Most people see an open call on Instagram, think about it for a second, then keep scrolling. googly eyes sent 50 songs.
That was September 2023, when Tove Lo and Flume posted an artist development call asking new artists for demos. The Houston songwriter has said she was “immediately elated” when it landed on her feed. She fired off 40 to 50 tracks with a line attached that carries more nerve than most cover letters: “I’m confident you won’t hear anything like this.”
Three years on, the receipt is Pandora’s Box, out Friday, 18 September 2026 on Neon Gold, Futures, and Virgin, with a music video directed by Maya Sassoon. Nine days after that she plays her first festival, on the Sunday of All Things Go at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland.
From Singapore, It’s a Streaming Link
Here’s the part that decides whether any of this is your problem. No Asian dates have been announced, so from here the entire relationship runs through a streaming link on Friday, and that’s the whole of it. There’s no S$ figure to quote, because there’s no room in Singapore to buy a ticket to.
The only ticket going is a Sunday pass to Merriweather at US$149 before fees, gates at 11am, a number that means something to you only if you were flying anyway. That’s not a consolation prize, though. It’s how most of the artists on a Spotify Wrapped list reach Singapore ears in the first place, years before they surface on a quarter’s gig calendar. Get in now and you’ve earned the right to be insufferable about it later.
Five Years Writing Other People’s Songs
Before the open call she was a songwriter for hire in Los Angeles, classically trained, building her own demos after hours. She has said she hadn’t sat in an artist session with anybody else in roughly five years by the time she walked into a room with Tove Lo and Flume. That first session produced Feel Like I Died.
Read the gap again, because it’s the part nobody puts on a poster. Five years of making other people sound more like themselves, with her own name set in small type on a credits page. Wanting out of that is the most relatable thing in this story, more than either co-sign.
By her account, the 2023 call pulled in thousands of demos. She had spent time working under a different artist identity before rebuilding the project as googly eyes, which is a gentler way of saying the overnight success took about a decade.
The lyric sheet for 5 More Minutes is those Los Angeles years written down. She sits on the 405 wondering “how in hell that hell didn’t change my mind”, tallies what she would surrender in “old Hollywood’s value proposition”, then begs for five more minutes because “I’m not finished”. Anyone who has stayed too long in a job they were good at will recognise the bargaining.
Pandora’s Box Is a Question
Line up her lyric sheets and one subject keeps returning: wanting it badly, and what the wanting costs. Internet Star has her studying other people’s dreams and deciding “those must be mine”, on the logic that “if everyone wants it, maybe so do I”. She ends it grabbing the reins back.
Pandora’s Box is that same appetite with the mask off. “Global phenomenon is all I want,” she sings, and then, in the next breath, “How much can you take of me?” The sharpest line on the sheet is the one she keeps circling back to: “Get a girl a record and she never gets over it.”
The verse that lands hardest is the life she turns down. If she didn’t want what she wants, she’d “be long gone, with my man in the woods, with a house, with a dog”. Instead she makes herself a martyr and watches “the figs drop like Sylvia”, which is Sylvia Plath’s fig tree from The Bell Jar, every possible life rotting on the branch because you only get to pick one. That’s a heavy piece of reading to fold into a pop chorus, and it holds.
Her own framing is plainer. “If I opened Pandora’s Box, it was a long time ago. Making music your job is so beyond dreamy, but it of course comes with its own unique set of pain points.” Then comes the bit that will end up screenshotted: “What happens if I get what I want? What will it unleash into my own little world? Is it worth it?”
Putting that out nine days before the biggest stage of your life is a strange, brave move, and the song lands harder for it.
Tove Lo’s Label Signed Her First
The self-made part is not a press line. Her 2024 debut Starlet EP, the one that carried Mid-Leap, Internet Star, and Waste of Conversation, was written, recorded, and produced entirely by her, down to the vocal production. She calls that world glitchy and technicolour, and the songs back it up: raw human edges bolted onto angular synthetic ones.
Starlet came out on Pretty Swede Records, the independent label Tove Lo founded in 2022, and it was the first thing Pretty Swede released that wasn’t Tove’s own music. Until then the catalogue ran to her 2023 album Dirt Femme and the 2024 HEAT EP with SG Lewis. Handing your label’s first outside release to a stranger from an Instagram inbox is a real vote of confidence, and it’s the detail that makes the fairy tale check out.
