Tove Lo Unveils "ESTRUS" at Packed Portola 2026 Set

“A lot of feelings, no solutions” is an unusually honest way to begin a festival set. It also happens to be the title of the song Tove Lo used to open her Saturday appearance at Portola. Her music has long understood the attraction of a night out when your personal life is in disarray. The songs offer somewhere to put that mess for a few minutes, and her Pier Stage set gave both the newly released material and the older hits room to do it.

With ESTRUS only just out, this was a substantial introduction to a new chapter. The set leaned heavily on the album, working “roomie,” “I'm the cake” and “des fleurs x stromae” into a sequence that also included “Cool Girl” and “Talking Body.” That balance is worth noticing. A festival crowd can be an unforgiving audience for unfamiliar songs, especially when an artist has several hits people have been waiting all afternoon to hear. Tove Lo trusted the new record enough to make it the bulk of the show.

The connecting thread was her writing about desire in all its inconvenient forms. KQED's account of the performance caught that movement between melancholy and bawdiness, including her gleefully explicit introduction to “source of life.” She can make a sad song feel companionable without making the sadness disappear.

The older material demonstrated how durable that approach has become. “disco tits” gives her a particularly good vehicle for blunt, bodily pleasure, while “No One Dies From Love” treats romantic devastation with the scale of a pop anthem. The contrasts are built into the songs themselves. 

“Habits (Stay High)” supplied the most obvious point of recognition late in the set. Fans sang its account of post-breakup excess back to her, and the song still earns that response. Its specificity keeps it from becoming a generic invitation to party. The sequence continued through “HEAT” to “I'm your girl right?”, keeping the newer music in view even after the familiar hit had arrived.

Placed ahead of Robyn on the Pier Stage, Tove Lo helped give Saturday a strong current of Swedish pop with complicated feelings. Her performance made a solid case for the new album without treating the older songs as obligations to get through. The result was an engaging set by a writer who still knows how much can be said inside a very good chorus.

Article by: Andrew Ameter

Photos by: AJ Manalaysay, Demian Beccara, Priscilla Rodriguez, & Sabrina Poei