Joselin (Sweden) – Elegantly (single) We don’t usually have many artists in here that have come through the TV ‘Idol’ route and any mention of Taylor Swift, as in the press release I received, typically sends me scurrying for cover. Not only has Joselin (Fogelberg)performed on Sweden’s version of idolatry, she’s won a national radio contest as well. Joselin is a 22-year-old (she looks younger) songwriter, artist and music producer out of Gothenburg but now based in Stockholm who only signed with the Swedish record label Ninetone Group, this February. She’s actually come the ‘academic’ route in ..read more

Pinto Grey (Sweden) – No Turn Around (sample track from the EP The Wrong Place) Ha! Here we go again. Glancing at the email I thought it said ‘Punto, Grey’, which is how Manchester’s finest classified my car when it was stolen. Fair game, I did get it back quickly and in one piece but who really needs a stolen Fiat Punto anyway? What you do need is a dose of Pinto Grey’s third EP, ‘The Wrong Place’. The six tracker is the work of a four-piece band out of Örebro, a pleasant Central Swedish town I once had the pleasure of at least driving through and which hosts the Live at Heart festival if mem ..read more

Unusually this one came to me via the post, care of A Treehouse Wait’s Dutch record label, Volkoren and with a physical CD and nicely printed and neatly folded A4 paper. A nice touch, in the return to the old days pre- Steve Gatesaberg or whatever they are called. Unfortunately I don’t have anywhere to play a CD other than in the car but the stereo there has been taking a battering. A Treehouse Wait is singer-songwriter Jenny Gajicki (Whalström) and co-writer/producer Emil Sydhage. This, their second album, ‘Kaleidoscope’, is scheduled for release on 24th May (CD and digitally). In the meantim ..read more

Even though Sol Heilo has appeared at least four times in Nordic Music Central it has never been with a new song even though we are two and a half years old. In fact the last time it was one of our ‘Down Memory Lane/From the Archives’ features with Sol singing her version of the happy rap song ‘Holde rundt deg’ at a festival in 2019. So she’s been off the radar for quite a while, mainly down to family rearing responsibilities as I understand it and while she’s been keeping herself busy with side projects like film scores and production I suspect some of her fans, many of them from the Katzenja ..read more

We don’t get too much in the way of ‘gothic post-punk’ and I didn’t even know what that meant until listening to ‘Psykosoma’, which is Stockholm-based Isolated Youth’s first song for four years as well as an album track on their forthcoming debut album ‘Miserere Mei’, named for Allegri’s interpretation of Psalm 51. I do now. Even the band’s name dragged me in. (The album was written during pandemic lockdowns and perhaps that is even what that name arose out of).  As soon as I saw it I envisaged some or other forlorn housing estate on the outskirts of Uppsala or Eskilstuna or Västerås wher ..read more

I’m always keen to support Nordic artists and bands that make the effort to come to the UK despite the difficulties they encounter these days with regulations, something that should have been sorted out long before now. London and Brussels – get on with it. And Denmark seems to be the primary supply chain although I was disappointed to learn that eee gee had cancelled a couple of UK dates here this month. One of the most frequent visitors is Copenhagen-based Mansfield who have made the journey several times since their formation in 2015, playing the likes of the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where ..read more

It’s a funny old thing, Eurovision. I remember when I first used to watch it, on a crackling, tinny-sounding fuzzy black and white TV set on which the singers and bands would perform in a small venue before a few hundred people and coverage of the vote would be interrupted frequently by a telephone line failure. “Hello, London calling, hello…are you there? Ja, heir ist Berlin, danke. Ve can only just hear you. Please copy. Hallo? Hallo?” Back in the day you were hearing the (mainly ‘Boom-banga-bang’ type) songs for the very first time and they were new and fresh. When ABBA bounced on stage to ..read more

Yet another intriguing Finnish artist comes in the form of Marko Nyberg. He is the founder of the ambient pop band Husky Rescue, which has released four studio albums, toured the world and played major festivals from Glastonbury to Lollapalooza, as well as being featured on multiple TV adverts and dramas such as The Sopranos. He was also one of the composers of ‘Black Sabbath – The Ballet’ for the Birmingham Royal Ballet in the UK. I can’t quite imagine Ozzy Osbourne in tights, but there you go. This new solo project arose out of a “profoundly life changing experience of a near-death experien ..read more

The Victim, aka Danish singer-songwriter Kenneth Nafling, has made one previous appearance in NMC, when he released his single ‘Ghost House’ in 2022, one that I described as “the liveliest piece of folk-rock you’re likely to hear all year” despite its melancholic subject matter of losing someone you loved, and dwelling on all the things you wish you had done differently when the opportunity was there. It was taken from the portentously-named EP ‘When everything is over, Part 1’ and now he has moved on to Part 2, which was released on April 5th. Reading the notes to the latest EP I braced myse ..read more

Hilding (Sweden) – Waste (sample track from the album Love Songs for the End of Time) Hilding (Halding Karlsson) is a Swedish songwriter based in Berlin. His music, he says, is “a blend of modern pop and classic rock, filtered through a bedroom studio.” We featured him not so long ago with the single ‘Bone Dry’, which was an early single from his album ‘Love songs for the end of time’, which was released on 29th March and which dealt with being burnt out and looking back on your life. I selected the first track from the album, ‘Waste’ as the sampler because the vibe is altogether different a ..read more