 2008 release. “This over-sexualized society…” she sighs, waving her hands. “It’s like, as soon as you show some fucking leg or whatever, they start making filthy comments. What about Iggy Pop? He never has a shirt on. That’s what I want to do, to be free and do what the fuck I want, but if you’re a woman and you do something like that, you’re seen as this victim. It’s like, Are you fucking kidding me?” It’s true that, despite the serious content of her lyrics, which, then and now, focus largely on heartbreak and determination, Li was belittled as an artist because of her high-pitched voice and diminutive stature. One critic said she looked, dressed and sounded “like an Olsen Twin,” and many assumed that her music was canned, produced electronically and not, as it was, with real instruments. That misconception was strengthened by a focus, in the press, on Li’s origin, Stockholm. Swedish producers are famed for the kind of slick pop production heard on early Britney Spears records. In any case, Li was tired of being identified by her nationality. “I was having to hold a flag all the time,” she complains. “So what if I’m Swedish? Everybody’s from somewhere.”

All this misunderstanding encouraged Li’s eventual retreat from public life. “My music originally came from a pure, innocent, private place,” she explains, “and then all of a sudden everybody is grabbing onto you and telling you things. I had to shut off everything and say, I don’t want this. I want to be a private person. I kind of did say, like, I’m leaving, bye.” Exhausted from constant performing and steamrolled by an acute identity crisis, Li landed in New York in the fall of 2009, where she had begun her career a few years earlier. She decided she would just hang out for a while, live it up. “Suddenly, there was nothing,” she says. “I felt so free, like the future was totally unwritten. But I was dying almost. I was like, I have no home! All this shit has happened to me but where do I go now? Who am I? And I was freezing!” Next, Li ended up where many artists do when they’re sick of New York: Los Angeles. “Everytime I went to California, I felt so warm and nice,” she recalls. “So that’s where I went to hide.” She rented a hilltop house in Echo Park with wooden floors, a piano and a garden. There, she began the process of reconnecting with Lykke Li, the person.

But first, she had to crush the former image of herself, the one she had grown tired of during long press days and the pressure of public life. So she ventured into the desert with the surf photographer Moses Berkson, where they made a short improvisational film documenting the ceremonious destruction of Li’s identity. Released this past November, just ahead of the first single from her new album, the piece, titled Solarium, depicts Li dressed in Jean Paul Gaulthier clothes, smashing mirrors one by one. “I wanted to wash away everything that had come before,” she says. “I wanted to get back to pure honesty again.”
Meanwhile, Li, who will be 25 in March, was changing and growing as an artist and a person. By the time she headed to Stockholm to record Wounded Rhymes, she was beginning to feel, and sound, very different. “Every time I sang, I would think, Oh my god, something is happening with my voice! I was finally able to sing what I felt.” She is audibly huskier and deeper on the new album, and the production, by longtime collaborator Bjorn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John, plays up her earthy voice with tribal drums and barebones instrumentation. It’s much different than the bubbly, dance-y stuff she wrote for Youth Novels at age 19. Lyrics this time range from solemn to angry. “Sadness is my boyfriend,” she wails on the Phil Spector-ish track “Sadness is a Blessing,” and she comes off almost like a blues singer on the bare bones “Unrequited Love.” These mournful, exposed moments are balanced out with plenty of powerful ones, “Get Some,” being the most dramatic. In the song’s video, Li appears as the leader of a self-made cult, a temptress drawing unsuspecting souls into a new religion with her sexual prowess. “And ‘cause I can I'm gon' go West,” she sings. “Just like a man I’m the fortress / Like the shotgun I can't be outdone / I'm your prostitute, and you gon' get some.”

Li won’t name a specific relationship that caused all the emptiness and anger of which she sings. “I don’t think every heartbreak has to involve a relationship,” she explains back in New York, where her journey started when she was a teenager. “A lot of times, you’re breaking your own heart. For me, it was realizing that what I thought was love really isn’t love. It’s about that, the ghost of love.”

The next night, she appears again all in black, almost like a ghoul in a billowing cape, at the Greenwich Village club Le Poisson Rouge. As the dark strains from Solarium play, she moves down a narrow path security has cleared in the crowd. When she gets to the in-the-round stage, the lane closes up and she is trapped, surrounded by a cult of screaming fans who have been waiting months to see her perform again. She grips a single drumstick, holds it high in the air and slams it down on a tambourine, signaling the start of the show. She’s wearing that same savage sneer.

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