In the past two years, the Norwegian singer-songwriter has reclaimed her electro-pop queen persona at an international jazz event, and performed a suite with organ from behind her audience, so it shouldn’t be surprising that she would respond to the prospect of a bourgeois music festival on a blissful summer’s day by leading us into the darkness.
“The sun smiles,” she writes on her Instagram, beneath one of those distinctive Piknik i Parken graphics, “the summer warms, but in our hearts we feel a sadness. A sadness over a world that is moving more and more towards evil and meaninglessness, polarisation, manipulation and powerlessness … You are allowed to cry, beautiful, wonderful people. See you in a few hours.”
As I wrote last year, after seeing (or rather hearing) her church shows, such feats of unexpected curation might be mistaken for sheer contrarianism, but it isn’t that. It’s something far deeper. It is honesty; an artistic integrity that would pass my most stringent adolescent checks. And a flair – surely unmatched in contemporary music – for mining and repurposing her canon to meet the moment.
Piknik i Parken is relaxed and stylised: an escapist fantasy with that corporatist edge we try to accept as a trade-off. The crowd drifts as one, to one stage or the other, resembling a happy cloud, then queues for street food. The organisers certainly make the scene pretty: you go through the ticket checks and straight through a little welcome arch draped with paper tassels; and while there’s a logo above your head too – it’s meant for photos on socials – the kids being carried in loved it tickling their hair, and I loved it too. And yes, you have to pour away your water to “save us from having to get it tested”, in case we’ve come to Oslo to microdose, but they let you fill it up inside. As I approached the park, I could hear someone singing in Sami, but it couldn’t be… surely? Thing is, no-one sounds like that except the vocalist from ISÁK, a tiny Norwegian band (2017-23) that I always loved but never got to see live. But yes, incredibly, in one of those small miracles, the warm-up act is Ella Marie (Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen), and fuck me if she isn’t the single best support act I’ve ever seen: high kicks and shredding guitars and electro thumps and synchronised dance moves, all in the service of preserving and protecting indigenous culture. She sings a yoik in tribute to a free Palestine (accompanied by a mass choir), does a spellbinding number a capella, and then explodes into the Lemaitre remix of ‘Gii Gielista’ (‘Who Lies’) – surely the best song of this year – climbing down onto the speakers beyond the stage to vanish the distance between audience and artist. And who could ever hope to follow that? Well…
And yet the word that keeps coming to me is ‘directness’. Because this show isn’t escapism, it’s engagement. It is carving out a home in the darkness: realising that there is beauty in pain, and humanity in the bleakest corners of the world.
It is Sundfør repeatedly breaking off during ‘blómi’ to connect explicitly and directly with the audience in the here and now: in this park, yes, but in this political moment too. She teases out new intricacies in the music – “love” has two syllables falling across three notes – but it isn’t enough for her. “Hold on… Oslo… ho-o-o-ld on,” she sings, “my loves, my loves…” The pluralisation wraps us all in love. She pauses then, asks a single spoken question. “Are you holding on?”
It is ‘The Sound of War’ too – a 2017 track inspired partly by a BBC report about Gaza – which is sung with a startling sincerity and, yes, directness, rendering its abstract words utterly transparent, as it breaks down into a ferocious new extended outro.
It is ‘Accelerate’, exhumed last year and now a mainstay again, throbbing with caustic anger, touched with the transcendence of hedonism, and climaxing with a line of profound ambivalence, which here is simply yelled into the sky: “Let’s have fun! Let’s have fun!”
And it is ‘Memorial’ – which sometimes feels like my favourite of Sundfør songs. It is the centrepiece of this century’s best record (2015’s Ten Love Songs), and, like its album-mate ‘Accelerate’, returned to her repertoire last summer after almost a decade away. It is a startlingly intimate song, an elegy for a relationship, hinging on a desperate wish (“Hope you’ll come back again”) that we don’t want to see fulfilled (“Even though I know, you are heartless”) because of an unshakable image of casual cruelty (“’Cause you took off my dress/And you never put it on again”). On record, Sundfør begins the song in the most epic vein imaginable – “Blasting, blasing/Stars exploding/A cosmic war, raging in the sky” – before revealing that this apocalyptic conflict isn’t a metaphor or a dual narrative, it’s just a backdrop. What is most extraordinary, though, hearing the song live for the first time, as I feel the tears pricking my eyes, is how through an act of vocal metamorphosis, Sundfør transmogrifies ‘Memorial’ into a memorial for whatever is lost. The dress on the floor is a dress, but it is everything else too.
And when she sings it on this afternoon in Sofiensbergparken in Oslo, she finds new shadings in every part. I’ve always loved the way she sarcastically tosses out the mantra of the pseudo-intellectual cynic (“It’s overrated/It doesn’t do it for me”), but here the deadpan delivery is replaced by a wail from the depth of the heart: recognising the tragedy of a failure to connect (with art, with life). And then she’s off, the phrasing of each line delicately reimagined, until she blasts into the wounded grandeur of that perfect line: “But all I ever wanted was for you to want me.” Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be leaning against the barrier at that moment was something else entirely. The song starts to wind conversationally around a repeated figure, the pedal steel comes in like tears, and Sundfør gives up on words entirely as she harmonises with it. Then: the realisation, and the pledge, “You won't come back again/Even if the world should end/Still, I would never let anybody else come in”. And the oblivious breeze of a summer’s day sends the dry ice lifting across the stage.
