Icona Pop

A party in Stockholm, February 2009

Aino Jawo and Caroline Hjelt met by chance at a party in Stockholm in February 2009. Four weeks later they had written enough material to play their first show together. The duo signed to TEN Music Group that same year and has never expanded beyond the two of them. Jawo was born on 7 July 1986, Hjelt on 8 November 1987.

Their self-titled debut arrived on 14 November 2012 and peaked at number 55 in Sweden — a slight commercial result for a record that happened to contain the song that would carry them out of the country.

The song that travelled

"I Love It", written with and featuring Charli XCX, reached number one on the UK singles chart and number seven on the US Billboard Hot 100. It has been certified five-times platinum by the RIAA and seven-times platinum in Australia. Placement did much of the work: the track turned up in Girls, in The Vampire Diaries and in the video game Need for Speed: Most Wanted, which is how a Swedish duo on an indie label ended up with a song that most people could hum without knowing whose it was.

The follow-up, This Is... Icona Pop, was released on 20 September 2013 and reached number 36 on the Billboard 200. "All Night" went to number 31 in the UK and "Girlfriend" to number 27 in Austria. In 2014 they opened for both Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus, which put them in front of arena crowds roughly two years after their first album had stalled outside the Swedish top 50.

"Emergency", in 2015, peaked at number 19 in Sweden and went double platinum there. They took the Grammis award for newcomer of the year in 2013, a SESAC pop award in 2014 and a Swedish GAFFA award in 2018.

Ten years of features, then an album

What followed was a long gap in albums rather than in work. Icona Pop signed to Ultra Music in 2019 and spent much of the intervening decade as guests and collaborators — records with Tiësto, Peking Duk and R3hab, and songs across the Trolls films. They also moved into television, judging Drag Race Sverige in 2023 and appearing as judges on RuPaul's Drag Race in 2024.

Club Romantech, released on 1 September 2023, was their first album in ten years. Its lasting consequence was less the record than the room: while making it they found a studio of their own in Stockholm, which is where everything since has been built.

Ritual, and what it cost to make

Ritual is the first Icona Pop album made entirely in that Stockholm studio. Sebastian Furrer and Jason Gill led the production, with co-writing from Ines Dunn, Erik Hassle and Yaeger, and guest appearances from Tove Lo and Daya. The duo had moved back to Sweden from Los Angeles during the pandemic, and both became mothers within days of each other.

The circumstances behind the writing were bleak and are not being hidden. Jawo lost her grandmother and was recovering from the birth of her second child; she has described being "in a super bad place" a year earlier, and the problem as "trying to fit my old Aino into a new Aino". Hjelt was going through a divorce and, at Tove Lo's urging during a stretch in Los Angeles, started taking lyrics directly out of her diary. She has said the period left her with "a lot of time with myself and that was very hard, but I learned so much".

Jawo calls it "a new Icona Pop era" and has said plainly: "I don't think people understand how honest this album is." The title track frames the record around the small rituals a person uses to get back to a changed version of themselves — which is a long way from the shouted, cheerfully destructive register of the song that made them famous, even though the tempo has not dropped much.

Where they stand, autumn 2026

Ritual came out on 14 August 2026 via Ultra Records and the duo's own Iconic Sound Recordings, their fourth studio album. It was trailed across five months of singles: the title track with Daya in March, "Dance To This" in April with a video directed by Gustav Stegfors, "Butterfly Feelings" in May and "Yellow Top" in June. On release day they put out a visualiser for the focus single "Hurt", co-directed with Nicole Walker.

The touring announcement followed at the end of July 2026 — a ten-date run split across North America and Scandinavia, booked worldwide by Creative Artists Agency. The framing from the duo was about getting out of the recovery phase: "Healing requires you to slow down and reflect, but you can't work on yourself 24/7 forever. Eventually, you have to get back out into the world and see what happens." They also made the obvious point about where that happens for them: "the dance floor has always been a place where we find ourselves."

The scale is worth noting. These are club dates — Baby's All Right in Brooklyn, Lincoln Hall in Chicago, the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles — not the rooms a double-platinum catalogue would nominally command. Whether that reflects caution after a seven-year absence from some of these cities or a deliberate choice of setting, it has produced a markedly closer kind of show than the 2014 support slots.

Ten dates, mostly small rooms

The Ritual tour opened at Baby's All Right in Brooklyn on 25 September 2026, their first New York performance since 2019, and continued to Lincoln Hall in Chicago on 2 October. The Scandinavian leg runs from Pustervik in Göteborg on 23 October and Mejeriet in Lund on 24 October, through Vulkan Arena in Oslo on 30 October, Arbis Bar & Salong in Norrköping on 6 November and Berns in Stockholm on 7 November, finishing at Pumpehuset in Copenhagen on 13 November. Two further North American dates close the run: Las Vegas on 20 November and the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles on 21 November.

Festival sets through the summer were shorter and leaner. At Celestial Lundakarneval in Lund on 23 May 2026 they played from 22:05 to 23:10 — 65 minutes, 17 logged songs — opening on "Ritual" and "Butterfly Feelings" and closing on "Dance To This", with "I Love It" buried mid-set rather than saved for the end. The headline shows use the same skeleton with roughly half an hour more in it.