“It is His office to save us”: Susanne Sundfør at Palmehaven, Trondheim

28 February 2026 (evening)

We are, somewhat incongruously, in a hotel restaurant when Susanne Sundfør makes another dart towards the eternal.

Norwegian pop music’s errant genius has done many confounding – and utterly apposite – things since swerving away from the fame game in 2018: going back to school to study psychology, performing behind her audience during the now near-mythic ‘church shows’ of 2024, and treating Oslo’s sunny Piknik i Parken festival as the ideal setting in which to reintroduce us to the malevolent throbbing of her song, ‘Insects’. But a forthcoming album in which she sets the 14th century religious writings of Julian of Norwich to music is, I think we can safely say, not what many of the other leading figures of the 2010s electro-pop scene are currently working on.

It gives us five minutes of breathtaking beauty at the heart of this show, in the shape of ‘Blessed Wounds’.

For me, hearing – and listening to – Sundfør’s voice is a religious experience. I don’t mean in the evasive secular sense, whereby art and human beauty are meant to replace God. I mean that I find her voice and the idea of God indivisible. I feel God’s hand in her music, glimpse him in the places she goes. Her voice does many things during this show, but ‘Blessed Wounds’, adapted from Revelations of Divine Love, finds her miraculous gift at its clearest and most simply beautiful. “It is His office to save us,” she sings, lifting you way above. Then her voice starts to soar too.

I work in a venue and see quite a lot of shows. Last year I bopped to Annie Lennox, shadow-boxed to Public Enemy, grooved to BANKS. But for me, while the effect of most gigs is pleasant, even rousing, it's also on some level superficial. The two artists who bless me with transcendence, who drag me out of the mire and drop me onto some higher plane, like an eagle nicking a baby in an early silent film, are Susanne Sundfør and Adrianne Lenker. They don’t actually have much in common, aside from an initial acquaintance with the folk milieu, and a quicksilver connection to the vastness of existence. But one has a turn of phrase akin to having the back of your head unscrewed. The other can do things with her voice that make Roy Orbison sound like Damon Albarn.

Today that voice is filling Palmehaven, which is as handsome as a hotel restaurant is ever likely to get. It has a sunken floor with a central fountain, a mock skylight filled with glittering stars, and palms that appear to be getting in some people’s way. For this show, an obligatory three-course meal is provided with every ticket (I was granted an alternative to the reindeer main). I can, with force of will and a favourable wind, zone into an experience and live there, but the bass pulsing through to the venue from the hotel bar next door, and the occasional clatter of crockery being collected, still seems an odd way for the world to interact with incalculable beauty. It’s like if Robert Kennedy’s Aeschylus peroration upon the death of Martin Luther King had been interrupted by someone playing Mambo No. 5 on their phone.

For this show, the final one of a short run of four dine-then-listen concerts, Sundfør is joined by her husband, jazz musician André Roligheten, who will play around her melodies in apparently semi-improvised style, slipping into keys and flights of avant garde fancy that I can enjoy without even beginning to understand them on anything but an emotional level.

Sundfør starts the concert, appropriately enough, with the words, “Holy, holy, holy one”, the opening salvo of ‘ashera’s song’, from 2023, which she wrote for their young daughter. Along with ‘When the Lord’ – the only song proper that Sundfør released during her five-year hiatus from 2018 – it seemed to point to a new spirituality, and the flowering of another side of her artistry, and person. She writes in her hymn to Roligheten (‘alyosha’) that he is “a man of faith”, and of quiet prayers. I wouldn’t presume to know, and actually don’t think it’s important, whether her devotional music is underpinned by specific religious convictions of her own. What’s critical is the questing sincerity that flows through it like a river.