That’s the directness, then, but the darkness is here too. They all wear black, and when they start, it’s with ‘Diamonds’, a spiky, disquieting song from The Silicone Veil, from that period in 2008-12 when Sundfør knew precisely where the tunes were but didn’t feel like making it easy on us, or making them sweet. You had to earn your release. It’s an explosive opening to the show, and is followed by ‘White Foxes’, which was once her standard encore, and her signature tune, and is done here in a familiar reading, just with its aggressiveness dialled up. After The Silicone Veil, Sundfør, now in Dalston, drinking and smoking too much, working to a bone-deep exhaustion, piled her genius and her formidable work ethic into Ten Love Songs. Perhaps the record was too raw emotionally, perhaps it was too far from the folk milieu she retreated to (and folk can be the purest retreat you can find), but by 2017 she was barely playing a song from the record (just ‘Trust Me’, as an encore, at Union Chapel); the following year she performed nothing but newer songs. When Ten Love Songs was mentioned in interviews, she would refer to the album as if it were a mathematical experiment in creating sonic progressions pleasing to the brain.
Last year, though, she said in an Instagram Q&A that it was her favourite of her records. Today she plays a full half of it, but just two songs from the following album, and one from the most recent. The first of her Five Love Songs here is ‘Kamikaze’, which when I first heard it brought to mind John Peel’s immortal observation (about the Bluetones’ ‘Slight Return’, as it happens) about how some songs sound like you’ve known them all your life. It is the purest and most insistent of her dance tunes, and in Sofienbergparken she finds new notes in the chorus, disrupting, subverting and enhancing a melody we thought was unimprovable. Later she’ll play ‘Accelerate’ – slapping herself with a tambourine while apparently inhabited by the spirit of a horny W. H. Auden (“Stop the clock/Whatever turns you on!”) – then segue straight into ‘Fade Away’, with its cash-register ping and unutterably gorgeous bridge (“This is the kind of love that never goes out of style…”). She will sing ‘Memorial’, a break-up extrapolated into a requiem, and then, incredibly, break out the hostile, ominous ‘Insects’ for the first time since she first toured the album. “Come join me in the darkness”? She wasn’t joking.
‘Kamikaze’ is followed, though, by a desperately vulnerable version of ‘When’ (from The Silicone Veil), its tune far closer to the studio version than the one we got at the church shows (where it was a highlight), but even then there are innovations: a framing device utilising the four backing singers, who join her in adding an intro in Norwegian, and return to repeat the song’s central question as a coda.
There is just one more song. I always think there’s something fitting about the fact that, if Sundfør ever does an encore, it tends to be just one song. You are left, in the showbiz parlance, wanting more – of course you are – yet there is a perfect classical simplicity to it.
She wanted to do “something special” today, she says in Norwegian. Special hardly describes what follows. She spins Jørn Hoel’s ‘80s synth ballad, ‘Har En Drøm’ (‘Have a Dream’) into what sounds like an ancient folk song, her heart wide open. In restyling it, she retreats from the regimented cacophony of electro, with its connotations of urban progress, into the gentle chaos of traditional music, just as she did in 2017 with Music for People in Trouble. Sundfør told me in our interview, though, that the octave-spanning pyrotechnics of ‘Undercover’ or ‘Mountaineers’ on that record were “not my proudest achievements vocally – that’s, like, just screaming”, and you get the sense that climbing into a song she deeply loves, and singing it with a specific and yet limitless emotionalism, is when she feels most gifted as a vocalist. Sparring with her backing singer here, she breaks off briefly for the return of the pedal steel – aching, yearning, weeping – and then returns, beginning to build slowly in intensity, placing the full power of her lungs behind those climactic words, “Har en drøm om et ainna land/Og en lengsel øm og stor” (“Have a dream of another country/And a longing tender and great”).
Have I ever had a better 15 minutes at a show than ‘Insects’ into ‘Mountaineers’ into ‘Har En Drøm’? It seems unlikely.
Yet there is a line I keep thinking about in Sundfør’s pre-show piece: “The sadness is also here, and the sadness should be heard and acknowledged.” At times I feel angry – perhaps ‘frustrated’ is the most accurate word, if you take that word to its literal extreme – about being ill. And certainly I feel angry – and impotent, and betrayed – when I look at the world. But those feelings are, mostly, just a useful and evasive mask for what I actually feel, which is sadness. It can take a therapist to guide you to those realisations, but sometimes it can take an artist.
And there is, simply, nobody who is trying anything remotely comparable to what Susanne Sundfør has been doing since her return from self-imposed exile in 2023: crafting each sporadic appearance to fit the times – an hour-long, organ-led meditation; a thumping electro-pop show designed to reduce you to tears. It is frankly amazing what she can do with her oeuvre, and with a musicality that is both utterly instinctive – as she dives into the unknown, rewriting and reimaging her melodies in real time – and studiedly calculated, fashioning what is essentially a new, conceptual approach to live music.
“The sun is forecast,” Sundfør had said, “but we will bathe in the night.”
How we did.
***
SETLIST
Diamonds
White Foxes
Kamikaze
When
Lullaby
Memorial
Accelerate
Fade Away
The Sound of War
blómi (with Rohey Taalah)
Insects
Mountaineers
Encore:
Har en drøm (Jørn Hoel cover)
***
Thanks for reading.
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