Four minutes into our international phone call and Sigrid is already humming the infectious hook to her chart-climbing banger ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’. It’s a melody that people all over the world would recognise, even 700 miles away from her native Norway via shaky phone line. This is a track that’s been streamed more than 23 million times on Spotify alone, and has found its way onto Lorde’s playlist ‘Homemade Dynamite.’
Humming. That’s what it took to take this 21-year-old from young Norwegian hope, to pop world darling-in-waiting. “I need to hum!” she laughs. And thank god she does. Sigrid Solbakk Raabe’s humming is producing some wonderful results.
The ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ EP is one of many to come. The title track, which charted in seven countries, is Sigrid’s “favourite to perform.” It’s “an empowering tune and feel-good anthem: when people hear it they start smiling!”
Hailed a millennial anthem for its determined resilience and whip-smart rebuff (“You think you’re so important to me, don’t you?”), ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ is “a happy song”, but it’s a happy song that, Sigrid argues, “has some grit to it.”
“I have this mantra about getting something positive out of something negative,” she says, referring in part to the experience that inspired her lyrics: Sigrid’s meeting with a condescending group of bullish male producers. The result is a soaring diss track buoyed up on soaring synth and a trap style beat.
On the flip side, sadder songs such as new single ‘Strangers’ – about “the search for perfection; wanting something to be something it’s not” - is plenty upbeat. Of dynamic tracks with diverse content such as these, Sigrid is the queen. “I want my music to be something that you have to react to in some way; the type of pop that says something. I want the whole spectrum. I want to make very emotional pop that hits your nervous system.”