For its part, ‘ashera’s song’ gives a lie to the (awful! Sexist! Kid-phobic! ‘70s-coded! Farcically still expressed today!) idea that parental odes are a baneful chore for the listener. This one is an elusive slip of a song that snakes past, showering you with sparks. Sundfør’s shows always have a narrative built into their setlist and heightened by performance, often travelling (as single songs like ‘Mountaineers’ and ‘Trust Me’ do) from something unresolved in theme and tune to a place of escape. At sit-down, scaled-down, stripped-down shows like this one, she always loves playing ‘Bedtime Story’ from Music for People in Trouble (2017). Synths are for summer festivals. Here the business is to rip away everything, to the point of purity, then complicate what remains with free jazz flourishes. Starting the show at the grand piano, dressed comfortably all in black, her hair back to its natural dusty brown, Sundfør's latest reading of the song hurls its dynamics in wild new directions. Her voice is climbing in a way it never previously has while telling this bedtime story, rendering its tale misleading, and its narrator lofty and cunning. She lollops languidly into a postmodern playfulness on “You know the chord before it’s played”, before signing off in wearily philosophical style. That’s the cue for Roligheten to break into a clarinet solo with shades of the 2018 full-album tour, where such semi-improvised pieces linked the songs, and turned the record into a suite.

That tour was also a memorable showcase for ‘The Sound of War’, which comes next in Trondheim. Sundfør wrote it after watching a BBC documentary on Gaza, and of late has been programming the song relentlessly, and performing it with startling urgency. As in 2018, she accompanies herself solo on guitar, but here the inflections flirt with Flamenco. It is such a formally clever song, especially in this detailed arrangement (necessarily absent the sonic explosions punctuating the full-band version). Her vocal trills oscillate between notes that call to mind the ‘red blinking Zion’ of its climax, yet that later part is built instead around a drone sound – emitted in Palmehaven by her collaborator – unlike the section that deals explicitly with drone warfare. It is a showcase for almost every part and virtue of her voice. She falls onto a blue note on “the snow… falls down”, pins you back with slow-mounting power, then flies into her head voice.

One miraculous thing about Sundfør as an artist is that restless imagination and invention: that sheer reluctance to ever sing a line the same way twice (something she has in common with the great jazz and soul vocalists, and in the folk world with Sandy Denny). That comes to mind especially in the case of ‘Can You Feel the Thunder’ (always just ‘Thunder’, on her printed setlist). This portrait of a matador was a decent album track in 2012 that in its recent live iterations ranks with the greatest songs ever written. You could argue that her performance at the Drammen church show was definitive, but the more profound joy lies in the fact that, like any Sundfør gig, each one is the greatest in a different way. Built here around insistent, driving piano arpeggios, it spotlights The Silicone Veil’s smirking refusal to simplify any tune into the straightforwardly pretty, yet its jagged magnificence gets its estoque into you. It is a stunning version: her voice at its most metallic, the aural equivalent of licking aluminium, before it flashes silver and morphs into gold.

She follows it with ‘blómi’, the title track of her last record, and a song of which she’s clearly proud, performing it at climactic moments in each of the six shows I’ve seen her play since she released the album. Each time she teases out different inflections, different meanings from now familiar lines. How many different ways can a woman sing the words “in love”, which here are flushed with warmth? She wrings such emotion from the cryptic promise “that the ladies in black will wear white again”, by first landing on and then tossing off this outrageously unexpected succession of notes. Yes, as an audience member you are an emotional wreck, but also sit slack-jawed in amazement. Now she’s scatting, and clearly in the moment, dancing in and out of her accompaniest’s melody. The audience reaction is explosive, and she closes the song with a satisfied and knowing smile.

It's at this moment that Sundfør invites Julian of Norwich up onto the stage, in a manner of speaking. Hearing a new Sundfør composition for the first time is such a special feeling, and ‘What Are We’ – the title track of her upcoming record, and the first of the night's two new songs – shows the extraordinary potential in marrying these words to this artist. It is also the first number of the night to combine only clarinet and voice, the arrangement seeming to resemble the mic stand in front of Sundfør, with her vocal strong and straight, and the brass notes twining around it like a cord. The music industry is calculating and money-minded at the best of times, and one gets the impression that after the gold records and domestic awards of Sundfør's early years, it had a path all mapped out for her. She has followed her instincts instead; one is tempted to say her heart.

'What Are We's glimpse of a shimmering future is followed by the first two songs from Sundfør's 2017 album (in the end, nine of the night’s 11 songs come from her last two records or her next one). ‘Mantra’, also performed to clarinet accompaniment, has swelled over time to become one of my favourite Sundfør songs, her increasingly esoteric line readings pulling a simple folk song of crows and meadows into this surreal and irregular jazz world populated by weird pauses and melodic leaps into the unknown. She sings it with her eyes closed, in a version that seems to levitate. (See opening image above.)

