Nordic Spotlight
The best music and music festivals in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands
Swedish-British duo Girl Crush knows a thing or two about balance. Its newest single, “Radio Silence,” walks many tightropes. There’s the line between upbeat, vibrant, high-sheen production and EDM’s nails-on-chalkboard digital surges. Between enticing, nasal, gorgeous singing and sneering, giving-it-all-too-much belting. Insightful and cloying lyrical material. Every time, Girl Crush is on the right side […]
In a just world, Swedish quartet KÅRP would be as massively popular as its obvious influences are. Then again, “obvious influences” is an imperfect phrase in regards to KÅRP; although the band’s reverence of Robyn, The Knife, and Lykke Li are about as blatant as signs of decay on an avocado, there is just no one […]
There’s no doubt about it: the ‘80s are back in. You can buy Stranger Things graphic tees at Wal-Mart. Magnum P.I. and Lethal Weapon reboots air weekly on network television. Seemingly every band in sight is dropping its guitars and putting batteries back into its vintage Yamahas. While it might feel like the ‘80s pop […]
Teamwork makes the dream work, and here at Nordic Spotlight, we love a good Nordic team. The producer NEIKED and the singer and songwriter Miriam Bryant, both from Sweden (where the latter is a massive pop star), have teamed up for “How Did I Find You,” released just about a month ago. Not long after, […]
Although JUNODEF is originally from Sweden, its members now live in London. It’s an interesting choice for the band to have made, because its music sounds deeply Nordic, and the UK is in a far more politically and socially precarious space than the Nordic countries are at the moment (even with Swedish legends The Radio […]
Oxen is just a couple of guys from Stockholm who happen to make great rock songs. Erik Hases and Stefan Söderqvist have, over the course of the year, released a string of singles that differ vastly from one another, connected almost entirely by the dual-part vocal harmonies that ground many of their songs. “Limbo” arrived back […]
ViVii refers to itself as a trio comprised of a core duo and an “enigmatic work partner.” While married couple Emil and Caroline Jonsson bask in all the spotlight that comes with publicly releasing music (or, more realistically, do all the public bidding for attention that comes with sharing art in the competitive, hyper-saturated music […]
Okay, sure: here at Nordic Spotlight, we love to expose the talents of rising, newer Nordic artists. But sometimes, a Nordic artist who has achieved global success time and time again just does something that reminds us why we constantly look for the artists that in years, maybe decades, will be among the whole world’s […]
Sometimes, it feels like vanity on social media is a distinctly American phenomenon. Reality TV and celebrity culture is strongly rooted in the United States, where children indirectly learn from a young age that money, success, and fame are directly correlated, if not outright equivalent. What’s more, social media’s leading platforms were invented here, and […]
Mysterious Swedish newcomer Bah Non describes his newest song “homonym modulation” as “a ride through the emotional roller coaster of a recent difficult break up.” Although the electronic artist’s apparent debut single moves across six minutes of ambient sear and waveform digital bloops without so much as dropping a single drum beat or finding anything […]