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.”
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.
Sonically, this impishness is tempered by the airy sweetness of her lyrics: Bubble Treasure is mainly a collection of love songs. Yet it bears more resemblance to a handmade valentine than a Hallmark card. “I just had fun doing it and I’m slowly finding a way of doing it that’s a little bit more free,” Toxe says of her creative process. “It’s more picking up on little things—things I read or stealing a sentence here and putting it together with something else from a movie—a bit more collaging it together and filling in the gaps, maybe, rather than starting on a blank page.”
One of the strengths of this bite-sized album—just 10 tracks that, taken together, clock in at under 23 minutes—is its tinkly, unified sound, built on piano, some strings, and percussion. “I don’t like putting out something that feels vague. I want it to feel like a bold and clear thought or idea,” says Toxe. “But I think the vibe is quite mystical or something with this album.” She likens its sensibility to “a pirate or a seafarer traveling the seas in search of this thing that will solve everything”—whether it’s “beautiful treasure or gold or money or whatever it is”—and ultimately finding only a chest full of bubbles. “It’s kind of a painful journey, maybe, but it’s a beautiful ending, I think,” she says. (Toxe points to her boyfriend’s roots in Key West, Florida, as a basis for the album’s “tropical-gothic style.”)
The album opens with the atmospheric “Awe,” in which Toxe sings of “the edge of beyond.” It’s followed by “Bubble Treasure,” which has a more insistent beat, somewhat mimicking the peal of falling water. Drip-drops then transform into trills on the third track, “Boo,” while the tempo of “Wishing Well” calls to mind a tide’s ebb and flow. There are a few instrumentals; “Cranberry Glass” made this listener imagine that Tinker Bell had turned into a mermaid.
Asked to describe her sound, Toxe demurs, offering: “It’s a mix of wanting to make pop music, but also not really being able to. I love making scores…so it’s quite narrative-driven. [My music] doesn’t really have a classic pop structure; sometimes it feels more like a scene that just keeps evolving. I think it has a little bit of a cinematic layer to it because I love working with textures and the ambience and stuff in the back of the song.” But even with those qualities, Toxe’s music is “pretty sincere,” she says. “I’m not really putting on a character.”
When it comes to clothes and style, the artist says that she tries “to just focus on having nice materials that feel good on my body and being comfortable,” though she has “always cared a lot about fashion and the craft of fashion.” (Just last week, Toxe was spotted wearing the conceptual label Bless.)
Fashion seems to be loving the sound of Toxe as well. Tracks from Bubble Treasure, which was released today, played right before the models started walking at the spring 2027 Cos show in New York. Acne Studios used Toxe’s music for their spring 2018 womenswear show, and it was on the speakers at Christian Dior in 2023. All of these requests came to Toxe from the brands. “I’m really happy that it’s happened,” she says, “that people have been drawn to my music. I do everything myself, so it’s very much my world that I’m putting out.”