As on the album, ‘Reincarnation’ comes next. “'K,” says Sundfør with an audial shrug, after retuning, before casually casting off a heartstopping version. “Oh I’m a bad girl,” she unforgettably intones, “’cause I turned the bad world into a crystal pearl”, a piece of deadpan sensuality that identifies her artistic virtue, having elliptically misstated the conclusion. Her fingerpicking accompaniment has these sixth-string bass notes that roll in with the inevitability of a punchline, though it’s the final verse that takes the song somewhere new: a reimagined melodic line in which she proves that she can hum twice as well as anyone else can sing. I’ve tried to express this in more high-minded ways so far, but it’s worth saying it plainly: imagine being this talented, what the fuck.

This feeling is further compounded by the introduction of ‘Blessed Wounds’, an astonishing new song. Sundfør introduces it by squinting at the handwritten lyrics on the piano rack and explaining that without them she’ll risk having to break into “la la la”s and “yeah yeah”s (famously not canon for Julian of Norwich). Such music-hall business gives way to a performance of virtuosic ambition. A showstopper that is also church music. A song of wonder and profound spiritual clarity, two pianos beneath a hand that is reaching across centuries. I feel my soul ascend. It seems wholly inappropriate to holler loutishly in response, so I refrain, but the applause is endless.

Once it finally abates, Sundfør closes the main set with ‘fare thee well’, which took years to get how she wanted it, before premiering in 2023. It is perhaps the most conventional singer-songwriter material in her oeuvre, nodding to the Roud folk ballad, but in the clothes of a ‘70s West Coast anthem. Again, she has her eyes shut tight. It can be hard for nosy journalists to penetrate Sundfør’s armour of self-deprecation and resistance to easy sentiment (she has previously framed music as variously a scientific experiment and a type of play), yet it is just as hard for me at moments like this to believe that she does not feel to her very bones the emotions that she is raising in us.

Since there is no natural backstage area in what is, and I can’t stress this enough, a hotel restaurant, our performers thank the audience and then loiter in a corner for a few moments, before coming back.

Their encore is ‘Trust Me’, the final ballad on Sundfør’s greatest record (and one of my two favourite albums of all time, along with Suede’s Dog Man Star): 2015’s Ten Love Songs. As ‘Mountaineers’ would later, it rises from squalor to catharsis, fearlessness and release. “Nothing’s ever easy when you take ecstasy,” Sundfør opens conversationally this evening, before moving through defiance (“You cannot erase me … like they do in the movies”) to profundity: “Baby you can trust me/Send for the saint/Send for the doctor/And save yourself.” At Union Chapel in 2017, when the song was also her encore, she proceeded to head for the heavens. This time she gives us that incomparable head-voice before sliding back down into chest to tease out the strangeness of the song’s climactic offer. Throughout, she sits with her eyes closed, and the hands in her lap shaping the words: fashioning the complexity of the emotion, or else being buffeted by it. They spasm in tandem with the delicate frenzy of performance… perhaps. But I think the purpose is to lift her voice. The one that lifts us way above.

***

SETLIST:

ashera's song
Bedtime Story
The Sound of War
Can You Feel the Thunder
blómi
What Are We
Mantra
Reincarnation
Blessed Wounds
fare thee well

Encore:
Trust Me

***

Thanks for reading.

Memorial: Susanne Sundfør at Piknik i Parken, Oslo

12 June 2025

“Come join me in the darkness,” reads Susanne Sundfør’s introduction to her sun-baked headline slot at this cheery Oslo festival.

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…

“The word in the heart is ‘yes’,” says the sample from Sundfør’s song ‘orð hjartans’ that opens her set. It means something vast and abstruse to her, yet today it means something simple to me. I was born with an incurable auto-immune disease; sometimes I can’t travel; sometimes I can’t do much of anything at all. And sometimes I think, “I haven’t been well in a while, I haven’t been sleeping. But fuck it, I’m tired of illness, I’m going to Oslo to hear the most beautiful voice on earth.” If you’ve seen me in the 48 hours since, you’ll have noticed the stupid grin slapped across my face, the surest signifier of a blissful daze.

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.

