FEATURE: Spotlight: Erika de Casier

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Erika de Casier

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I shall come straight to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlotte de la Fuente for Rolling Stone

some interviews with the amazing Erika de Casier. I want to head back a little way for the first interview, as de Casier has been on the scene a little while now. Perhaps someone that many people are not aware of. She announced the album, Still, will be released on 21st February via 4AD. It is going to be an album you’ll want to check out. In 2021, Rolling Stone spoke with the Danish artist in 2021. It was around the release of her second studio album, Sensational. Erika de Casier is someone I am quite new to, so I am listening back to Sensational, in addition to her 2019 debut, Essentials:

“Her 2019 debut album, Essentials, featured sensual R&B and Nineties nostalgia, laced with the frenetic production of U.K. garage and a hint of drum ‘n’ bass. Songs like “Do My Thing” garnered comparisons to Sade and Aaliyah, and made de Casier a quiet star among a certain set of sensitive dance music fans. Her approach is not unlike what Tracy Thorn did with Everything but the Girl, transposing emotional depth onto dance culture’s innate euphorics. That quest for depth has been a defining characteristic of the past year, with global shutdowns forcing the entire world to look inward.

De Casier spent the majority of quarantine alone, remotely finishing her last year of university while simultaneously finishing the new album. In another Scandinavian twist on American annoyances, she studied music in a self-directed program that her country subsidizes for its citizens. As part of a university project, she presented tracks from the album that will likely soundtrack moments of introspective romance around the world. And yes, she passed. “They thought it was cool,” she says. “I was really surprised that they were so open to it.”

De Casier was born in Portugal; her mother is from Belgium and her father is from Cape Verde, a small island off the coast of West Africa. When she was a kid, she relocated with her mom to a small town in Denmark called Ribe, where she and her brother were the only mixed-race children at their school. She remembers finding solace in music videos, where she saw people that looked more like her than any of her classmates. “MTV was a place where I could turn it on and it’s like, ‘Oh, people like me,’ and feel a sort of relief or a sense of belonging,” she says.

After completing an exchange program in Vermont as a teenager, de Casier enrolled in university in Aarhus, where she’d meet the DJ and producer known as Central, who would provide production help on a number of tracks on Essentials and, perhaps most importantly, furnish some of the record’s most memorable remixes. The club mix of “Intimate” was many people’s first introduction to de Casier. That track, an assertive drum ‘n’ bass beat softened by her gentle croon, is a case study of everything the singer does well. Her melodic flourishes, inspired by the glory days of black music in America, when artists like Missy Elliot and Aaliyah were stretching the confines of what defined popular music, graft naturally to the sonic sensibility of club music, itself indebted to the experimentations of mid-’90s R&B. The result is something pure; it’s borderless, timeless, and genreless.

De Casier says she approached the new album as a clean slate. She’d released Essentials independently, and its positive word-of-mouth reception gave her a sense of a proof of concept. For this new record, which will be released later this year on the label 4AD, she wanted to trust her instincts in the same way. “I wanted to just put Essentials behind me and say, ‘That was a lovely record, now I want to do something new,’” she explains. “I was trying to remember what it felt like to just let go and stop trying to meet any expectations.”

With the surplus of alone time afforded by the pandemic, that freedom came easier than it might have otherwise. As a songwriter, though, de Casier has a knack for keeping things centered regardless. “Instead of writing about how I did react to a situation, I write about how I wish I would have reacted,” she says. “You know how sometimes when your friends ask you for advice, you’re like, ‘Yeah, you should just do this,’ but you never follow your own advice when it’s about you?”

There’s an admirable patience in the tales of love, loss, and rejection that de Casier constructs. On “Busy,” an upcoming single from the album, she takes a classic U.K. Garage beat as the canvas for her to politely inform any potential suitor that she’s focused on herself first and foremost. It might be a letdown, but at least you can dance to it.

In moments like these, de Casier’s music recalls the empowerment ballads that Destiny’s Child or TLC constructed in the early 2000s. Except where a previous generation might have called for outward displays of confidence, her music — like the rest of the world for the past year now — is all about bringing that confidence home. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I am with people,” she says, “and parts of my emotions that I haven’t maybe dealt with before”.

