Lykke Li - Hammersmith Apollo, London 13/11/14

What’s striking is the lighting, or rather, the lack of it; it’s certainly the least flashy display for any major pop gig I’ve seen in as far as my memory stretches back. It’s a less is more approach Li has taken not just with her music of late, but with her overall aesthetic - darkness prevails, light shining only through cracks, being all the more brilliant in its brightness when it does.

The stage, bathed as it is in gloom, is an early statement that if Li is going to play the game at all, it certainly won’t be with a straight bat. Tonight is an exercise in re-contextualising her work, and indeed that of others – a slightly ill advised, decidedly more downbeat take on Drake’s “Hold On We’re Going Home” may be right at home in the Radio 1 Live Lounge, but sounds like a frivolity in a set that’s otherwise characterised by its startlingly imposing nature.

The Swede seems so consumed by the sound she concocted on her latest album I Never Learn that its bleakness infects all songs in the set, no matter what record from which they originate. And, credit to her artistic bravery, it works – even when hearing a tune as playful as early wonder “Little Bit” dressed up as the brooding beast that stands before tonight, you suspect that you could love this much bolder, scolded version just as much as the original given time.

Though she spends much of her time sauntering in an out of the shadows in a long black cloak - as if pondering whether the ratio of eye of newt to bat wing in the musical broth mightn’t be a little off - it isn’t all doom and gloom. Sometimes, as on the stunning “Love Me Like I’m Not Made Of Stone”, it’s just gloom, with Li preceding the song by telling us how she’s recently, after seven years of being on tour, started to develop stage fright (perhaps going some way to explaining the presence of the constant, blurry fog on stage). At others, such as her duet with the evening’s support act Eliot Sumner on “Get Some”, it’s straight up, thinking-person’s pop fun. But again, it’s another case of light shining brighter because of the darkness around it.

Such a success is that pairing that one starts to wonder whether Li, with her newly developed stage fright, might function better with a foil. It’s a hypothesis that is blown out of the water by a closing “Heart Of Steel”, on which she dances not as if nobody’s watching, but as if they should all be on the stage dancing with her. Hers is a darkness, sure, but it’s one that invites you in, rather than leaving you in the cold.