With Bubble Treasure, her first album in English, Swedish songbird Toxe (pronounced tox-uh) brings breathy dream pop into a magical underwater realm.
Toxe, real name Tove Agélii, was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1997. Growing up, she listened to artists like JJ from local label Sincerely Yours, but drawing was her main creative outlet. Then, at 14, she attended a band camp, after which her brother gave her the software she still uses to make music today. As a teenager, Toxe says, “I kind of just fell into [music]. I was in high school, so it was just immediately a fun way to DJ and perform, and I got to travel.”
At 18, she moved to Berlin and studied art and architecture. It was 2015 and Yung Lean and Drain Gang were on the rise. “I think in the beginning, I was very much listening to indie and rock, and then I became more interested in electronic music, dance music, and French music,” she says, citing Bala Club, an electronic collective out of London. “It was an exciting time.”
Why Berlin? “I had a lot of online friends that I met on Tumblr or on SoundCloud and a lot of them were in Berlin for some reason,” she says. “At that time, it was kind of just a fun and also very cheap place to live.”
Photo: Igor Pjörrt / Courtesy of Toxe
That year, Toxe released the EP Muscle Memory; her first album, Toxe2, came out in 2024. Though she describes herself as feeling a bit hesitant at the time, you’d never know it from the single “Som en Sol,” nor from its spicy video in which the artist fights her alter ego in the snow.
A petite blonde, Toxe says she identifies with the Tove Jansson character Little My, who is described as being “small but fierce.” You get a sense of that mischievousness in the new video for her song “A Girl Who Needs a Brain,” in which Toxe licks a tree and eats grass.
