Løkken began with a single house, built in the late seventeenth century on enclosed land beside the village of Furreby. It was an inn, run by Simon Sørensen and his wife Else Christensdatter, and for years the place was simply called Furreby Løkke — the fenced field beside Furreby. The name settled slowly. Løchen, Lÿchen, Lÿcken and Lÿkken all had their turn before the nineteenth century fixed on Løkken. By 1715 there were fifteen houses and sailors were moving in, because this stretch of coast turned out to be a good place to load. Grain, butter and meat went across the Skagerrak to southern Norway; iron and timber came back. Two hundred and seventeen people lived here in 1801; by 1901 there were 1,067. A survey in 1875 counted eighty-seven houses, mostly brick with some thatch, and no streets to speak of.

There was never a mole, never a basin, never a quay. Boats went out through the surf and came home the same way, hauled up onto the beach and left sitting on the sand — around 1950 there were still some fifty of them lying there. In 1898 roughly 180 fishermen worked out of Løkken, mainly for cod and haddock, though the stocks were already thinning and the industry was on its way down. A handful of professionals remain, alongside a small recreational fleet, and the rest is kept at the Coastal Fisheries Museum and the Løkken Museum. The same surf that made loading possible wrecked a great many ships. Løkken's rescue station had a crew of twelve who rowed out with their captain on the rudder, on call at every hour, contractually required to find a man to stand in for them if they meant to be away for more than a day.

The Hjørring–Løkken–Aabybro railway, the Løkkenbanen, ran from 1913 to 1963, and Løkken was its largest intermediate station: two platforms, four tracks, a turntable, and a station building by Sylvius Knutzen that was enlarged in 1944 and still stands at the south-eastern edge of town. It was built to move fish inland. During the German occupation it moved something else — material for the fortification of Jutland's west coast, with a narrow-gauge spur laid from the station down to the beach and the Furreby Naval Battery going up just north of town. The concrete bunkers from those years are still scattered along the sand, tilted and cracked and slowly losing to the weather.

The line's real legacy was tourism. Bathers had trickled in before, but the Løkken Badehotel, open since 1895, gave wealthy visitors a reason to stay for weeks — the fashion of the era among people who could afford a rural beach hotel for most of a season. Then the railway made a day trip from Aalborg possible, and Løkken filled up. Special summer trains ran with twenty to thirty carriages, and freight wagons were fitted with benches to serve as extra third class. By 1920 a newspaper reported that almost every house in town had at least one room let to visitors. Fishing and shipping faded; letting rooms did not. The town now has three campsites, three bed and breakfasts and a great many holiday homes, and the original Badehotel, restored and divided into apartments, stands near the centre with a restaurant on the ground floor.

Løkken sits at the southern end of Lønstrup Klint, the run of coastal cliffs along this part of Jutland. Its high point, Rubjerg Knude, has been buried under migrating sand that eventually forced the lighthouse there to be moved inland. Five kilometres east, on a ridge above the fields, stands Børglum Kloster, the medieval abbey that is now a museum. Inland from the beach, the dune and meadow belt running down toward Rødhus has been protected since 1962 to keep holiday houses off it — seven separate conservations covering 415 hectares in all. Some 1,700 people live here year-round, among them the town's quieter distinctions: Lone Træholt, born in Løkken in 1958, became the first woman to reach general rank in the Danish armed forces.