Knockout

Matching bold, euphoric pop with an incredible work ethic, we meet Sigrid just after the release of debut album ‘Sucker Punch’ as she gets ready to take on her biggest summer yet.

Words: Rachel Finn.

Many wannabe musicians spend their formative years dreaming of performing to arenas of screaming fans or spending their summers travelling around the festival circuit. Not so for Sigrid. A couple of years before breakout track ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ arrived in February 2017, the singer was considering a very different path indeed, tossing up the noble decision of whether she should become a teacher or a lawyer.

“I wanted to work for the Norwegian government. I was dreaming of the UN or the EU or something like that, international law…” she remembers of her early career plans. “I never dared to think music was possible for me and I had no plans of becoming a musician. I thought I was going to university to study, but I think I always had that little music thing in me.”

Clearly the singer had big ambitions either way, but it wasn’t until she moved from the small coastal town of Ålesund, where she was born and raised to Bergen after finishing high school that she began to think music was even a remote possibility. Fast forward a few years and, rather than carving out a career in parliament or in a classroom, Sigrid is currently backstage at The O2 in London, preparing for another show on her run supporting George Ezra, performing in front of thousands of people each night.

Glastonbury is the size of my hometown in Norway multiplied by six!

“I studied politics for like, one month and I dropped out,” the 22-year-old recalls. Perched on a sofa, sipping on a bottle of water, she seems completely at home in these daunting surroundings and totally committed to becoming even more successful; dropping out, it’s safe to say, was probably the right choice. Within her first few months in Bergen, she met her management and began travelling to London for writing sessions, while her friends remained scattered around Europe, studying medicine, law and other such traditionally academic pursuits. “It’s very different. I had a music column [in a student newspaper] and I was in the studio a bit, but during that half year I began to understand that I really wanted to do music because it didn’t just, like, happen. I understood that I really needed to work for this.”

Sigrid is at a mid-point of sorts right now: debut album ‘Sucker Punch’ is finally out (it hit No.4 in the charts in the UK and No. 1 in her home country of Norway, something she describes as equal parts “weird” and “surreal”) and she’s preparing to head off on a huge run of festival shows this summer, a trip which will take her across over ten countries and back again, making it her biggest summer yet. But she’s ready for the challenge.

“I definitely think about festivals when I write. I’m guessing a lot of musicians must think quite visually when they write music, like films or art, and they can see the music or things like that. For me, it’s very much about the live side of things,” she explains of her writing process. “I didn’t really have a huge theme for the album. I just wanted it to be a collection of my favourite songs. It’s been a very organic process of just writing and having fun in the studio and I think you can hear that in the songs. Most of the vocal takes are like [they were] on the day, because we have that raw energy.”

With its bold, singalong choruses and earwormy hooks, ‘Sucker Punch’ may be an album custom-made for festival crowds, but there’s more bite within its twelve tracks than your average radio-friendly collection. Sure, it treads some well-used pop tropes - there’s the song about the all-consuming crush (the title track), another about relationships that aren’t quite relationships (‘Mine Right Now’) and one that implores you to stay out all night and dance away all your troubles (‘Don’t Feel Like Crying’) - but there’s depth there too.

Alongside early hit ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’, and the oft-told tale of how it was inspired by feeling patronised by older men during a writing session, another track ‘Business Dinners’ is in a similar vein, a glitchy, off-kilter number about the experience of potential labels trying to mould her image before she was signed. It’s a stab at an industry that just wants her to be “sweeter, better, angel / pictures, numbers, figures / deeper, smarter,” summing up the contradictions facing many young female artists trying to break. Sigrid meanwhile, “standing on the shoreline”, just wants to “swim and float”.

It’s a criticism echoed across the festival sphere where, over the past few years, the gender diversity of line-ups has been increasingly scrutinised, with a real push towards wider representation slowly taking shape. “My experience is that there are a lot of festivals that could do a lot more to get a more equal balance of female and male musicians and I think it’s all about looking a bit harder,” she notes. “There are a lot of incredibly talented people out there of both, or all, genders so I think for making a change you need to start at some point. Looking a bit harder is the right way to start.”

Elsewhere on the album, on the soaring, string-laden ‘Sight Of You’, she tackles bad days (“The airline lost my luggage, still got all this weight / And all the things I’m done with are showing up again”), only with a twist: unlike most of us, for Sigrid, at the end of the day there’s a stage and an audience of expectant fans waiting, regardless of how exhausting the day has been.

The pop scene is always evolving. You’re not making music in a vacuum.

