“I don’t really feel like I’m in touch with anything,” Highasakite frontwoman Ingrid Helene Håvik whispers. “But I feel like I’m being controlled by my emotional side.”
It’s not a shocking confession from the Oslo-based singer/songwriter. With the assistance of bandmates Trond Bersu, Øystein Skar, Marte Eberson and Kristoffer Lo, Håvik’s emotion-driven worldview is stamped all over her music. Hard-hitting pop is interwoven with orchestral passages. Spaghetti Western-inspired overtures sit side-by-side with Asian-influenced zithers. Seemingly anything with a surface is serviced as a percussion instrument. It’s a dizzying blend, one seemingly meant to whisper from inside earphones and shout from the mountaintops—often over the course of the same song. But ask Håvik if Highasakite’s latest album is her singular vision and you’ll get a response that twists and turns like her sinuous vocals.
“I’m the one who writes the lyrics and all the music,” she says. “So I feel like I should have the say in everything. But it doesn’t really work that way because people have to be happy with what they play. So I have to play ball and be understanding towards the other people and not be a complete dictator.
“I don’t think that I was very diplomatic. I really tried, but it wasn’t that easy. Everyone has a lot of ideas, and not every idea can come to life. Sometimes people get really hurt. It’s a sensitive subject to eliminate some ideas. That can be really difficult. I think that our producer did a good job in sorting everything out and making everyone feel like they had contributed to the sound.”
Håvik’s protectiveness over the album is understandable—she’s been waiting her whole life to make it. She’s the daughter of a singer, and describes her childhood as full of musical encouragement which ushered in careers for her and two brothers.
“[My mother] was really giving me a lot of compliments from when I was like, four years old,” she recalls. “I was the most talented person in the world! She was really positive. I never thought about having to live up to her expectations.”
Although she took a brief musical break during her pre-teen years, when singing “wasn’t any fun anymore,” music became her main focus at age 16. Try as she might, she can’t fully visualize a life doing anything else.
“I still wonder about that maybe I should do something else,” she muses, trying out the idea. “It’s not always that easy. Sometimes I still consider different education. Having a more stable life. That’s the problem. I don’t have anything. No talents.”
It’s a decision that Håvik seems unlikely to have to make anytime soon. After the warm reception of her band’s debut EP—In and Out of Weeks, a collection of hazy, percussion-driven pop songs that had even Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon tweeting his approval—Håvik decamped to Ithaca, New York to write the band’s first full-length. While the group’s previous effort was focused around the possibilities of youth and the nostalgia that comes with looking back, Silent Treatment is a look at adulthood and life in the present tense. Håvik admits that exploration it isn’t always pretty. Even the album title, Silent Treatment, is derived from a relational fight tactic aimed at freezing out the other person.
“I’m a very pessimistic and negative person,” she admits. “It’s just me.”
Although the album is awash with dark themes (Håvik admits that much of the album is about relationships and the drama that comes with it), the collection also interweaves ethereal moments, derived as much from ecological mentions of the earth, the sky, and—in one surreal moment—digging to Hiroshima.
Håvik traces these earthy references back, in part, to a childhood love of Native Americans. Although direct references to the indigenous people have been largely stripped from the band’s music, it still lingers around the edges. So much so, that Highasakite often appear on stage in feathers and face paint in sincere homage.
“I know that I have been really inspired by Native Americans because that’s something that I really wanted to be when I was little,” says Håvik. “It’s this feeling of being a free spirit or something beautiful. It’s a symbol of the soul.”
And does she still feel like a free spirit?
“No, not at all,” she laughs. “I think I still have that fantasy somehow.”
Currently stuck inside thanks to the Scandinavian weather (“It’s really exhausting to go out the door and get snow in your face all the time,” she moans). Håvik says that the closest she gets to reclaiming some of that freedom is when she gets to spend time outdoors. That freedom is limited, though. As she explains, concerns about the way mankind affects the environment always linger in her mind.
“It’s in the back of my mind and I don’t know what to do with it,” she admits. “I try to be good to the world. I don’t eat a lot of meat.”
Håvik pauses, searching for the right reference to explain her relationship to the world and its fragility. She finally settles on Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s meditation on depression and the end of the world.
“That’s my worst nightmare,” she says. “I had nightmares about that after I saw that movie, that there will be no memory of anything. No one is there to remember anything.”