Sigrid: Norwegian singer-songwriter’s quick march to fame

Norwegian singer-songwriter Sigrid is the latest to discover fame outside traditional music-industry channels.

Norwegian singer Sigrid: ‘My brain works differently when I’m out in nature.’

To cap off the most exhilarating year of her young life, Sigrid Solbakk Raabe opted to spend New Year’s Eve far away from the globetrotting bustle that coloured much of her 2017. Instead of attending a crowded party, she retreated to the serenity of a mountain cabin near her home town in Norway. There, she celebrated with good food, good wine and the company of three best friends from high school.

“My brain works differently when I’m out in nature,” she says on the phone from her parents’ house, which contains the piano where, not long ago, she wrote her first song. “Now, I don’t see nature that often because I’m travelling all the time, and I see a lot of tall buildings.”

A little over a year ago, very few people outside her home town of Alesund — population 47,000 — had heard her name, let alone her music. But the release in February last year of a four-track EP set in train a series of extraordinary events that have propelled her from nobody to somebody at a dizzying clip.

Now, Sigrid — who has chosen a mononym for her stage name, like Madonna, Adele and Rihanna before her — is in the strange position of being followed by thousands of people around the world who are eagerly waiting to hear the latest music to emerge from the fingers, mind and voice box of the 21-year-old songwriter, pianist and singer.

Though she was signed to Island Records as a teenager, she is not a product of the glossy, often superficial environment of television talent shows. She was scouted on the strength of her musical and vocal talents and, with no small amount of expectation resting on her slight shoulders, she is determined to build a sustainable career in the fickle world of pop music.

A few hours before Review connected with ­Sigrid this month, the singer posted a black-and-white photo to Instagram. It features her sitting before a piano at Ocean Sound Recordings, a studio that offers extraordinary views of the Norwegian Sea from most of its windows. For her growing legion of fans, this simple image — a young woman in the act of creation — offers the first proof of her work ­towards a hotly anticipated debut album.

How does it feel to go from unknown to well-known in a year? “It’s a really weird thought,” she replies with a laugh. “It’s a huge honour that people are excited. It makes me really happy.” Stranger still is the fact she’s a global pop star in the making, despite having released just six songs — one of which is a sparse cover of the Leonard Cohen song Everybody Knows, recorded for the Justice League film soundtrack. At very least it makes for amusing dinner table conversation in Alesund with her family, who are just as surprised and fascinated by her sudden success as the musician herself.

In February last year Sigrid released her first single, Don’t Kill My Vibe, whose lyrics offer a relatable, defiant middle finger to anyone who has been underestimated. “You think you’re so important to me, don’t you?” she sings sweetly, with her Norwegian accent adding a unique colour to the phrasing. “But I wanted you to know that you don’t belong here.”

This track was inspired by an earlier songwriting session with some middle-aged men who didn’t listen to her and who thought they knew better than their young collaborator. ­Evidently they were wrong.

“A lot of my songs are a bit like elegant f..k-you anthems,” she says with a laugh. “I try to be honest. I just make the music that I would listen to, if it wasn’t me singing.”

By turning a negative emotional experience into a positive pop song, Sigrid evidently struck a chord. The popularity of Don’t Kill My Vibe — as well as her newest single, Strangers — is part of the reason she is about to undertake a small-scale international tour that will include dozens of shows in Britain and the US, following four shows in Australia and New Zealand.

Her sudden fame is emblematic of how platforms such as Spotify and YouTube can help to break an artist without relying on traditional gatekeepers.

“I don’t know how it was to be an artist before streaming, and before the full-on globalisation [of music], but I’ve heard from other people that it was more common to work one territory for a long time, and then you moved on to the second one,” she says. “Now, you can go everywhere at the same time; you can release it, and then see the power of statistics.”

In that sense, Sigrid’s statistics are formidable: so far the EP’s four tracks have been streamed a combined total of 68 million times on Spotify, while the handful of videos at her YouTube account have attracted 27 million plays to date.

Despite such demand, and the lure of capitalising on the global interest as quickly as possible, self-care is a high priority. “It’s easy to work too much,” she says. “Me and my team are really careful with that. You don’t want to kill yourself by going on too many aeroplanes.”

One downside to her success is the distance she now feels from her idyllic upbringing. Too many tall buildings; not enough Norwegian woods. Hence the New Year’s Eve escape, and why she loves the isolation of Ocean Sound Recordings, which must surely rank among the world’s most striking locations for a studio.

“It’s on an island that looks like a pancake; it’s very flat and it’s in the middle of the ocean,” she says. “I love the fact that you’re so disconnected from the rest of the world. I love disappearing into music, and it’s easy to do out there because there’s nothing else to do.”

If last year was life-changing for Sigrid, it appears that this year is on track to spur yet more ­tumult. In January she won the BBC’s Sound of 2018, an annual poll of music critics and industry figures whose previous winners include Adele and Sam Smith. While she regularly works with co-writers and producers, she insists on creative control of her pop music career — a difficult and admirable aspiration.

“I would never put out or promote anything that doesn’t feel 100 per cent me,” she says. “It must be really, really difficult to promote a song or image that you don’t love. That’s why I’m also quite stripped back with my clothing and my make-up. When I’m on stage, I don’t want to think about what I’m wearing. I just want to dance and have fun, and play my music.”

While her first Australian show took place in Brisbane yesterday, audiences in Sydney and Melbourne still have a chance to see Sigrid. Given the rapid ascent of her career in the past 12 months, this tour just may be the last chance to bear witness before she becomes a household name playing arena shows, like some of her fellow mononyms.

Sigrid performs at Sydney City Limits festival today, and in Melbourne on Wednesday.