FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
Part Sixty-Six: Sigrid
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THIS feature concerns…
PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Sarda
women in music today who I feel are going to be hugely inspirational in the future. The artists who will leave a mark and do sensational things. Today, I want to spotlight Sigrid. She is someone who has been making music for a while now, though she is growing stronger and more intriguing with every release. Sigrid Solbakk Raabe is a Norwegian singer and songwriter. She released her debut E.P., Don’t Kill My Vibe, In 2017. She won the BBC Music Sound of 2018. In 2019, she released her debut studio album, Sucker Punch. It was a busy time for Sigrid. From being highlighted as a new artist to releasing an acclaimed debut album. Since 2019, she has grown in stature and popularity. She recently played Reading Festival. By all accounts, it was a hugely memorable performance. I am going to source a few Sigrid interviews in a bit. Before then, it is worth pulling in a review for Sucker Punch. There is going to be a lot of demand for a second album. I am not sure when that will arrive, though one feels it will not be too long. Sucker Punch was definitely one of the finest debuts of 2019. This is what The Line of Best Fit said in their review:
“Each and every new track here glitters, too. "Sight of You" is the sweetest take: an anthem about how, despite gruelling schedules, AWOL luggage and almost-permanent homesickness, Sigrid feels saved by the sea of adoration that awaits her on stage. 'Basic' conjures that first flush of romantic infatuation: Sigrid nails the lyric here ('Let's be real, I'm just saying, If you feel it, don't cage it, Ooh, I wanna be basic') before pulling out the catchy big guns with a brazen 'nah nah nah nah' refrain. And over the skipping '80s vibe of "Mine Right Now", we hear her talk herself out of sabotaging a new relationship by overthinking ('But I ruin the moment 'cause I picture the end, And I don’t wanna go there, So I tell myself that, Hey, it's alright if we don't end up together.')
With Sigrid's knack for finding that silver lining, genuinely sad songs are a rarity here. That said, "Never Mine" speaks to a place we've all been: the torment of a love who has moved on before you've had the chance. Here, as the synths part, we hear Sigrid's changling voice settle, briefly, in a broken place, repeating the song's titular lament – a performance that will make the breath catch in your throat.
On the technical side, Sigrid's arrangements surpass the genre she rode in on: there's a core of deftly-orchestrated electronic pop, sure, but more classical features abound too – the ringing electric guitar solo that lifts "Sucker Punch"'s final bars; the thunderous strings carrying "Sight of You"'s melody; the tender piano chords that transform "Basic"'s middle eight. With pop currently consumed with references to trap and dancehall – Scandi-pop being no different – hearing these delicious deviations is a thrill.
Again, it all comes back to Sigrid's character, and how her beaming confidence and candour gives her arrangements a stand-out flair and her stories an earthy relatableness. Aside from being a near-perfect collection of belting pop, Sucker Punch also carries a message of triumphant grace: if you can try to be your own best friend and love yourself a little more, wonderful things will happen”.
If you have not heard Sucker Punch, then go and check the album out. It announced Sigrid as a wonderful young Pop act. She has only just turned twenty-five. I know that we will see a lot of music through her career.
There have been a few interviews with Sigrid this year. I will come to those. There is one from 2019 that makes for interesting reading. The Skinny featured Sigrid. It is an illuminating and deep interview where we learn about her start. The Norwegian songwriter provides some useful tips and advice:
“I’m a college dropout!” Sigrid Solbakk Raabe (known mononymously as indie-pop singer Sigrid) exclaims, somewhat bemused that she’s been chosen as the cover star for The Skinny’s student guide. However, while she’s not been through the multi-year slog of coursework and last minute library sessions – it was only a few weeks into a Comparative Politics degree that she decided to devote herself to music – she’s certainly someone that any fresher, or any young person for that matter, could learn a thing or two from.
A fresh-faced 22-year-old, music journalists have been keen to stress her youth, painting her as some kind of Nordic ingénue plucked from obscurity. Yet, even over the course of our conversation, it’s clear that this narrative misses the mark. Yes, she’s remarkably young for what she’s achieved – she already has a debut album, a slew of charting singles and the BBC Music Sound of 2018 title under her belt – but there’s nothing wide-eyed about her.
Perfectly courteous, with each statement from her mouth seeming so carefully considered and unabashedly serious, she’s professional to a fault – even when peppering her sentences with stateside slang or declaring her unbridled enthusiasm for Tame Impala. Initially it’s easy to think she has her guard up, that no 20-something is this together, but she assures us her personality has always been marked by precocity. “I’ve always been one of those kids who try to be a bit more grown up than they are,” she admits, with a laugh. However, she’s not shy to admit that music, and the various skills she was forced to develop as a DIY artist, was a crash course in the dark arts of “adulting”. “I was still in high school – I was only 16 – when I started to talk to labels,” she says. “I was sort of running my own music career. That was my introduction to email!”
