Copyright thepinknews
Since 2017, Norwegian pop star Sigrid has thrived on twisting minor frustrations and relationship woes into fizzy, empowering pop with delightfully sticky hooks. The now 29-year-old’s major breakthrough, “Don’t Kill My Vibe”, was a chipper shutdown of a condescending music producer. Follow up “Don’t Feel Like Crying” was a sanguine, anti-heartbreak banger set to glittering, ABBA-esque disco strings (both have reached 100m Spotify streams). Sigrid, born Sigrid Solbakk Raabe in the tiny town of Ålesund, often wraps her complex emotions up in shiny, synthy, easily digestible packaging, her words usually speaking on defiance rather than despair. That’s why, on listening to her third album There’s Always More That I Could Say, I was surprised to hear her threaten physical violence. “Try to tease me, call me out. I might punch you in your mouth,” she snarls on “Have You Heard This Song Before?” over crunchy guitar thrums. Catching up over Zoom, Sigrid in Oslo, I’m relieved to discover that she isn’t quite a woman on the edge of flipping tables. She’s as jovial and sunny-sounding as the bulk of her discography has always been. She cracks up when I mention that lyric, but concedes that the record is a fiery one. The album’s cover is her screaming. “Fort Knox”, the second single after noughties delight “Jellyfish”, is a propulsive explosion of rage; “Kiss The Sky” is a sardonic kiss-off to an ex; “Eternal Sunshine” brims with anxiety that she might not keep in touch with her former lover’s siblings. It’s a breakup album; she reportedly split from Norwegian skier Nikolai Schirmer in 2022. What emotions was she processing during its creation? “Don’t f**k with my heart” “Ughhh, all of the above,” she smiles. She giggled while ab-libbing that ode to whacking a lover, but it came from a place of frustration. “I am a person with my heart on my sleeve and it can be mistaken for being naive or young or childlike, but it’s also like, don’t f**k with me. Don’t f**k with my heart,” she says, comparing herself to a “tiny but aggressive” animal. “Even if I’m a bit bubbly,” she continues, “I will and can punch you in your mouth – which I think is so funny.” So yes, Sigrid has more bark and bite on her third record than on 2019 debut Sucker Punch and 2022’s How To Let Go, but she’s also taking more accountability. On her 2021 single “Mirror”, she loved the person she saw in her reflection, but now she can see the flaws too. On “Kiss The Sky” a partner accuses her of being a closed-off diva with a cold heart. “I know you’re right, but f**k it, it’s whatever,” she shrugs on the track’s chorus. On the stadium-ready pop-rock of opener “I’ll Always Be Your Girl”, her lover calls her a “pretentious” aggressor. “You get off from the fighting and you know I do too,” she rasps in agreement. She can be difficult in relationships, and she’s “definitely owning up to it” on the album. “I think people probably think of me as the ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ girl, which is great,” she stresses, but the track came with the expectation that she would forever be tough but easy-breezy in the face of conflict. “I’m also the type of person that will have all these great comebacks two hours later.” “There are no rules anymore for what is pop” The reason she’s finally able to put all these thoughts on record, she suggests, is the current state of pop. “There’s a lot of room for being more messy,” she says, reeling off a list of her “favourite pop girlies” – Charli XCX, Zara Larsson, Lola Young, Chappell Roan, Olivia Dean – who are proudly and forthrightly putting their vulnerabilities and contradictions into their music. “I have felt like I can, on a personal level, be more open and funny and satirical and take it to the extreme,” she says. “[There] hasn’t been the space for pop to not be so rigid, but the rule book is [now] thrown out the window. There are no rules anymore for what is pop.” Since her major breakthrough – she won the BBC Music Sound of 2018 poll, previously won by Adele, Sam Smith, and most recently, Chappell Roan – Sigrid has been whisked out on stage at every summer festival going. “I have the best job in the world,” she urges, but points out: “There is always summer somewhere in the world.” After releasing How To Let Go in 2022, she toured continuously – “I never really stop touring” – and ended up, though she doesn’t use the phrase exactly, probably a little burnout. Amid her tour, she tried returning to the studio to work on album three. At that point though, “I hadn’t really experienced a lot of life stuff. I had been kind of a machine. I’d just been touring,” she says. “Wake up, play the show. You know the Gaga meme [that’s] like: ‘Wake up! New Club! New Venue!’ It’s kind of like that.” She made some songs, but there was no clear direction. Last summer, half way through the writing and recording process, she headed out on a solo trip to the north of Norway for a breather. “I was just tired,” she laughs, then exhales. “I needed a break, and I hadn’t had a summer holiday for nine years.” She called up her management, and told them she needed to go away for a bit. “I was like, ‘I’ll see ya. I’m going to turn my phone off.’” “Everyone knows gays rule the pop world” On her return, she worked with her friend and producer Askjell Solstrand, writing in Bergen, London, Tokyo and his shed. Still, she found herself caught up in a tricky cycle of overthinking what her album could sound like. “It’s so easy to think about who’s going to listen to it. Does this fit into my discography? Does this say something about who I am, where I’m at? Do I think it’s cool enough?” She opted to attend a writing camp with Solstrand, intending to write for other people. It gave her musical brain a rewiring. Here, they wrote one of the album’s highlights, “Hush Baby, Hurry Slowly”, a throbbing, lightly sexy slice of electro-pop. It came about in ten minutes, inspired by Robyn and Troye Sivan’s 2023 album Something to Give Each Other. “That album is so, so good… that euphoric feeling of that album, I love that,” she beams. Queer folk cherished that album for much of the same reason they’re big fans of Sigrid: a mutually refined nose for a solid, soaring pop chorus. “I take that as a massive compliment,” she says when I suggest so. “Everyone knows the gays rule the pop world.” Finally, the cogs began turning, and the album began slotting together piece by piece. Sometimes, it just takes three years, a little more living, and a little less expectation. “On the first album [2019’s Sucker Punch]… I had more time and no one knew what I was capable of. I didn’t know,” she says. “Don’t Kill My Vibe” and “Strangers” – which is her most streamed song, with 150million Spotify listens – came together in just one day. “I’m turning 30 next year. I’m 29. You get into the other head space of like, I just want to have fun again. It’s not that deep.” Until now, everything has been quite deep for Sigrid. Historically, she has been a self-confessed control freak, shy, and painfully self aware. After starting piano lessons aged seven, she tried to quit, fearing the hobby wasn’t cool enough for her peers’ approval. She first wrote songs after her brother, also a musician, invited her to perform with him, but told her she couldn’t sing the Adele covers she’d grown comfortable with. In 2022, she told an interviewer that she admired Taylor Swift for her business-like approach to the music industry: “That’s not calculated, it’s just smart. It’s smart to have a plan,” she said. But with There’s Always More That I Could Say, she’s finally learning to let whatever happens, happen. “You have to be OK that the plan can change. You never know what’s going to happen around the next corner,” she says. Earlier this year, Ed Sheeran was performing in Oslo, and invited her to perform on stage with him. Afterwards, she asked if she could support him on tour. He dutifully agreed, and she’s heading over to the US with him in July. “That’s how the industry is. It can change so quickly.” Almost ten years into her career, and Sigrid is finally learning to roll with the punches. When she’s not delivering them, that is. Sigrid’s new album There’s Always More That I Could Say is out now. Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
