Following a run of standalone singles that hinted at a darker, more volatile direction, Swedish artist Ellen Benediktson returns with WID4L, a five-track sophomore EP out now via Icons Creating Evil Art.
If her earlier work often circled clarity and control, WID4L is built on the opposite impulse, emotional action without restraint, and the uneasy awareness that comes with it.
Rather than framing self-destruction or impulsivity as problems to resolve, WID4L sits inside them. Across its five tracks, Benediktson sketches a psychological loop, obsession that knows it is irrational, jealousy that can be named even as it takes hold, and a kind of self-awareness that arrives too late to change anything. The record does not present these states as turning points. It treats them as a condition.
Musically, the EP continues in the lane of indie and electro-pop, but there is a sharper edge to its construction. Where her 2022 debut Good Girl established a clearer pop architecture, WID4L feels more unstable by design, melodies that tighten rather than resolve, production that holds tension instead of releasing it. The result is less about catharsis than suspension.
Visually, that tension is translated into a single dominant motif, red. Not as styling, but as residue. Across artwork and imagery, red appears less like an aesthetic choice and more like something physical that lingers on skin and refuses to wash away.
The imagery is high-fashion and slightly gothic, beautiful in a way that makes you a little uneasy. Benediktson adds “A warning that pulls you in. I wanted the red on my hands to feel corporeal, like the emotions just spill out and can’t be washed away.
The idea was: ‘what if I just smeared myself in a ton of red goo?’ — like all the emotions had left my body and turned into something physical. It’s both beautiful and kind of creepy.”
That idea reaches its most exaggerated form in the cover concept, which Benediktson has described as a self-portrait of emotional excess pushed into physical metaphor. The image suggests not expression but aftermath, feelings not processed but spilled.
At the centre of the EP sits Only Lovers, a track that distills the project’s central contradiction. Its verses are close and controlled, almost claustrophobic, before opening into a chorus that briefly tips into euphoria. But even that release is unstable. The song frames intense romantic attachment as something that might be destructive by definition, pain not as collateral but as proof of authenticity.
“Only Lovers is about chasing a love that’s too intense to survive, where the pain becomes proof that it was real. I’ve romanticised falling apart for love — and have fallen apart.”
It is a theme that runs consistently through Benediktson’s writing, the idea that emotional collapse can be mistaken for emotional truth. In Only Lovers, that confusion is not corrected, it is observed and, in some sense, accepted.
Benediktson’s artistic instincts have long been shaped by performers who treat pop music as both sound and persona, Lady Gaga, Hayley Williams, and Miley Cyrus among them. That influence is less about imitation than permission, the idea that emotional intensity and visual boldness can sit at the centre of pop rather than its edges.
Her first major public breakthrough came through Eurovision Song Contest at 18, where she reached the final with “Songbird” before returning twice more to the competition. Those appearances established her early presence, but stepping away from that framework led to Good Girl, a debut that clarified her emotional directness in a more structured pop form.
With WID4L, that structure loosens. The songs do not abandon pop entirely, but they push against its instinct for resolution. Instead, the EP lingers in what happens when clarity arrives too late to matter, when you can see exactly what you are doing and still do it anyway.
Listen below:
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