Sundfør is seated at the piano, jagged red face paint slashed across her cheekbones. On the back of the instrument is a handwritten sticker reading, “MEAT IS A SUPERFOOD”, a characteristic doubling-down after the online abuse she received for saying she thought her newborn baby would benefit from eating protein. She has just had a second child, and announces that the glass of wine she’s drinking is her first since giving birth. There is the show’s theme, and then there is the performer, who is so completely assured that between songs she can seem airily carefree. On stage with her are two drummers, a bassist, a guitarist, two synth-players, four backing singers, and her husband: a jazz saxophonist who memorably augments ‘Accelerate’ with a purposefully strangulated, tortured solo. For the first four songs Sundfør sits at the stage’s extremities, seated behind keys. Then she moves to the centre, for ‘Lullaby’ (the sole song from 2008’s The Brothel), ‘Memorial’ and ‘The Sound of War’. After a plaintive, piano-led ‘blómi’, which becomes about us, before giving way to guest vocals from jazz vocalist Rohey Taalah at the central mic, Sundfør gets to her feet once more for ‘Insects’, and for ‘Mountaineers’, the greatest ever vehicle for the greatest voice I’ve ever heard. It is a song that takes you to a place you’ve never been before: out of the morass, away from the oil slicks, beyond the barren land, far from the boiling tar, and upwards to the wild wolves in the mountain tops, to the heavens, and to the one thing above that, the voice that soars over all. “I cannot help but marvel at the beauty before my eyes,” sings Sundfør. I know the feeling. She said when I interviewed her in 2023 that fully committing to the vocal demands of that song will wreck her voice for the rest of the day, and so when singing live she will sometimes ‘cheat’ it, but if she was cheating it here, she fooled me. Perhaps when it's your only show of the year, the fallout doesn't matter.

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.

Meditation in an emergency: Susanne Sundfør’s church shows

Tonsberg Domkirke, and Bragernes Kirke, Drammen, 23-24 March 2024

The conversational, or tabloid, or trivial version of the story is this: Susanne Sundfør is cool, and weird, and crucially a contrarian, the kind of contrarian who will invite fans to two intimate churches – and watch those fans scurry over from their remote outposts across the world, since she no longer plays outside Norway – and then spend the entire gig performing behind them; they in pews facing the altar, and she standing in the organ loft, emoting to their backs.

The longer and more honest version is that the Norwegian singer-songwriter is a restless and questing thinker – her Instagram stories an unstinting succession of photographs of paragraphs from dense and provocative non-fiction books – as well as an unapologetic gambler, a unique creative artist whose vision transcends expectations, outstrips her contemporaries, but carries her audience with her. She jumps, and the parachute opens. We’ve seen her do it so many times before.

‘Meditation in an Emergency’ (2012) was one of Sundfør’s most soothing instrumental works, and here, whatever the emergency – climate, though she says there’s much that can be done; cultural, though she treads a vertiginous path between its traps; social, which is what she stresses here, with the simple need to ‘be present’ – the escape route is the same.

“This concert is unusual, perhaps a little dogmatic,” she shrugs in her spoken introduction (in Norwegian the first night, in English the second). And so it is: a suite of six songs, dating from 2012 to present, re-arranged for organ and voice, and lasting an hour in total. Both musicians are unseen, the audience intended instead to meditate on the space and the sound that swells to fill it. Tonsberg Cathedral (accessible only be rail-replacement bus this weekend) is a small, beautiful, unpretentious church that seats around 250; Bragernes Kirke in Drammen can house a further 200, and comes with a more immersive AV experience, the lights dimmed, then cycling through the spectrum.

The results of all this are astounding: atavistic, exalting, eternal.

The first thing to say is simply that Sundfør has the single most beautiful voice I have ever heard – beyond Sandy, or Ferrier, or Sam Cooke, or Roy Orbison – and that to be in its presence, in its prime, feels like the most absurd privilege. More than that, though: she has an artistic restlessness exemplified by the way that, like Sandy, she sings every song differently every time, teasing out new intricacies, paraphrasing or ornamenting melodies, toying with meaning like a great Hamlet. On the first night, ‘Can You Feel the Thunder’, played for the first time in years, leaves you breathless and broken, its simple tale of a matador soaring in Tonsberg as it never did on record. The following evening, she tries something different with the song, injecting a panicked urgency, and the magic is partially lost, or else transferred to ‘When’ (also from The Silicone Veil (2012), which climbs out of the setlist, having reached a skeletal and stripped-back perfection. “You take what you can,” she says, falling onto a blue note that was never there before. From now until the end of the time, that performance will lie among my favourite memories.