I am going to move it onto more recent interviews. An artist who is not only creating her own magnificent work. Erika de Casier is writing wonderful music for other artists. GQ spoke with de Casier in August. She had written several songs from NewJeans’ E.P., Get Up. The K-Pop group having this secret weapon in the form of a modern-day R&B great:

“As of press time, the Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter Erika de Casier boasts a relatively modest 38.6k followers on Instagram, 7.78k subscribers on YouTube, and 281,948 monthly listeners on Spotify. But to some of music’s biggest names, de Casier is an IYKYK secret weapon.

Those relatively humble numbers are pulled into focus when you realize who’s listening: In 2020, pop superstar Dua Lipa slid into her DMs, professed her admiration for de Casier’s music, and commissioned a remix of her Future Nostalgia single “Physical.” Last year, over Instagram DMs with Dev Hynes, she was drafted to sing on Blood Orange’s “Relax and Run.”

“I remember I woke up and it was a notification from Dua Lipa,” de Casier remembers, laughing. “I was just like, ‘What is this fake account that wrote me?’”

This year, the 33-year-old is having another surreal moment—this time, as a songwriter drafted in by Hybe’s indie label ADOR for the buzzy K-pop girl group NewJeans. Co-writing four out of six songs on NewJeans’ blockbuster Get Up EP, which sits at No. 1 on the Billboard charts (and includes global smashes like “Super Shy” and “Cool With You”), de Casier has lent her increasingly distinctive sound—unfussy, unhurried, Y2K pop and UK garage-indebted R&B—to a genre that has traditionally leaned on maximalist pop hooks.

De Casier honed that sound over two albums of sexy, skittish, bedroom jams for introverts. And as she prepares to release her just-finished third album (“coming soon,” she says), she seems poised for a breakout moment of her own.

Erika de Casier’s curious trajectory is a case study in pop music’s globalized present. She’s a Portugal-born, Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter of Belgian and Cape Verdean descent, who grew up on a steady diet of US and UK pop and R&B acts like Destiny’s Child, Craig David and Sugababes. Recently, de Casier talked to GQ about writing for NewJeans, the influence of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and the magic of multilingual pop.

GQ: You’ve built quite a following for yourself as an independent act who’s done things on their own terms. How has working with big pop entities like NewJeans and Dua Lipa—and even more established acts like Blood Orange—influenced your work?

Erika de Casier: NewJeans is the first project that I've written for that's not my own. For me, it was really freeing to write for another artist, because it lets you put yourself aside in another way. I think I've maybe in the past been afraid that if you write for others, it takes away some of the creativity or something from your own stuff. And that is not true at all, because it actually just makes you more aware of what your style is and what you really want to do.

I just had a lot of fun writing those songs and that's something I can bring to when I'm making my own music. For me, it develops your creativity in another direction, which then can shed light on how you do your own stuff.

And also, I don't know, it just takes away the ego. And it takes away the pressure—which is funny, because you would think there would be so much more pressure because it's for such a big name as NewJeans. When writing for NewJeans, I just felt like, "Well, if they don't like it, they can always just say no to it." [Laughs]

How did you end up writing for NewJeans?

So I just got this email from one of their team members that just said like, "Hey, we're having a session in Copenhagen, we would love to see you there." And then I was randomly talking to my friends, Catharina [Stoltenberg] and Henriette [Motzfeldt] from [Norwegian electronic pop act] Smerz, and my friend Fine [Glindvad Jensen, a singer-songwriter] and they were like, "Oh, we got that email as well… What? That's so random." And then we just decided, okay, let's all just go there. We met there and wrote one of the songs “ASAP” together, the four of us.

There was these also other producers that we wrote a bunch of songs with like Frankie [Scoca] from New York, Kristine Bogan who lives in Berlin but is from the States, and there was another guy called Monro from the UK. So it was just all these different people and then my best friends.

It's kind of mind-blowing.

Yeah, because I don't know how they heard of me. Because on that [massive pop] scale, we're just so small. And in Copenhagen… Why did they have a session in Copenhagen? It's so weird! [Laughs] But yeah, I'm so happy about it”.

