Nordic Spotlight
The best music and music festivals in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands
Based on its name, one might expect Gothenburg, Sweden to be the most goth-friendly city in the world. Think drinking establishments drenched in darkness and blasting the Sisters of Mercy, a statue of Robert Smith in the main square, and coffee only served black. Research proves this idea unfortunately wrong: Gothenburg is instead best known […]
Sail by Summer describes itself as “melancholic,” but its recent single “Facing Dullness” doesn’t immediately portray the Norwegian-Danish duo’s sorrow. Under stuttering synth splashes, pitter-patter drum work, and squelching guitar notes often blanketed in reverb and phaser, “Facing Dullness” sounds convivial on first impression, just as the heftily produced art of a long-running, mainstream radio synthpop […]
We’ve been keeping track of Iceland’s cat-loving, psychedelic elf-muse dj. flugvél og geimskip, for close to half a decade now. Last Friday, she released her newest album, Our Atlantis (and a corresponding interactive 3D world), which takes her self-described “outer space electronic music” to even darker new depths. “Elsta lag í heimi,” also listed on Soundcloud as “Oldest Song […]
It’s not at all difficult to understand what Raimond Dagfjäll says when he sings, but the lyric video for his song “Fever Dream,” the title track of his newest EP as Rain on Monday, is far from unnecessary. In the video, the song’s lyrics appear in blocky text against grainy, slowly-moving bays of static, and this combination […]
Le Corbeau is nothing if not ambitious. Øystein Sandsdalen’s pet project—many might know him best for his years playing guitar in Norwegian shoegaze outfit Serena Maneesh—dropped three albums at once back in November, with little in the way of advance warning. The trilogy, titled IV V VI, comes with a whopping 27 songs; “Psycho at the Wheel,” a […]
Michael Rexen has traveled a ways to get here. The artist better known as M. Rexen was born in the United Arab Emirates before traversing the Middle East and Africa over many years. He ultimately settled in Copenhagen, and in Denmark, he’s already become known for the rambunctious live shows he and his ten-piece band […]
Although Lasse Lokoy appears to be a newer name in the world of forward-thinking Norwegian artists, he’s no stranger to success. He’s already well known as the bassist for incessantly buzzy Norwegian band Sløtface, which kept itself insanely busy in 2017 and 2018. The constant craze around that band’s agitating punk seems to have not […]
Although psychedelic music doesn’t always need vocals—think about the many endless instrumental interludes that defined psych rock’s earliest days—to convey the sense of wonder, joy, and innocence that drugs can incite, sometimes, vocals can reveal hallucinatory depths otherwise inaccessible. Swedish/Norwegian duo Lerin/Hystad understands this vocal-instrumental balance quite well: Starmap, its newest album, is its first to feature vocals. […]
Sweden’s answer to SOPHIE has arrived, and she sounds amazing. Meet COBRAH, the newest purveyor of the high-sheen, PVC-and-latex-soaked visuals and sounds that SOPHIE introduced in 2013 to mass acclaim, a wave of soundalikes, and production credits for mainstream pop and hip-hop artists. COBRAH is more than good enough at this style to achieve similar […]
From the very beginning of “Mike,” the most recent single by Danish artist Rebecca Maria Molina, it’s very obvious whom her newest song is about. “His name is Mike/He’s an underdog,” sings Molina (who uses her last name as her musical metonym) just under thirty seconds into the track. It’s tempting to assume that any song […]