Pretty Swede signed her alongside Neon Gold, the label that put out Tove Lo’s own Truth Serum EP in 2014, the one with “Habits” on it, plus early records from Charli XCX, MARINA & The Diamonds, Christine and the Queens, and Ellie Goulding. Virgin sits in the credits too, and Virgin is a Universal imprint, so the artist who did everything herself now has major-label weight behind the rollout. Both things are true at once.
The EP That Made People Look
Her five-song EP paint me like one of your fav american girls arrived on 13 March 2026, co-written with Tove Lo and Flume across the whole tracklist. Staged Haze credited it with both “massive sonic moments” and “intimate lyrical ones”, while Out Jamz called it “a combination of storytelling, synth pop beats and raw weird energy”. The consensus, broadly: crying in the club, produced properly.
The rest of the songbook proves she has more than one gear. Bruises on the Peach is a devotional thing that drinks “the sweetness down to the peach pit” and stays anyway, while Made Of squares up and dares you: “Come hit me, come hit me hard, find out what I’m made of.” Two more collaborative tracks, Made Of and I Don’t Go Out, are already out ahead of a full joint EP with Tove Lo and Flume.
She spent spring on the road with Ashnikko, which tells you exactly what kind of room she’s built for. High volume, high theatre, a crowd that turns up early and knows the words to songs that aren’t the singles.
Sunday at Merriweather, 11am Gates
All Things Go runs Friday 25 to Sunday 27 September 2026 at Merriweather Post Pavilion, with 46 to 49 acts across two stages. Passes start at US$149 for a single day and US$349 for all three, before fees, and gates open at 11am.
The festival built its name on women and LGBTQ+ artists, and the 2026 bill holds the line: Mitski, Hayley Williams, MUNA, Zara Larsson, and Ethel Cain across the weekend. Sunday’s top line reads Brandi Carlile, Wolf Alice, Lola Young, Tinashe, and Father John Misty, with Remi Wolf and Sierra Ferrell on the same day.
googly eyes sits well below all of them, in the afternoon cluster of newer names with CMAT, Jensen McRae, Ryan Beatty, Tiny Habits, and Violet Grohl. That’s the undercard, and the undercard is the reason to buy a Sunday ticket instead of drifting in at dinnertime. CMAT is one of the funniest performers working a festival stage, Jensen McRae will quietly gut an amphitheatre that holds around 19,000 people, and googly eyes is the one nobody in that field has watched do this yet.
Turn up at 11am or miss the part of the bill that will be headlining in three years.
Three Rooms With EMEI in October
After the festival she joins EMEI for three dates: Varsity Theater in Minneapolis on Saturday 10 October, Thalia Hall in Chicago on Sunday 11 October, and Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on Tuesday 13 October.
Theatres, not arenas, and that’s the point. An artist on this trajectory plays rooms that size once, and the people standing in them spend the next two years telling everyone they were there.
🗓️ Date: Sunday, 27 September 2026, All Things Go Festival
⏰ Time: Gates from 11am
📍 Location: Merriweather Post Pavilion, Columbia, Maryland
🎟️ Tickets: Single-day passes from US$149, three-day passes from US$349, before fees
🎵 Single release: Friday, 18 September 2026
🎧 Labels: Neon Gold, Futures, and Virgin, with Pretty Swede Records behind her earlier work
🎬 Music video: Directed by Maya Sassoon
🎤 October dates: Varsity Theater Minneapolis (10 October), Thalia Hall Chicago (11 October), Danforth Music Hall Toronto (13 October), all with EMEI
🇸🇬 From Singapore: No Asian dates announced, streaming only for now
Pandora’s Box lands on 18 September, so set the reminder now rather than catching it three weeks late in somebody’s festival recap. Stream it through Neon Gold the day it drops, then keep watching googly eyes’ own channels for the Maya Sassoon video and whatever she does with her first festival crowd on 27 September.
Photos and visuals courtesy of Anthony Yebra, Sophia Schrank, Philip Handeland, Talia Stewart, and @aj.incam for googly eyes.
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