The dramatic and intense Swedish pop star Lykke Li has been relatively quiet lately. Back in 2020, she released “BRON,” her first-ever Swedish-language single. Since then, it’s been crickets. Today, though, Lykke Li has surprise-released a new single called “No Hotel.” It’s very pretty and very, very sad.

There’s not a whole lot of instrumentation on “No Hotel”; it’s mostly just Lykke Li’s voice and one guitar with a whole lot of sustain on it. A song like that doesn’t offer a singer any place to hide, and Lykke Li has no interest in hiding. Instead, she sings in plain and concrete terms about heartbreak: “Heartbeat half-dead, I carry blue/ With every step, I’m not over you.”

On “No Hotel,” Lykke Li’s narrator pines for an ex who’s in love with someone else, and she pleads for that ex to come back. Her voice is tremulous and wounded, and it all sounds very real. Lykke Li co-wrote and co-produced the song with Björn Yttling of Peter, Björn & John, a longtime collaborator.

UPDATE: Lykke Li has announced that “No Hotel” is the first single from EYEYE, a new album that’s set to arrive in May. Lykke Li recorded the whole LP with Björn Yttling in a Los Angeles bedroom, working without click tracks or electronic instruments, singing all her vocals into a cheap drum mic. In a press release, Lykke Li says, “I wanted the record to have the intimacy of listening to a voice memo on a macro dose of LSD.”

The LP will also have a visual component, with videos directed by Theo Lindquist, who shot all of them on 16mm film. Jeff Wilbusch, from Oslo and Unorthodox, stars alongside Lykke Li. According to a press release, these aren’t exactly music videos; they’re “visual loops.” Lykke says, “We wanted to capture the beauty and grandeur of a three-hour European arthouse movie, while making something native to modern media. The intention is to deliver the full impact of a movie in sixty seconds on a phone screen, which is where most of our emotional experiences happen now anyway.”

Below, listen to “No Hotel” and check out a trailer and the EYEYE tracklist.

TRACKLIST:
01 “No Hotel”
02 “You Don’t Go Away”
03 “Highway To Your Heart”
04 “Happy Hurts”
05 “Carousel”
06 “5D”
07 “Over”
08 “u&i”

EYEYE is out 5/20 on Play It Again Sam/Crush Music.