Pretty Swede Records / Virgin Music Group
Released back in June, “des fleurs,” the duet between Belgian star Stromae and Swedish pop artist Tove Lo, is still gaining ground on French radio. The track has spent several recent weeks on the SNEP radio chart, proof that a feature released more than four months ago can still climb once it catches on.
A connection going back to Coachella 2015
The story behind “des fleurs” goes back a decade. Tove Lo has said she first discovered Stromae’s world watching him perform at Coachella in 2015, the year “Papaoutai” and “Tous les mêmes” were touring the globe. The two stayed in touch over the years, but distance — him in Belgium, her in Sweden and later the US — made an actual collaboration hard to pull off for a long time.
The breakthrough came from a demo Stromae sent in 2022: a piano piece with a murmured choir that Tove Lo called “a beautiful piece of piano music.” She recorded her vocal on a portable setup, then, once the song was slotted into her album, asked him to add a French verse. He said yes.
A quiet year for Stromae
For Stromae, this feature fits into a 2026 built on selective appearances rather than a loudly announced comeback. He had already surprised fans in March by singing a verse in Japanese, then by making a surprise appearance on Orelsan’s stage at Brussels’ ING Arena, where the crowd sang him “happy birthday.” On “des fleurs,” he also co-produces alongside Tove Lo, A Strut and OZGO, delivering a dark verse about a flawed man trapped in a loveless relationship — a theme that echoes “Tous les mêmes.”
The track is built like a waltz, with an insistent rhythm that turns almost obsessive the more you hear it. It sits as track 4 on Estrus, Tove Lo’s sixth album, released September 18 on her own label, Pretty Swede Records, via Virgin Music Group. The record explores desire and family tension inside an electro-pop frame recorded in Los Angeles, Stockholm, and a small Swedish fishing village where she spent childhood summers.
Why the song is climbing now
The fully animated video, directed by Melchior Leroux, came out alongside the release in late June. But it took months for “des fleurs” to settle onto French radio playlists, running alongside other international hits such as Katseye’s “Animal.” That slow-burn pattern — a French-language feature taking months to break through on radio before becoming unavoidable — is nothing new for Stromae, whose songs often keep living well past their original release date.
For Tove Lo, it is also a way to register in France, a market where she has never broken through as a solo act despite the worldwide success of “Habits (Stay High)” back in 2014. The pairing works both ways: it cements Stromae’s standing as a safe bet in the French-speaking music landscape, and gives Tove Lo an extra foothold in a market where she otherwise stays under the radar.
Whether “des fleurs” keeps climbing or has already peaked, its slow build says something about how French radio programmers treat francophone features these days: less as a one-week event, more as a song given the time to find its audience.