In Tonsberg, I was sat next to two men who’d come from Poland and Slovakia especially for the show. “We’re Susanne superfans,” one said proudly, the most relatable thing anyone’s said to me in quite some time. He responded to music in the same way I do, which augmented the experience. Whenever Sundfør tossed off some moment of instinctive vocal witchcraft, he chuckled to himself and shook his head in wonderment, which is exactly how I feel. My head is in almost perpetual motion throughout these shows: amused by the inspiration, embracing the sorrow, then the catharsis. My neighbour also occasionally, whisperingly, took the Lord’s name in vain, which is a bit disrespectful in a church, though since God gave Sundfør that voice, I suppose we can let him off.

“I never even knew you were a man of faith, till I heard you whisper it,” Sundfør sang in 'alyosha', the lead single off her last album, and a song about her husband. Previously a mildly outspoken atheist, she has since segued from a (to borrow one of her favourite words) dogmatic belief in science to a more profound search for spirituality and wonder in both music and life – something we chatted about when I interviewed her last year. That search has led her here, and the way her art interacts with faith and God in these shows throws all kinds of interesting new light on the material.

That is most literal, in all ways, when she closes the main set with ‘When the Lord’, a devastating song written for the documentary Self Portrait (the only song, as such, that she released during her near-total hiatus between 2017 and 2023). In Tonsberg, the song stretches her head voice to the limit; in Drammen it’s in a different register, and at a different speed – surely the slowest anyone has sung in a church since the Trinity Sessions. “When the Lord has descended,” she wails, and the light a soft red on the crucified Christ hanging above the altar.

In a Catholic moment, I wrote in last year’s interview piece that those moments when Sundfør rips the top off her voice are “the closest thing in music to glimpsing God”, and the self-deprecating contrarian responsible for such flights of beauty blithely dismissed them as “just screaming”. Here, there was no distance between God and voice at all. I suppose I can summarise my faith by saying that I see the hand of God in things (a sentiment only partially spoiled by Maradona); in these shows, it rests on every moment.

At the close of the first night’s organ-and-voice suite, the audience rises to its feet, and gives her a thunderous ovation (the following night, she characterises this response as people thinking the show was over, and attempting to leave, which is no more than half-true). She sweeps down the aisle, black-and-white dress and re-brunetted hair streaming, organist Kit Downes alongside her, and closes with a single number in front of the altar: the title track of her most recent record, blómi (2023), featuring the most (indeed, only) whimsical organ accompaniment of the evening. She plays just seven songs – When the Lord, plus two each from three of her last four records, Ten Love Songs skipped after its lively supporting role in Bergen – in a performance that runs a little under 70 minutes, and yet it is one of the half-dozen greatest shows I’ve ever heard (‘seen’ doesn’t quite seem appropriate here), and my favourite since the Before Times.

While Sundfør can be evasive off stage, and passionately, dismissively resistant to any external interpretations of her work, what remains most exciting about her art – along with its strangeness, aside from That Voice – is her clandestine sincerity. She wants to do things that are true and different and meaningful and interesting and glorious and special and unusual, dragging her music into places (and spaces) where others fear to tread.

On the first night, you can turn and gawp at her if you have the gall and curiosity and social chutzpah; on the next, she is entirely invisible. That second show is the same but different, in the classic Sundfør style: same concept, same setlist and in the cosmic sense the same result – but play me any song from the soundboard and I’ll tell you which night it’s from.

The surface feeling at these shows is that you’re in the presence of a genius, whose instinctive understanding of music and melody is intellectually exhilarating, but all of that is subservient to something more primeval and important. The experience is – beyond anything else – deeply, deeply moving, emotionally overwhelming, in fact, stirring you somewhere far beneath your critical faculties, music history books or Pitchfork star ratings.

