The Afterparty, Lykke Li
Theo Lindquist
Shooting an album campaign on a phone, and what beauty is when machines make art.
Director Theo Lindquist on Lykke Li's Afterparty
Theo Lindquist did not make a music video for Lykke Li’s new album. He made a world. Afterparty arrived as a slow drip of fragments across Instagram: a man fighting an invisible wind while smoking a vape, a woman drunkenly dancing her way onto a train, a group of people throwing one another over an impossibly high wall.
WITH THEO LINDQUIST AND PABLO DUNKERLY
Let’s start with the name. Is Afterparty something you came up with, or did Lykke arrive with it?
It came from Lykke. We brainstormed names together, and both kept coming back to that one. It captured something we’d both been feeling for the last couple of years. Ukraine, Gaza, economic inequality. A steady erosion since COVID. The rise of AI and things feeling harder, with less security and a sense that the future can no longer be mapped out. The analogy she used was that we’d been at the party for the last few decades. Everyone dancing, everyone having fun. Now we’ve moved on to the afterparty. Everyone’s a little wasted, a little about to pass out, but some people just don’t want to go home so they keep on dancing. That’s where we’re at now. The very end, the afterparty. Once we landed on that image, everything else fell into place.
It’s interesting because she’s not naming it the apocalypse.
Right. The album isn’t a political statement. It’s a feeling, and it’s treating it with humor. Lykke’s work tends to be received as sincere, emotional, tragic. But the lyrics on this album and others are quite often dryly funny. She’s a wickedly funny person. It’s making the best of a bad situation. Finding grace inside the storm.
One thing that surprises a lot of people is that you went toward memes. A lot of filmmakers would have run the other way. How did you approach meme culture as a research process? I’ll be honest, when I’ve had to research memes for projects, I find it exhausting even though I consume the stuff myself.
Originally I actually selfishly wanted to make a traditional music video. Not because I think it’s the best format, but because it would have been fun as a reaction to what we did with Lykke last time, which was also short looping videos. That was five years ago, and the idea for it came a couple of years before that, so I’d been thinking and wanting to use short content, or meme shaped pieces, for a long time. Memes are just a more metaphorical, narrative version of what we’d done together previously. They are also funny so this lent itself perfectly to the tone of the album. Lykke and I had also been passing memes between each other throughout the research phase, going “this is kind of related, this is kind of Afterparty.” So that fed it. But we also researched artworks and films.
Like what films?
Late 60s, early 70s revolutionary cinema was a big influence, as everything seemed to be crumbling and people revolting. Costa-Gavras’s ‘Z’, Sidney Lumet’s ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ was especially inspiring, because the story is about failed plans turning into something else. The heist goes wrong, the guy gets stuck in the bank, and instead of panicking he ends up in this strange communion with the hostages. Lykke loves ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by Godard. That spirit fed the whole project. What happens when things fall apart? What attitude do you take? The album takes the attitude of finding the humor in it. I think that’s our natural disposition also. Rising above the circumstances, even though everything is collapsing around you.
It’s like a fight against desperation.
Yeah. The wind video is a good example. A guy in a literal hurricane of debris, things flying at him, everything has gone to hell. But he embraces it. He lights a vape and just sits there and enjoys it for a second. The chaos doesn’t go away. He just chooses to take another stance inside it. Same with the train film. Someone who’s really drunk beyond the point of walking is trying to make it to their train, and instead of crawling they turn it into a sort of performance, dance. They find a kind of joy in the situation. That’s the album’s essence in a visual form.
Lykke isn’t featuring in multiple pieces of the campaign. Was that her decision, or did it emergeduring ideation?
She’s in some of the work, but not the central videos, and the reason was to expand the world beyond her. To make it feel collective. Not just about Lykke being in this situation but about everyone being in it. And if you think about meme culture, the videos would have read as staged if she were in them. Imagine one of these videos appears in your feed, but you recognize her. You instantly read it as another pop star trying to get attention. We didn’t want that. We wanted people to find Lykke through the art and music. The opposite of the usual celebrity flashing.
Lykke and yourself feel like strong creative partners.
Totally. Lykke and I talk for hours about everything surrounding the project and then I go away and work through every idea with Scott Normand, my co-writer. He’s a philosopher, which sounds pretentious but is invaluable for this kind of work because the project required first principles thinking, not referencebased thinking. Once we’ve ideated on and deeply mined her material, we compile our thinking and run it all by her. She then iterates on it with us toward the final result. It’s a lot of fun. Lykke has a great eye and good instincts. We’re usually in line already, which makes it fun to keep working together.
Let’s talk about the iPhone. You shot the whole thing on iPhone, no lighting, no traditional gear. Was that the plan from the start?
It was the plan, and it was scary. I’ve been working in visual mediums my whole career. I’m comfortable with all the tools. I know how to make something average look good through lighting, the right camera setup, etc. That’s my safe zone. With the iPhone, we wanted to strip all of that away. No tricks. Pick up the phone, push record. The only effect we allowed ourselves was to zoom in and out. The fantastic cinematography duo Persona worked on this with us and felt that same fear and excitement about the challenge. They ultimately embraced the chaos and nailed it in my opinion.
Were there actual disadvantages to shooting on iPhone, beyond the data wrangling?