I will finish with a new interview from The Guardian. It mentions how Erika de Casier has been working with this alter ego, Bianka, in addition to writing songs for other artists. It seems now, it is a time when she is stepping out alone and trusting her own voice and identity. A terrific artist whose music is instantly recognisable and memorable, Still will be an album that announced her to a wider world. After working with NewJeans and songs she wrote for them being hugely popular, it is now time for her own music to get the praise it deserves:

“One of those sides is as pop’s most sought-after songwriter. Last year she co-wrote four of the six tracks on the second EP from hugely popular K-pop girlband NewJeans. Released in July, Get Up sold more than 1.65m copies worldwidein a week and beat the Barbie soundtrack to No 1 in the US. The call to collaborate came completely out of the blue. “To be honest, I didn’t know who it was,” laughs De Casier. “I read the email and was like: ‘NewJeans? Who is that?’ So then I looked them up and thought it sounded pretty fresh. They asked me if I’d listened to K-pop and I had to be honest and say: ‘No, I haven’t,’ and they were like: ‘Perfect!’ They have their antennae out and they’re trying different things.” Rather than simply utilising De Casier’s way with a catchy hook, songs such as Super Shy (more than 390m Spotify plays and counting) sound exactly like De Casier records: all tactile, softly sung R&B, liquid drum’n’bass plus a gift for tender introspection housed in a club setting. “People were writing to me: ‘Is this you singing?’ and I’m like: ‘Nope,’” she says. “I find it flattering that they liked the sound and they kept it the way it was.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Colin Solal Cardo

Born in Portugal to a Belgian mother and Cape Verdean father, De Casier credits her humility to Denmark, the country she moved to when she was eight with her mother and younger brother. “It’s a part of me,” she says, referring to janteloven, the Scandinavian trait of not wanting to stand out. “It feels unnatural to talk about myself.” When she first moved to the small town of Ribe, she was unable to speak Danish. She and her brother were also ostracised for being the only mixed-race children in their school. De Casier found solace in MTV, both in the music’s universal language and because she could see people with the same skin tone.

As she got older she started to dabble in music production on her computer and would borrow CDs by the likes of Destiny’s Child and Erykah Badu from the local library. Her hushed, introspective vocal style was honed more out of necessity than anything else; she would often sing at night and didn’t want to disturb her flatmates. Music was never meant to be a career, however. “I was thinking about going to art school and I was thinking about medicine. Then I wanted to be a psychologist. That’s a plan B for me.” She still has trouble calling herself a musician today, three albums in. “I have a lot of impostor syndrome. I don’t know if you ever do something and think: ‘Yep, I’m a musician.’”

But it’s in the music she creates, often as sole songwriter and producer, that De Casier can dismiss any misgivings and tap into her id. On the Sensational highlight Polite she scolds a date for being rude, while Still’s loose album-long concept of charting a relationship from hot-and-heavy beginnings to messy endings is anchored by the slinky Ooh, which finds De Casier breathily describing fantasies and dishing out come-ons. My Day Off, meanwhile, is both a nod to her hectic schedule and a newfound sense of being able to say no. “I didn’t feel like answering any emails or messages,” she says of the song, which also mentions the very un-R&B topic of catching up on laundry. “I was just being a brat on that song – it’s like: ‘I just need a day off.’”

Days off are going to be few and far between in 2024. Still will be followed by more touring and more songwriting for others, while songs for album four are already taking shape. But, for now, all of that is at the back of De Casier’s constantly whirring mind. “I’m not hearing back from the builders, I don’t have a kitchen, I’m living in a building site,” she sighs, looking around at the dusty detritus. “We’re in my living room where I’ve knocked down a wall,” she says, before clarifying: “I didn’t do that myself.” It turns out there are some things she can’t do”.

I am going to finish it here. I wanted to do a sweep and look back at where Erika de Casier has come from and where she is now. An artist that I am really interested in who I think that is going to release a lot of new music, everyone needs to keep an eye on her. I am new to her, yet I am going to look out with interest at what comes next. After Still is released on 21st February, there will be a lot more coming from Erika de Casier. Do make sure that this is an artist…