This summer one song is everywhere. Don’t Kill My Vibe is a festival-friendly anthem that just works: a gentle melody in the verse, a bold singalong chorus, and words about standing up for yourself while telling others not to kill something that matters to you — namely, your vibe. You would expect this solid-gold pop nugget to have come from a highly polished American diva such as Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. That it is the product of an unassuming 20-year-old Norwegian from a remote coastal town makes Don’t Kill My Vibe all the more remarkable.
“It could be about someone’s boyfriend, girlfriend, friend, co-worker, whatever,” says Sigrid Raabe about the song that took her out of provincial Alesund and into a whirlwind of jet lag, television and concert appearances, and people like me wanting to talk to her.
“It started out as a ballad, a sad song. But we got to the chorus and thought, ‘We need a big production here, big drums.’ And then it became a positive anthem about me speaking up for myself. That’s why it means so much when people tell me the song is about their relationship with their ex or something. The words are personal to me, but general, so they can become personal for other people too.”
We are sitting on folding chairs in a small canvas tent in the backstage area at Glastonbury festival, where Sigrid is due to perform in a couple of hours’ time. Tall and willowy, with a freckled, fresh-faced prettiness, she looks younger than her 20 years.
Coupled with a disarming courtesy — she gives effusive thanks for my wanting to talk to her, not something you hear from pop stars very often — you can see how older music industry figures might be tempted to patronise her, which is exactly what Don’t Kill My Vibe is about. She wrote the song after an early co-writing session proved disastrous, with expressions of frustration such as “You speak to me like I’m a child” coming directly from experience.
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“It was like I wasn’t wanted in the room and my opinions were not of any worth,” says Sigrid of the session with two older, professional songwriters that inspired Don’t Kill My Vibe. “It was hard to speak up because I was afraid I was overreacting, which is a typical label young people put on themselves. ‘Should I be angry now?’ I powered on through.
“Some time later I was in a much better session with [the Nordic pop songwriter] Martin Sjolie, and he asked me what I had been thinking about. I told him about the experience and how it had made me feel. So I can thank those people who patronised me, sort of.”
“I listened to Nirvana, Coldplay, the Kooks and the Arctic Monkeys without being sure what they were saying
According to Sigrid, becoming a hot new pop star with an indie sensibility and mainstream appeal was not manifest destiny. The daughter of an architect mother and an engineer father who played a lot of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young records in the house, she was seven when she took up the piano and 14 when, as part of a school project, she broke down Beyoncé songs and used them as the basis for her own compositions. She did not foresee herself making music in a professional capacity, though, claiming that her sister, working for an NGO in Madrid, was always the singer of the family.
“I didn’t grow up thinking, ‘I’ll be on that stage one day,’ ” says Sigrid. “Music was my free space, something I did on the side, just like every kid plays football or does dancing classes. I was going to apply for law school or become a teacher because travelling to the US to appear on James Corden’s show or to the UK to play Glastonbury is not something a girl from a small Norwegian town does.”
That small Norwegian town is rural, pretty and cold. “Alesund occupies five islands on the west coast, it has a population of 50,000, and you have the sea right next to mountains, so a lot of the landscape is very steep. But the cultural landscape is exploding because of a company called Momentum, which puts on a lot of concerts and festivals, and that gave me inspiration.”
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She adds, in a tone suggesting nothing could be a bigger deal: “We even had A-ha come to the town.”
Sigrid was 16 when her brother Tellef invited her to sing with his indie band, but only if she came up with some original material. The song she wrote, Sun, was picked up by national radio. It led to a deal with Petroleum, the same Norwegian label as Sigrid’s friend Aurora, who sang Oasis’s Half the World Away for the John Lewis 2015 Christmas advertisement. By 2016 word was out. Sigrid was hopping back and forth from Bergen, where she now lives, to London every week, doing co-writing sessions — including that fateful one — and being wined and dined by British labels while they waged a bidding war over her.
“That was the craziest period of my life. There were two weeks in July when I had label meetings every day. I was living in a corporate business hotel in King’s Cross, and I would come back each evening and tell the staff how the meetings went.”
Wasn’t it a lot for a 19-year-old from a small town to take on? “I am very young and I was abroad too, so yes, it could be overwhelming. Now the most challenging thing is the time zones. It is stressful to travel to the US four times in five weeks, just back and forth, and your world is not your world any more. But I have group chats with my family four times a day and in Bergen I share a flat with my best friend, where we will just lie on the couch in woollen tights, watching Netflix. The positive side of doing this outshines the bad, 100 per cent.”