Honestly, it’s almost too easy. The hard part isn’t technical, it’s psychological. You can’t hide. If the idea is weak, the work is weak. The whole pressure shifts to the concept and the performance. We didn’t know if we would pull it off, and I think some people had a few doubts throughout the making. But Lykke, myself, and her team had built a trust by then so they were willing to take a risk and find out.
There’s a strange flip happening now with AI. People reject AI imagery, but they also misread real footage as AI. That’s happened with a lot of the Lykke videos, hasn’t it?
Constantly. Plenty of people in the comments called these AI slop. “You can tell from the bin bags” or whatever. But it’s not AI, none of it. It was filmed on a phone. And what’s also funny is that the red room Carousel piece we did five years ago, completely shot in camera with a forty-eight-camera bullet time rig, real bodies, real work, all of it. When it came out, everyone was amazed. Someone recently reposted that piece on another account and what was amazing was the comments, which said “another AI slop, AI... yawn.” And so on. People rejected it for being something it isn’t. What that tells me is that the product isn’t what matters anymore. It’s how it was made.
„We’re rejecting machines making art, even when they didn’t make it. It’s a fascinating time to be an artist and it’s forcing us to question the value of everything.”
Let’s talk about Berlin. Was that decisiontied to your feature scouting, or did itcome up later for Afterparty?
Exactly that, I was already in Berlin scouting for the feature, and I fell in love with the city visually. The grayness. The countercultural energy. The sense of things crumbling a little at the edges. Less so than in the past, but still more than other cities. So I proposed it to Lykke. She liked the idea. Berlin has carried a countercultural pulse for fifty years. You can’t fabricate that.
Beyond the films, you creative direct for Lykke and the stills and art direction has its own uniqueworld. How did that come together?
For the stills, we worked with Chloe Le Drezen, who’s a previous collaborator of Lykke’s. A great film photographer. She gave us a counterbalance to the iPhone work. Something with a higher level of detail and texture. Mixing the two formats felt right to me because iPhone all the time might have felt a little visually exhausting. Lykke also wanted her personal imagery shot in a way that was softer and more flattering, so Chloe felt right for that too. Then we had the chance to work with Brent David Freaney and his amazing team at Special Offer on the art direction and all the various layouts. They tried everything. Took the images of Lykke, re-photographed them, layered Monty’s text on separate pieces of vinyl and plastic. Came back with some great results we all loved.
There’s a funny anecdote on the format question. When you came in to pitch Afterparty, the labeltold you the music video was dead. Which was, in fact, citing your own pitch from five years earlier.
Yes, I went in to propose doing a traditional long-form music video for nostalgic reasons. The label said: no, the music video is dead, we don’t want one. They were citing back to me an argument I had made to them on the previous album pitch, before anyone had been doing that. I found it pretty funny. The team there had absorbed the idea so thoroughly they refused on my behalf. The thing is, the audience is consistently ahead of the industry. When we first made short looped pieces five years ago, there was no name for them. But people were already consuming them via social media. People in the industry kept asking: what is this, exactly? Festivals wouldn’t have a category for them. Five years later, the industry coined “visualizer.” The industry is slow to adapt because everyone’s locked into roles that protect themselves within a system.
“With the iPhone, we wanted to strip all the usualtricks and gimmicks away. Just push record.”
Artist: Lykke Li
Director & Creative Director: Theo Lindquist
Production Company: Anorak Film, Common Artists
EP, Producer: Zane Kalniņa
EP: Felix Knabel
Producer: Philmo Haucke
Production Coordinator: Ilaria Rizzo
Second Unit Director: Pablo Dunkerly
Artist in Collaboration: Monty Richthofen
Writer: Scott Normand
DOP: Persona
Photographer: Chloé Le Drezen
Assistant Photographer: Pauli Beutel
Gaffer: Sina Blume
Choreographers: Imre Van Opstal & Marne Van Opstal
Talent
Metro Dancer: Imre van Opstal
Dancer: Darrion Gallegos
Wind Dancer: Shaked Heller
Rain Dancer: Aishwarya Raut
Rain Dancer: Luca Tessarini
Wall Acrobat: André Augustus
Wall Acrobat: Léann Gingras
Wall Acrobat: Hamish McCourty
Wall Acrobat: Georgia Webb
Runaway Bride Dancer: Jaan Männima
River Float Talent: Muriel Seiquer
Props Master: Josche Allwardt
SFX: Bernd Wildau
Stylist for Lykke Li: Naomi Itkes
Stylist Assistant: Matti Hoffner
Stylists: Evangelina Julia, Muriel Seiquer
Make Up Artist: Jana Kalgajeva Halpin
Make Up Assistant: Eleonore Ising
Hair Stylist for Lykke Li: Ali Pirzadeh
Hair Stylist: Anna Neugebauer
Production Assistants: Anna Mengels, Frank Ebermann, Henryk Cielinsky, Michael Klaus
VFX: Stray London
Creative Director: Tom Luff
Compositor: Giacomo Verri
EP: Misha Stanford-Harris:
VFX Producer: Max Castang
Color House: Ethos Studio
Colorist: Dante Pasquinelli
Color Producer: Nat Tereshchenko
Special Thanks to: Brendan Walter, Christoph Petzenhauser, Spencer Smith, Crush Music