You Need to Know About Sigrid
“There are two places where I can completely relax: in nature and by the piano,” says Sigrid, the mononymous Norwegian singer-songwriter—full name: Sigrid Solbakk Raabe—who broke onto the world stage last year with an EP of viral bangers. Raabe grew up hiking with her family in the mountains around Ålesund, a small port city on an archipelago on Norway’s west coast. Her hometown is “rainy and dark” and “cozy,” a place where you can wander into the backcountry and not encounter another human for hours.
Fresh-faced and button nosed, with long brown hair that she frequently sweeps back into a ponytail, Raabe appears younger than her 21 years and is refreshingly earnest given her sudden, astronomical rise (to the tune of more than a hundred million global streams of her debut EP). In her videos, she often wears high-waisted jeans and primary-colored tees—normcore with a Gap Kids spin—and sings directly to the camera, wide-eyed and angelic, until a lyric moves her and she curls one side of her mouth into a lopsided snarl. Today, she’s speaking to me from Oslo, on a day off from a whirlwind year of touring and recording that hasn’t afforded quite so much time for communing with nature.
“My whole family has been like: What is this?” she says, telling a story about a kindergarten choir concert where she burst into tears until her parents dragged her off the stage. “I’ve always been the shy one. I really just like to sit alone at the piano. I need my me time.” These days she spends it working out acoustic covers of tracks by Norwegian rappers like Lars Vauler and Karpe Diem. Her renditions aren’t for public consumption, but “I try to get inspired in my own songs.” (Listen to the recent “Strangers,” in which she does something adjacent to rapping, and you’ll hear the influence.)
Despite her “who me?” stance, Raabe is probably best known for “Don’t Kill My Vibe,” a feisty earworm about an attempt at collaboration with an anonymous older male producer who steamrolled her in an early songwriting session. It’s a catchy empowerment anthem tailor-made for a moment in which we’re particularly eager to hear young women taking on the patriarchy. “When you are young in this industry, it’s difficult to know when to speak up,” she says. “I didn’t, and I was super-frustrated because I’ve always seen myself as someone who does.”
The experience has turned her into a poster child for telling it like it is, a reputation bolstered by tracks like “Plot Twist” and “Fake Friends” (“It’s better to run away than to run with fake friends / No use for excuses so bad things come to an end” she sings on the latter). “I do write heartbreakingly embarrassing love tunes, too,” she says, promising more of those on her first album, out sometime this spring (check out the newly released “I Don’t Want to Know” for a taste). “I’m not always the person to be like, fuck you. I’m just very”— she lets out a deep, knowing sigh—“very 21 years old, you know? It’s a lot of emotions.”
