The Girl Who Took Songs Apart

Growing up with a father who worshipped Neil Young and a mother devoted to Joni Mitchell probably does something to your ears. It wires you for songs that actually mean something—that have architecture, not just hooks. Sigrid Raabe grew up in Bergen, Norway, on the western coast, and by the time she was seven she was already at a piano. By her early teens she was working through Coldplay and Adele covers, which is how most kids with good taste spend their teenage years. But then she did something smarter: instead of just covering songs, she started taking them apart. Lifting the chords out and putting different ones back. Changing rhythms. Reassembling the pieces into something of her own. That’s where she really started.

The push into writing original material came from her brother Tellef, also a musician, who offered her an opening slot with two weeks’ notice on the condition that she showed up with her own songs. She was sixteen. The result was the beginning of one of Norway’s most unlikely pop careers—unlikely not because it seemed improbable but because nothing about Sigrid sounds calculated. Her debut single slid onto playlists like it had been there all along, and what followed established a voice that sits somewhere between MØ’s wiry restlessness and the early-album emotional wallop of a young Adele. She moves between Bergen and London now, which is the standard geography for a young European pop artist doing the math.

The video for Don’t Feel Like Crying arrived alongside her debut album Sucker Punch, and it does exactly what the title suggests: someone working a feeling out through movement, dancing the grief away, which is one of the oldest tricks in the book and still one of the only ones that works. Sigrid says what she’s always been after is a well-written pop song—playing piano and singing whatever comes to mind, that’s the best thing for me. The songs still sound like they came from somewhere specific, which is rarer than it should be.