Toxe – Bubble Treasure
Swedish experimental music pioneer Toxe has just released her sophomore album, Bubble Treasure, alongside an accompanying self-directed music video for “Bubble Treasure”.
Arriving as the follow-up to her 2024 debut Toxe2, Bubble Treasure was recorded while between Paris and New York, marking her first album sung entirely in English.
The album grew out of Toxe’s live performances, where she reworked older songs with baroque flourishes—including harpsichord, piano, and plucked guitar—layered into her familiar electronic palette. On “In Awe”, we hear xylophone and timpani, while twinkles of piano, wind chimes, and strings bejewel the tracklist – yet the synths of “Elegant & Dead” and 808s of “Wishing Well” are a reminder of the music’s digital origins. These ten tracks have a shimmering, fleeting quality, as if bubbling up from Toxe’s mind as fully formed pop experiments only to disappear abruptly. Each song hones in on moments of peace before disaster, “A Girl Who Needs a Brain” is written from the perspective of a zombie clinging to her last romantic thoughts, and “In Awe” from the perspective of a comet approaching Earth. With Bubble Treasure, Toxe finds beauty in the tranquility of letting go, once again finding the balance between harsh and serene that has shaped her work from the beginning.
Toxe has made a name for herself as a multi-disciplinary artist with idiosyncratic taste, heard on her genre-bending NTS show, FF Radio, as a globally touring DJ and her playful remixes, most recently Smerz’s Street Style (Toxe EDIT). Her holistic approach to music means she is equally at home playing Panorama Bar as soundtracking runway shows (Dior, Burberry, Kenzo, Acne, Celine, Lucila Safdie), her songs finding their way into DJ sets from veteran experimentalists like Aphex Twin and Björk as well as her own Boiler Room. Toxe’s background studying architecture and design is felt in her attention to texture, which gives her music a tactile feel, like how “Muscle Memory’s” hard, industrial kicks let melodies flutter like debris around them and “Blinks’” ornate synths distort and stretch like digital putty. There is an emotional sincerity that runs through her work, heard in her wistful melodies and wide-eyed experimentation, which she channeled into the left-field pop songs of Toxe2. The music videos for the earwormy single “Som En Sol” and self-directed “Pillow Fight” further felt like glimpses into Toxe’s vivid world-building.
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