The Golden Elliphant In The Room

Last summer the Swedish rapper, singer and self-proclaimed "punk pop star" Elliphant (aka Ellinor Olovsdotter) rocked the Australian festival circuit. Now she's returning for an even bigger tour, encompassing Newcastle's This That. And "Elli" is plugging what could be the season's defining hit - Stranger with her This That co-headliners Peking Duk.

A teen backpacker, Olovsdotter always fantasied about exploring Australia - "this weird dot on this planet". Curiously, she visited before "the Elliphant project" launched, as a carer for a cruise passenger. In 2016 Australia is among her most successful territories. She is a triple j fave.

The Stockholm native first encountered Peking Duk when they DJ'd after her at South By Southwest in Texas. "I couldn't get my eyes off them - they were so funny," Olovsdotter recalls, perky at 10pm in her Los Angeles base. She bonded with the Canberrians here. They've since become "family".

"I don't know if I would have been ready for any bigger success than the success I have."

In March Olovsdotter dropped her long-anticipated international debut, Living Life Golden (LLG) - led by Love Me Badder - via Dr Luke's Kemosabe Records. Olovsdotter worked with such varied producers as Diplo, Skrillex, Joel Little (Lorde) and Dave Sitek (TV On The Radio).

LLG has its quota of tropical EDM bangers, but other songs are more "chill" - it's like an eccentric cross between the early R&B Pink and MIA. Alas, LLG was overlooked - possibly, and unfairly for Olovsdotter, because of the involvement of Dr Luke, who's been fighting a controversial legal battle with Kesha. However, Olovsdotter blames the album delay. "I just think everything comes out how it's supposed to come out, right?" she sighs philosophically. "[But] I can't really say how I feel about the release of this album without sounding a bit negative, because I feel it was not in tune with how Elliphant was growing." The promotion lost momentum. "So it was like a little bit of a flop," Olovsdotter confides. "But that doesn't mean I think that the songs on the album are a flop. I still think that it's a good album." Indeed. She suggests that, with its many moods, LLG is "a grower".

In fact, LLG contains Olovsdotter's most unexpected collab - the duet Everybody with Azealia Banks, the pair connecting at 2015's Splendour In The Grass. Today Olovsdotter defends the polarising Harlemite, "even if there's so much that I disagree with". For her, Banks is nonetheless a "brave" artist. "She is that little person that we all have inside," Olovsdotter says.

Overall, Olovsdotter is content with her career trajectory. The star remains in-demand for features - in addition to Stranger, she blazes on Blame from the Canadian duo Zeds Dead and Diplo, her longtime champion. "I don't know if I would have been ready for any bigger success than the success I have - I think this is a very natural place for me to be with my history in music. From now on I'm gonna be more about quality than quantity and, for the first time in my music life, [I'll] really start to take control of the thing."