Frank's Diary: City Summertime and Whatever's in the Water Up North.
Entry #1: Let's get down to business.
On the third day of June, the city begins its slow, sweltering melt. For the first time in months, I can bare my calves on the fifteen-or-so minute walk from the East Village to the library and abandon 4 pm sunsets and nights boiling pasta with Lawrence English drones lulling me into that sort of trance-like autopilot you can only really describe when you’re in it. I’ve got loads to discuss both about English shredding 132-year-old pipe organs and experiencing long dissociations during winter depression, no doubt for another conversation. In the meantime, the light is back and I have missed distinct melodies dearly.
I crave bright, broad sounds when the sun hits with a burn. Songs that sound like they could take up space if they were physically manifested or grow a flower through a piece of concrete; you know, Lorax style.
This summer, I’ve been siding with songs that sound like they gleam, perhaps a reflection of their place of origin. In such regard, I’ve noticed that a handful of my recent favorite relics happen to be the product of an abrupt, albeit delicate Nordic soundscape renaissance.
From an ultra-mega-non-Nordic perspective, when I think of that part of the world, I never have a cell phone. There is always a tree taller than a skyscraper within eyeshot and the air smells like petrichor and sea mist depending on the forecast. There’s a constant ringing ambiance of a flowing creek and the moss on the rocks lining it make the surroundings look like they can breathe. The mycelium in the grasses exist in colors you never thought naturally feasible, crawling with caterpillars, and look like they’d fry the shit out of your cerebellum.
Such conclusions I have drawn purely from a collective listening experience considering I have never actually been to a Nordic country a day in my life, much less heavily considered them a musical superpower beyond the Björk and Robyn of it all.
Nevertheless, in this installation, I present eight fabulous musicians whose work has made a very muggy New York City feel like this envisaged, biotic, sparkly Nordic fantasy of mine.
Fine: Copenhagen-based composer and producer Fine Glindvad Jensen makes a bright, loud bassline whisper. Perhaps these are all silly contradictions, but “gentle hard hitter” is a label that is the closest description I could give to a first-time listener keen on a new-wave experimental outreach, yet still grounded in the singer-songwriter roots of it all. Her 2024 “Rocky Mountain Ballads” see personalized MIDI-saturated strings flying in somber surf-rock cycles, her classical training beaming, though meticulously synthesized (Fine formerly studied at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Musical Conservatory—one of three alumni on this list.)
Erika de Casier: Newly independent, Erika de Casier persists in proving that she was born to push cross-genre sounds of swagger, sensuality, and the sting of lost moments once considered ideal. Her most recent conquer? A trip-hop, R&B fusion flow that is equally cohesive as it is a supernova in its own galaxy. My first listen, specifically the track “You Got It!” transported me Rayven Symone flashback style to Sneaker Pimps' “Becoming X” era, specifically “6 Underground,” only De Casier fills empty space with to-the-point percussion, airy backing arpeggios, and conversational, at times prophetic lyricism.
Okay Kaya: “Can U Not” found me many years ago driving home from a science exam gone typically abysmal. I was driving in my 2016 Subaru Outback, defeated yet unsurprised at my attempts to use stoichiometry to convert my units. The opening single-tone drone of this track is an ear-perker. Its simplicity is almost frustrating, her self-layered vocal performance reciting a daily routine and one’s minimal relationship expectations is alarmingly evocative. Since 2018, the Norwegian singer-songwriter has had hits flowing from her ears, ones of note including another 2018 buildup banger-ballad “Habitual Love” along with the ever-whimsical spoken word singalong hybrid “Mother Nature’s Bitch.”
Astrid Sonne: “Wait, the melody is the percussion” is something I probably should have noticed after my second or third listen of “Staying Here,” track 7 of Sonne’s now-year-old LP “Great Doubt.” Seamless is the construction of her tracklist in that it’s as jagged as it is sensical. It’s like if you had a quarter that landed on a different side after every flip and either you’re getting drubbed by room-thronging strings and vocals that bridge a spoken cadence, or it’s layered, delicate, ambient beats with crooning vocals that hardly seem to pass the lip.
ML Buch: Marie Louise Buch’s guttural guitars work themselves into arrangements that, as her 2023 album cover suggests, could manipulate sunlight. “Suntub” is, to me, a near-summit of Copenhagen soft-rock, a geo-genre that, based on this list alone, is completely stacked. I accidentally sleep-streamed “Dust Beam” 182 times in a night inevitably putting my Spotify wrapped on overdraft but it would be remiss not to mention that it is one of the most strangely devastating instrumentals of the 2020s, especially for being only two minutes long.
Miynt: By far my most recent selection on this list, “Something in the Way You Move” literally appeared on my Spotify recommended while shuffling through some of the other artists on this list. Since then, her newest LP “Rain Money Dogs” has dropped, a collection of indie-analog rock sounds all products of squirrel watching and existing in the natural world. That process alone should lend itself to the sound. It’s a super pleasant listen.
Smerz: Slow ambient burns, art-pop catwalk sleaze, and audio hangovers abound. Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s sophomore LP “Big City Life” pays homage to the red-light-green-light essence of urban existence with the same buzz you get after burning your first cigarette in a couple months. Chaotic and calculated, this full-length follow-up is major, and the future is burning bright.
Jenny Hval: Hval describes her latest record “Iris Silver Mist” as a continuous flow of ideas created in a moment of musical absence. Indeed, each track glides wild and free like a deep breath in an attempt to recognize a foreign scent. For those unaware, “Iris Silver Mist” is a perfume by Serge Lutens, a keepsake Hval says was the catalyst to the project’s birth. Like perfume, each track is ephemeral, layered, and blatantly different. Like much of her work before (her 2019 album “The Practice of Love” went triple diamond in this household) it is another triumph for the Jenny-verse.