During the first show, Sundfør wavers on ‘Mantra’, compressing the melody into monotony – a playful drone – then stretching it in the oddest places. ‘ashera’s song’ is starkly meditative at first, before it begins to build. When a bloke from Nashville who’s come over for the Drammen show enthuses to me about her voice control, this is what he means: that blast of power, Sundfør’s gift wandering around the octaves, and with anyone else it would feel like showboating, but you get the sense she’s just searching for the truth of the song.

The next night, ‘Mantra’ becomes a hymn, and ‘ashera’s song’ a portal into the artist’s soul, her vulnerability all the more touching because it isn’t glimpsed too often.

The organ plays – a 10-minute improvisation to open, then bridging the gaps between songs – and you remember how key instrumentals are to the Sundfør oeuvre: her wordless concert album, (A Night at Salle Pleyel), the showy, off-kilter solos that pepper Live at the Barbican, the extended diversions in Memorial and The Sound of War (which gets a dazzling airing here, hanging hauntingly on its climactic line, “A red blinking Zion”), and the harpsichord coda she threw onto the end of her floorfilling electro-pop banger, Kamikaze. But for me it’s the voice. Isn’t it always. It weaves in and out, climbing towards the heavens.

And when she sings, nothing else matters.

***

Setlist:

[extended organ intro]
Mantra
ashera's song
Can You Feel the Thunder
When
The Sound of War
When the Lord

ENCORE:
blómi

Susanne Sundfør at Røkeriet, USF Verflet, Bergen

Friday 29 and Saturday 30 May 2023

Among the things we were least expecting from Susanne Sundfør’s new live show, Rebirth of the Electro Diva must have been pretty high on the list.

First of all, she is touring a new album, blómi, and the last time she toured a new album, she played the-new-album-and-nothing-else, unless you counted the improvised, double-bass-led improvisations linking each song to the next.

Secondly, she has characterised herself as a folk artist whose flirtations with electro-pop were little more than a mathematical digression: the solving of a series of sonic puzzles ultimately pleasing to the human brain.

Increasingly, she has looked to distance herself from that record, 2015’s Ten Love Songs, in which the sorrow is swamped by triumphal dance hooks, and apparently from the life that created it: living in Dalston, smoking and drinking too much, wrecking her voice, close to breaking point.

When she has played songs from the album on recent tours, it has tended to be the eerie or spectral ones – ‘Silence’ and ‘Trust Me’ – rather than the shimmering art-pop of ‘Fade Away’, or her femme fatale monsterpiece, ‘Delirious’.

And yet here she is, on stage at USF Verflet in Bergen – a former sardine factory repurposed as the city’s coolest venue – dancing sensually to four of Ten Love Songs’s floor-filling bangers, as the synths climb a stairway to paradise.

Perhaps that’s what happens when you ask a born contrarian to headline a jazz festival.

This is the kind of love that never goes out of style

As I wrote in this recent interview piece: in spring 2018, Sundfør seemed on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough. Then she effectively disappeared. In the intervening years, she has found love, started a family, struggled with anxiety, gone back to high school, and become enormously interested in regenerative farming. Now, finally, she has returned to music. Her first album in six years, blómi was released at the end of April, and she is toying with the idea of a European tour in 2024.

In the meantime, she is playing across her native Norway all summer. The first two shows were in Bergen, headlining the city’s Natt Jazz season just metres from the riverside studio where she recorded her debut album in 2007.

When Sundfør last performed in the UK, she wore a hooded black cloak, and had apparently smeared soot around her eyes, like a Scandi druid, or an urchin Zorro. This time she has newly bleached her hair, and is clad entirely in white, down to the high-heeled PVC boots she kicks off off-stage at the midway point, so as to dance barefoot.

Her mesmerising 2017 show at Union Chapel was a spare affair, featuring just one introverted co-conspirator. For these extravagant, joyous Bergen shows, her on-stage ensemble has swelled to 15, including a pedal steel guitarist, two synth players, five backing singers, and a multi-instrumentalist husband on sax-solo-and-choral-conductor duties.

Open your eyes and begin again

The first night is an invigorating work-in-progress: the thrill of the new, and the old made new, and just the old uncovered and embraced after years in hiding. The second show, which adds a single song – a new opener; Sundfør at the centre of a crescent of 12 vocalists for the handclaps and harmonies of leikara ljóð – is the actualisation of ambition: the art, with most of the wrinkles ironed out.

