At the end of last year, an interviewer asked Tove Styrke what made her stand out from other young women breaking into the pop scene. The question, quite rightly, exasperated her. "Why should I compete with other young women in the pop scene?" she asked, incredulous.
When she sits down with Gigwise almost six months later, she's still having to deal with the assumption that there's a finite amount of space for women in music.
"I think it's such a funny idea," she muses. "Like, why? The music community in Sweden is tight, people are collaborating, helping each other out and all of these women are doing the same thing and it's such a healthy thing. It helps us move forward and achieve things. I really can't understand the idea of competing against somebody just because you're sort of, a little bit, alike."
It might seem like a surprising sentiment coming from someone who first made their name on a televised singing competition - but she would disagree. "Its really hard to talk about music and a thing like Swedish Idol at the same time," she says, "because they have nothing to do with each other. A competition like that, on TV, that's entertainment, that's a popularity competition... and afterwards, that's when you start making music."
Watch a clip from Tove Styrke's Gigwise interview above
And almost immediately after finishing Swedish Idol, that's exactly what she did. In 2009, at the age of 17, Styrke released her self-titled debut album. It wasn't until five years on though, when the brilliant single 'Borderline' made waves worldwide, that Styrke became confident in her own songwriting abilities. "I feel like I've managed to reach another level when it comes to lyric writing," she explains. "It's one thing to write a lyric that sounds nice and rhymes, and it's a very different thing to write a lyric that comes from a real place. Actually revealing something about yourself, that can be quite scary, but that's something that I've done on this record."
Not only does Styrke reveal herself through her lyrics though, she also reveals the inequalities of a consistently unjust society. 'Borderline', for example, is about smashing the patriarchy. "It's about breaking free from the norms and the standards of society, what you've been taught to be throughout your life, breaking free from that - or waking up from that. My initial idea was to describe the patriarchy as The Matrix, something that is not real and that you can wake up from."
What exactly are the standards of society with which she's had to battle? "Everything... People always expect me to be pretty, and want to be pretty and beautiful, and want to be called beautiful. It's not very nice when people comment on my looks. Often I've been in meetings where people have talked about me in the third person, which is not very polite, and they would never do that to a guy who were in my position. Never. People assume that I can't make decisions for myself... People expect so much less of me because I'm a women."
We suspect that, with the release of her second album Kiddo, low expectations will be one thing Tove Styrke won't have to battle with any longer.
