One to watch: Tove Lo

It's safe to say that Swedish pop star in waiting Tove Lo has always had a dark imagination. "When I was 10 years old, I wrote this short story," she says, and as you envisage princesses and castles, she adds: "It was about a detective who found a body cut up from the vagina to the head… there was witchcraft and voodoo involved too."

"Don't worry," she adds, no doubt catching your correspondent backing away slowly. "I think I'm probably just curious about mental people!"

Such curiosity is at least put to good use in Lo's music, hook-packed, electronic pop songs with a tendency to home in on the more deranged side of love: the obsessions, the tantrums, the giddy feelings that make people behave in volatile ways.

One standout track, Not on Drugs, is a perfect example of this: it compares falling in love to being out of your mind on drugs, a contrast with her other favoured narrative, that of having to take lots of drugs to get over being dumped.

"Whether it's adrenaline junkies, or actual junkies, everyone is chasing a high," she says. "Love is the ultimate high and it can be just as dangerous; it can get you to do pretty much anything."

Lo may only be 26, but she's spent a lot of that time honing her craft. She attended the "daunting" Rytmus music school in Stockholm as a teenager and passed through her fair share of grotty rock venues as vocalist in, somewhat improbably, a local maths-rock group ("the music was terrible, but I had a crush on the guitar player").

Lo was also busy writing her own music and through contacts made at a release party for her friends Icona Pop, she eventually found herself being packed off to LA for songwriting sessions. Being taxied from one potential collaborator to the next was another daunting process she likens to "crazy speed-dating – you're supposed to find this chemistry and write something great and personal, but when it doesn't work you just want to run away. And quite often that's what I did!"

Although she's now written for several artists, from Cher Lloyd to Girls Aloud, Lo says her "dream" will be properly realised with the release of her debut solo album later this year. Although still untitled, it does have a rough storyline based around three chapters: the sex, the love and the pain. It's also likely to carry on down the lyrically frank path of this year's Truth Serum EP, in which lead single Habits described Lo bingeing on food, alcohol and men in an attempt to blot out a failed relationship.

Lo has described Habits as her most honest song, so I put her to a quick honesty test. Has she ever, as the lyrics say, visited sex clubs?

"Er, I can't talk about that… er, OK, yeah, but only once!"

Thrown up in a bath?

"Yes!"

Picked up daddies in the playground?

"Umm… ok, maybe not in the playground," she says, looking like she'd quite like the honesty test to end.

Habits features a provocative video in which Lo enacts the lyrical tale of a desperate four-day bender. Was it fun to film?

"It was actually really hard," she protests. "Day one was fun, and I'm always like, 'Don't release the unseen footage because there's a lot of shit on there that can't be seen!' But after four days filming, my friends had spent so long getting drunk and making out with each other that we were all tired and sick of it."

Lo says a song can never be too truthful, but being so forthright can cause problems. Her parents, both academics without a musical bone between them, have found her racier songs somewhat difficult to process.

"They've been worried," she says. "They don't watch the videos, they stay away from the lyrics, and my dad has not said one thing about my tattoos!"

Would they sooner she went into academia?

"They wanted me to have a proper job, something that was stable and would make lots of money," she says, with a mischievous cackle, "but I'm all grown up now, so they can't really say anything!"

Truth Serum EP is out now