“It’s a completely different beast to play a festival, it really is,” Sigrid says, who last year ticked off two more ‘bucket list’ goals, playing shows at Coachella and Roskilde in Denmark. “Like, it’s ruthless! Festivals, summer, travelling-wise, can be really hard. That song is about how fucking exhausting it is to do festivals sometimes because we’re often in three different countries in three days and they’re so far from each other. You sometimes have to drive to weird places out in fields to get there... or take a fucking boat! But it’s really fun and very rewarding. It’s just mad, but it’s really fun. I think that’s what I wanted to convey.”

This summer will also see Sigrid return to Glastonbury after she made her debut at the festival in 2017, a highlight among her relentless touring schedule and a long-time career goal. “Something I love with British festivals is that it just seems like people don’t really care about the weather - you just go hard anyways and I love that, I love that attitude! Glastonbury was one of the first festivals I heard about from Norway, because growing up in a country like that, I think we’re very influenced by Britain on the music side. And I found out right before I went on stage that Glastonbury is the size of my hometown in Norway multiplied by six!”

While Sigrid’s journey as an artist over the past couple of years may have taken her to stages around the world, to make ‘Sucker Punch’, Sigrid and her team headed home, recording the album at Ocean Sound Recordings (also the birthplace of records by Arcade Fire, Sampha and Anna Of The North) on a small, rural island fifteen minutes from where she grew up. It’s a place that also served as the venue for her first ever gig at age sixteen, and where she recorded some of her earliest songs. “There’s not a lot to do out there,” she says, laughing. “There’s no cafes or bars or venues to go to. It’s just looking at cows and nature, but I think that’s something you don’t really get to see a lot when you’re travelling so that’s why so many musicians go there to record, because it’s so special. It’s really beautiful. The only distraction you have is the nature. It’s kind of like my second home.”

In an industry where any vague deviation from ‘the norm’ can be used as a PR angle, much has been made of Sigrid as an ‘anti-popstar’, with her chill attitude, casual way of dressing and nofrills stage show. Her identity is one that seems a world away from the extravagant imagery of some of the past decade’s most noted pop stars - the kitsch, colourful world of Katy Perry or Lady Gaga’s high-concept aesthetic. Yet Sigrid isn’t so fussed about whether she’s part of a new movement of pop or not. Questions about her image, she stresses, “[are] totally cool”, but she’d rather just keep things about “my music and my way of communicating emotions”.

“[Lady Gaga] is one of the artists I respect the most. I think she has an incredible way of always staying true to herself but in so many different shapes and forms, which I find very beautiful, the fact that you can do whatever you wanna do. I love that. And I do whatever I wanna do. The pop scene is always evolving. You’re not making music in a vacuum. It’s always inspired by things that are happening around you.”

A lot of musicians must think quite visually when they write music, but for me it’s very much about the live side of things.

Not content with just performing, she’s keen to stress her hands-on approach to making her music, as a co-writer and co-arranger of all her songs. She’s also recently started writing for other artists as well, with a credit on Rudimental’s new song ‘Adrenaline’, and describes herself as open to collaborating with other artists in future. “It was like my first proper big cut, so I’m really really proud of that,” she explains excitedly of the track. “I think I always put so much of myself and my personality and my style into everything I write, so I guess I always have me in the back of my head. But I thought it would be really cool to try and write for someone else.”

Right now, however, Sigrid is mainly focused on her own busy next few months ahead and dealing with the strange experiences that can come with a steadily-rising mainstream pop career. One of the weirdest, she admits, is being recognised in public, something that’s happening more and more frequently as her star continues to ascend. “It’s mad, like people are coming up to me and asking me if I can sign a piece of paper with ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ or other song titles, so they can tattoo it… on their foot?!” Sigrid laughs, grinning. “Like they’ve come up to me with their tattoos of my signature. That’s mad.”

After Sigrid’s hectic summer of festivals, the rest of the year will see her almost constantly on the road, touring the US on her biggest headline run yet and heading back to the UK for another string of shows, before eventually venturing back to the studio to work on new music. Pressed on where she sees her career in music going however, she’s cagily keeping those plans under wraps for now.

“Oh, I always have ideas. I never stop writing. I think I’m always humming something new or listening to new music that inspires me. I am extremely ambitious and I have big goals, but it’s a bit important for me to keep them a bit to myself. What if it doesn’t happen, you know?” she says, carefully.

“But what I can say is that I think my biggest goal is to just be happy with what I do and I am right now. Always keep it about the music and keep writing, because that’s where I think everything comes out from. I’m super positive about everything that’s gonna happen. It’s gonna be a very exciting year - and years - ahead of me.”

‘Sucker Punch’ is out now via Island. DIY