Her journey, from first gaining attention in her native Norway to blowing up internationally with the slow-burn hit Don’t Kill My Vibe – a slice of zeitgeisty, empowered pop released at just the right time – to now embarking on her biggest ever tour across Europe and the US, it started in her teens and has taken her into her 20s. The emotional intensity of these years, when it can feel like your life is brimming with potential one minute and careening towards disaster the next, is tough for everyone, so it’s hard to imagine managing that while simultaneously forging a career in the limelight.
Yet Sigrid, in her own words, is “doing pretty well” – though she admits it’s not always plain sailing. “I’m 22 and you’re still figuring out stuff [at that age] so it’s strange that everything [I do] is on display if anyone wants to know. But maybe that’s what makes it really exciting too.” Her concerns, however, don’t seem too different from your average Gen Zer reared in a digital age where, thanks to social media, each life moment is searchable at the click of a button. She seems relatively unfazed at being in the business of playing festival main stages (at the time of our conversation, she’s fresh from a top-billed gig at Oslo’s Øya Festival) or touring globally. “In some ways you get used to the thought of people listening to your music from across the world,” she says, though there are some moments when things do still feel a bit surreal; “in other ways it still kind of blows my mind.”
What, then, has she learned from what’s admittedly quite a unique experience (even if she seems keen to downplay its significance)? “I think I’ve just grown more and more secure with who I am and what I want,” she says, after taking a moment to consider our question. “Obviously I still have doubts sometimes of what to do and how to do things but I still come back to my gut feeling.” We're struck at the easy confidence Sigrid has in her abilities and the faith she has in her own intuition. For most people, this self-assuredness only comes much later in life, after years of looking to others to work out who we should be.
It seems that she’s not found success to be a distraction from remaining in touch with her “authentic” self – quite the opposite, in fact. However she’s not overly attached to the person she once was and, rather, is keen to embrace the change and growth that comes with growing up, regardless of what your chosen career is. “Obviously I’m going to change a little bit because that’s what happens when you grow older: whether it’s studying or working, any experience will change you in some way, and I think that’s cool and exciting.”
Sigrid’s Top Tips
On being taken seriously as a young person:
"I can’t say that it’s always been easy being the youngest one but usually I feel very respected and it always goes back to the fact that I’m the artist. I’m the one that’s on the poster for everything – I’m the boss of my own career so I need to love everything I do because I’m going to promote it.”
On giving things your all:
“My luxury problem in school was that I didn’t know what I should be most focused on – it was kind of halfway school, halfway music. I was supposed to play some really cool gigs in Norway in my last year of school but I cancelled them. I wanted to go to these shows and really kill it if I was going to do it, so I took a year off music to focus on my grades”.
I think the last year or two has been the biggest for Sigrid. She has released a debut album but, since 2019, hype and popularity has built. The new material she has put out is her very best. Although she hasn’t performed live a lot lately, the sensational performance at Reading showed she has not lost any of her ability. In the process, she has shown herself to be one of the most compelled live performers in the world. I will finish with a few 2021 interviews.
In this i-D interview from May, Sigrid discusses a second album. It seems that, although there has not been a title announced, we will get music from her fairly soon:
“The problem with having a career that you love is that it becomes so intertwined with your identity that when life is put on pause, or things don’t work out quite the way they should, it can really hit you. “I think it’s the closest I’ve been to an identity crisis,” Sigrid says of the period. “But I’m on the other end of it now, so that feels good. You hear so often about not putting your self-worth into your job, but it’s so easy to say that. And I put every waking minute into my music! I think about it constantly! At one point, I felt like I was just floating around. I lost that sense of — and this sounds cheesy — but everyday purpose. Not knowing what I’d be doing in half a year, or even three weeks, kind of freaked me out.”
Luckily, summer brought with it salvation in the form of legal travel between Norway and Denmark. Sigrid spent much of July and August in Copenhagen, working with Danish producer Sly and his Norwegian songwriter girlfriend Caroline Ailin (a frequent collaborator of Dua Lipa). The two of them had also retreated from LA, where they’d worked with Sigrid on a number of songs, including her new single “Mirror”. “I’d stay by the harbour, it was quite serene,” she says of the creative process. “And it was different! For Sucker Punch, every song was written between tours where it was like: you have one day with this producer and you need to write a song. But this was totally chill. There was no rush, so we’d go swimming in the ocean between sessions. I was totally off the grid, in a sort of studio cave.” It was the steady, productive set up she’d long hoped for.
PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe McConnell for NME
It’s a topic Sigrid no doubt explores on her sophomore project, which she says she wrote with live performances in mind. “A big inspiration for all of the songs is big festival stages, probably because it’s where I feel the most secure about myself,” she says. “I miss it so, so much.” She notes how the fact that she’ll be performing these songs over and over for the next few years impacts her songwriting. “It needs to feel good to sing,” she says. “If I’m having a bad day but I know that the next song is going to be ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’, it makes me feel a lot better. It’s probably the feeling I chase the most: going on stage and singing and feeling better. And doing it together with a lot of other people. Fuck, I miss touring!” Sigrid, usually the sensible one, has promised her band that she’ll party with them a lot more on their next tour. “I’m scared about what I’ve got myself into,” she laughs.
It sounds like she’s putting herself out there sonically too. “I think that the past year opened up some more experimental doors for me,” she says of her new work. “I really felt like I could do anything I wanted to. It’s quite playful but ambitious and it’s very me. It’s a pop record but it’s leaning in so many different directions.” As is the case with many isolated popstars, Sigrid has been anxious about having an audience to return to, but those fans are still there, as loud as ever. “That’s been a real light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “Writing at home before Copenhagen, I was like: what am I doing? Who am I even writing for? Who’s going to listen to this?” In reality, she has nothing to worry about.
With the live music industry starting back up again and Sigrid on track to bless us with a body of work imbued with such positivity that it’ll undoubtedly carry us through the remainder of the pandemic unharmed, things are looking good. “It was as if someone just turned on a switch and everything went from 0 to 100 very quickly,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Woah, this is my real life.’ It’s quite daunting to go back to the whole circus but I absolutely love it. And, you know, there’s more music coming”.
I will actually bring in just one more interview. NME chatted with her last month. It seems that one Sigrid’s new track, Mirror (her most-recent, Burning Bridges, was released on 25th August), announces a new sound and personal attitude. It seems that her second album is going to be a lot of fun, too:
“But for ‘Mirror’, it’s all change. This time the Norwegian pop star stands tall astride atop a diving board in a flowing pink gown, hands on her hips but with comfort and confidence. It matches the song’s narrative flip, too; instead of grappling with other people’s putdowns, she’s in a celebratory mood. The chorus’s buoyant, direct message – “I love who I see looking at me” – is under-pinned by slick beats and party-starting piano stabs, a far cry from the brooding, skittish drums of ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’.
“I needed to hear ‘Mirror’ when we wrote it,” she says on a break during her first NME cover shoot in a south-east London studio. “This is an industry of perfection and I want to do as well as I can, but I still need to hear that it’s OK to do your best and that is good enough. I get really paranoid and up in my own head about not being good at something straight away, then I remember ‘Mirror’’s message of: ‘Just love yourself – just have fun with it.’”
If Sigrid’s modesty had been misread as cynicism, ‘Mirror’ kicks off a new era that sees her shy away from nothing – even the challenge of following up hit singles. It is, perhaps, the only way to navigate the hellish standards currently set for pop stars, particularly women, who are forced to navigate criticism that they’re in a “flop era” if a song or album does not fly immediately. “That pressure to follow-up a hit is always there,” she says. ‘It’s hard to deal with and definitely gets to me sometimes, but it’s a pressure I put on myself as well.”
And ‘Mirror’ is a celebration of the incremental changes we make; rarely do we engage in wholesale makeovers, but full of subtle improvements and recalibrations. ‘Mirror’ is the sound of someone who knows that they belong and to enjoy it while it lasts.
“I was just trying to be honest with myself more than I’ve been before, I always worry about being perceived as ‘cocky’”, she says, air quotes around that final word. “Sometimes that can tip over a bit and that’s when you need to remind yourself that, like, ‘I am good at this’ – I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I didn’t know what I’m doing.”
irror’ and the remainder of the upcoming second album finds the 24-year-old on spectacularly liberating form. She leans into her love of stadium bands such as Muse and Coldplay, landing at the intersection of rock and pop; it’s decidedly Sigrid with sharp wordplay and tightly constructed songs, but there’s a looseness to her performance and the band she’s assembled to thrash out the songs.
It’s a reflective listen, unsurprisingly, given how she spent the last year. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, she was working in Los Angeles but raced home to spend most of lockdown with her parents and boyfriend in Ålesund, a port town. Initially that period meant that work didn’t seem like an attractive proposition for the first time in a little while, but it gave her time to consider her place in the world”.
I am going to wrap it up there. I believe that Sigrid is an artist who will be a massive inspiration on the next generation. In a busy music market, she is one of the most talented and interesting artists. Many will keep an ear out to see what her second album contains. It looks like it is shaping up to be pretty memorable. A tremendous young talent, I know that Sigrid will go on to…
WORLD superstardom.