Who’s ready to dance? Just ahead of the release of their highly anticipated song “Heat” and EP of the same name, Out caught up with dance icons Tove Lo and SG Lewis for a candid chat about their sexy new club-ready bangers, the state of dance music today, working with Nelly Furtado on a recent single, and, of course, double-sided dildos. And “Heat” is just the beginning, as the two confirmed that more music videos are on the way.
Tove Lo and SG Lewis have proven to be a winning combination. Tove Lo shared that their collaboration felt natural from the start. “We’ve both written with a lot of different people and there’s just some where you get in the studio and it just clicks,” she said. “When we were together, it just felt so right away. We understand each other’s vision, we understand each other’s ideas.”
SG Lewis echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the fun and natural process of making music together. “It was such a natural process. That coupled with the demand from the fans that we share and our fans in the queer community that we wanted to create a project that was kind of our thank you to our fans in that community,” he said.
Their collaboration with Nelly Furtado on a recent single was a dream come true for Tove Lo. “Just meeting her face to face? I’ve been such a fan since forever,” she said. SG Lewis added, “Nelly is one of those kind of legendary artists. For me as a producer, working with her vocals, they’re just so distinctly Nelly Furtado.”
The music video for “Heat” is a sexy celebration of the queer community. Tove Lo credited director David Wilson for the idea of the double-sided dildo. “The idea is we want it to just feel like the song, we want it to be queer, sexy, sweaty, us in our element,” she said. “We sent this kind of brief out and then David came back and was like, I have to do this.”
SG Lewis emphasized the importance of creating an unfiltered celebration. “We wanted to really go the full distance and not have any voices saying, ‘oh no, this can’t go on TV, or this can’t go here.’ We just really want it to be like an unfiltered celebration,” he said.
The duo hosted a Club Heat party in London, which was a huge success. “It was honestly so amazing. We shot the video and threw the party all in one. It was a long day but it was an amazing day,” Tove Lo said. SG Lewis added, “It was really cool to see that format was really fun and the fans reacted really well to it.”
Dance music is experiencing a resurgence, and both Tove Lo and SG Lewis have thoughts on this trend. Tove Lo noted that the pandemic played a role in this resurgence. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the pandemic, I learned how to DJ with a lot of my girlfriends. We clearly were missing the space,” she said.
SG Lewis added, “People are searching for escapism in the music that they listen to. I feel like dance music creates a lot of those spaces and opportunities for people to have moments of celebration in an otherwise kind of scary landscape.”
Both artists believe that dance music and pop music are closely related. “My favorite type of music, full stop, is that magic space in the middle,” SG Lewis said. Tove Lo agreed, adding, “I love a sad banger where the lyrics can be sad but the musicality, there’s just like a bit of hopefulness.”
SG Lewis recently launched a new label, Forever Days, to release dance music that wouldn’t exist on full-length albums. “I wanted the label to be a place where every decision could be made without ambition and only with the kind of mindset of ‘OK, how is this gonna work on a dance floor?'” he said.
Tove Lo‘s marriage has also influenced her music. “I feel like that kind of then played into my like, ‘Oh my God, am I doing all the steps now that I never wanted to do? Like, what am I?'” she said. “It kind of gave me a bit of a little bit of an identity crisis when I was writing Dirt Femme.”
Tove Lo and SG Lewis‘ Heat EP is out now. Listen to it wherever you stream music.