According to Darcus Beese, the president of Island Records UK, “there are some acts you sign where it’s just a one-song listen”, and Sigrid was one. She came into Island’s offices on Kensington High Street in London and sang two songs, Don’t Kill My Vibe and Dynamite, acoustically. That was enough to get her the deal. Beese compares seeing Sigrid in concert to the first time he saw Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine and not being able to put his finger on the appeal, but thinking: “I just know she’s a star.”
“I was going to apply for law school — or become a teacher
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At Glastonbury’s Park stage later that afternoon, Sigrid does indeed look like a star. Dressed simply in a white T-shirt, red jeans and Nike trainers, long brown hair pulled into a ponytail, she dances in an angular, practised way that evokes hip-hop bravado and the choreographed innocence of an end-of-term pageant.
Don’t Kill My Vibe is the big one, but Fake Friends, about people letting you down, Plot Twist, on getting over an early love affair, and Dynamite, which she wrote while missing her family, are highlights too. Yet it is Sigrid’s charisma that shines through. Bold, smart and approachable, she seems so much more natural than your average pop star.
“I did think carefully about how I wanted to present myself,” she says. “I love Wes Anderson. Moonrise Kingdom is my favourite film, alongside Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola and Her by Spike Jonze, so they are all influences. And musically, Don’t Kill My Vibe was the moment I found my sound because it felt like a cool blend of my singer-songwriter roots with big pop choruses. I love indie and grime music, but I’m just a chorus girl at heart.”
Sigrid doesn’t hang around long enough at Glastonbury to pitch a tent near the composting toilets and check out the latest acts. She has to get back to Bergen to work on songs for a forthcoming debut album. Before she goes, I ask her to shine a light on a long-held mystery. Why do Scandinavian countries produce so much pop music, from Abba to A-ha to Sigrid?
“I think it is because we grew up listening to American and British music without quite understanding the lyrics, so we focused on the vocal melodies,” she offers. “I did not understand Adele’s Rolling in the Deep, but I loved the tune. I listened to Nirvana, Coldplay, the Kooks and the Arctic Monkeys without being quite sure of what they were saying. That means we became good at melodies ourselves.”
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I thought it was because of the weather. It rains so much in Norway, there isn’t much to do but stay indoors and write a global smash hit.
She thinks on this for a moment, before replying: “Maybe that too.”
Don’t Kill My Vibe is out now. Sigrid is at the Scala, London, September 13 and 14
Songs of the summer
● Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, featuring Justin Bieber
If one song is going to evoke the bittersweet memories of evenings spent drinking too much sangria and kissing someone you shouldn’t have at that Andalusian disco in summer 2017, it is this. From a Puerto Rican crooner, a reggaeton (Latin hip-hop) rapper and North America’s own superbrat comes the biggest foreign-language hit since 1996’s Macarena: undeniably cheesy, irresistibly joyful, utterly inescapable.
● Green Light by Lorde
Featuring one of the greatest choral uplifts in modern pop, and lyrics capturing that conflicting feeling of freedom and grief that heartbreak brings, the comeback single by the 20-year-old New Zealander Lorde was inspired by the end of her first serious relationship. After a holiday bust-up, a make-up and at least one box of wine downed over an evening, this is the song you’ll want to dance round the pool to.
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● Want You Back by Haim
Haven’t got the time or money for that much dreamt-of California road trip? This is the next best thing: a glossy pop rocker from Los Angeles’s Haim sisters, who channel the spirit of Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac into a catchy three-minute apology for an indiscretion. You’ll want to listen to this while driving along in your automobile, even if that automobile is stuck in a jam on the A303 outside Wincanton. In the rain.
● Summer Bummer by Lana Del Rey
It’s not all fun in the sun. In fact, when friends are firing off Instagram dispatches from a gorgeous villa in Tuscany while your version of alfresco living means sitting in the park and watching the wasps attack your Cornetto, summer can be the worst season of the year. Thank heavens, then, for Lana Del Rey, bringing her trademark sexualised misery to this hip-hop-tinged tale of unrequited passion.
● Loyalty by Kendrick Lamar featuring Rihanna
Rap genius Lamar’s songs are more likely to accompany lengthy treatises on race and identity than a beachside barbecue, but something about Rihanna’s sultry contribution makes this blend of pop, funk and hip-hop an appealing summer jam.