In common with another legendary vocalist, Sandy Denny, what’s most exciting about Sundfør is the questing restlessness of her invention. Every version of every song she sings is given some new inflection, some new paraphrasing or twisting or variation of melody that changes its feeling and meaning. If neither rendering of ‘Turkish Delight’ here sweeps you up in the same way as the studio version – the blissful simplicity of its third act replaced by something that in its sheer jazziness sounds depressed – the trade-off is in the way that so many other songs are transfigured live. Performing the title track of ‘blómi’, Sundfør chucks in vocal trills, unexpected pauses and head-voice ad-libs that stop you in your tracks. With ‘alyosha’ – the lead single off the album – she knows what she’s got, a vehicle for the sheer scope and power of that God-given instrument, but even then she can’t resist a few experimental flourishes, while gazing across the stage, perhaps just at someone needing a musical cue, or perhaps at the guy who inspired this love song.

She does all three sitting behind her keyboard, along with ‘White Foxes’ (formerly her encore, now a first night statement-of-intent, with deafening percussion intro); a countrified version of ‘I Resign’ from her debut record; the deep cut, ‘Lilith’; and her gospel-inflected encore, ‘fare thee well’, with a glorious extra verse. For the rest, she’s at the main mic, a place she has barely ventured since 2016.

Do you believe in reincarnation?

And that’s where we find the electro-pop diva reborn. First up, she does ‘Kamikaze’, and if you’re wondering whether I’m overhyping the ‘she hasn’t done this for a while’ angle, well: she forgets the second line, consults a band mate, apologises with the words, ‘It’s been a while’, and then launches into the song again. It is one of those tracks that, to paraphrase John Peel talking about the Bluetones’ ‘Slight Return’, “as soon as you hear it, you feel you’ve known it all your life”, but now it comes with a gently wandering opening melody and added blue notes that give the song an emotional punch to go with its sonic one.

Later, she drops in ‘Fade Away’ – by far her most popular song, sporadically drowned out by the spirited singing of first-night die-hards – before returning to ‘Ten Love Songs’ for the final two tracks of the main set, ‘Slowly’ and ‘Delirious’. The latter now has a pleading pedal steel, and rap-adjacent vocals breaking off into clubby exhortations. The former is, simply, one of the best things I’ve ever heard live, especially in its second night iteration. It is notable on record for having at least four separate, irresistible hooks, each more exalting than the last (scroll to 3:08 to be lifted into the clouds). And now it has five. “It’s in the way. You. Hold. Me,” Sundfør sings, in a cascading, staccato arpeggio, as the song reaches its zenith. “Baby. I. Know. You’re. Lonely.”

The other songs she sings at centre stage are a playful ‘Reincarnation’, and ‘rūnā’, in which she seems to be conjuring the music through the contortions of her body, like Judy singing ‘The Man That Got Away’ in A Star Is Born. And between the notes she finds new ones, more beautiful than those on record, before riding the climactic harmonies, swaying, her arms spread wide.

A couple of times during the show, she leaves the stage, firstly for the synth transition between ‘Kamikaze’ and ‘rūnā’, and later to let the rest of the cast perform an a capella version of ‘ashera’s song’, reimagined as an old American spiritual, the original number spliced with fragments of atonal bluegrass, ‘Peace in the Valley’ and ‘Let Your People Go’. While both numbers are interesting, neither are quite what drew us to Bergen tonight.

Take me high to the depths of your soul

On the first night, I made a new friend called Thomas, and when we talked about what had drawn us to Sundfør’s music, we were of one mind: once that voice grabs you, there’s no going back.

These songs are beautifully written, the sprawling arrangements are often inspired, there’s space for limited musical improvisation, and the band are talented and charismatic, with the backing singers allowed to cut free and even encroach on some signature Sundfør lines.

But we are here, and will always be here, for That Voice. That it is now allied to the whole of her canon, even the emotionally tricky, musically mathematic bits, is a cause for dancing, in Bergen and far beyond.

***

SETLIST:

leikara ljóð [second night only]
White Foxes
Turkish Delight
Kamikaze
rūnā (with synth transition intro)
Reincarnation
I Resign
blómi
Fade Away
Lilith
alyosha
ashera's song (new version, choir only)
Slowly
Delirious

Encore:
fare thee well

***

Thanks for reading.