Controlled Intuition: The Alt-Pop Scene in Copenhagen and Beyond

If you asked someone on the streets of America what they considered to be the “Song of the Summer” in 2023, you probably got varied answers. “Last Night” by Morgan Wallen commanded the Billboard charts for the entire season’s duration, but Pride parades were far more likely to blast “Padam Padam” by Kylie Minogue, which got stiff competition for LGBTQ+ Song of the Summer when Troye Sivan released “Rush” that July. If you asked pedestrians in eastern and southeastern Asia what 2023’s song of the summer was, you might’ve heard “Super Shy” by Korean girl-group NewJeans, Billboard’s K-pop Song of the Year. The short track stands out from most other K-pop tunes, delivering a steady, understated stream over liquid drum and bass compared to the often bold, brilliant hooks of the genre’s usual suspects.

One of the masters behind this slick, groovy anthem is Erika de Casier, a Portugal-born singer-songwriter with roots in Copenhagen, Denmark’s largest city. In the half-decade prior, de Casier’s work as a solo artist grew from a secret handshake shared between obsessives of underground pop to a genuine indie darling, with rave reviews of her 4AD debut Sensational and prime festival slots in the United States. Soon after de Casier really started getting her flowers as NewJeans’ secret weapon, another Copenhagen-based musician started attracting cult status among critics: ML Buch, whose sophomore album Suntub stretches the contours of guitar music into uncanny valley, drafting a sound familiar yet futuristic, embodied yet transhuman. Copenhagen-via-Scotland composer Clarissa Connelly, too, rose to prominence and joined the roster at Warp Records, cementing a kind of legendary status within today’s avant-garde—and her 2024 album World of Work made it abundantly clear just how talented she is at fusing choral composition and electronics.

It’s not just de Casier, Buch or Connolly. The latest cohort of independent artists out of Copenhagen make some of the most charming, puzzling left-of-center indie music one can find. Paste caught up with several of the scene’s rising musicians who count each other as labelmates, collaborators and, in many cases, classmates at Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium—or Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC). While they may agree that there’s something special in Copenhagen right now, they are quick to emphasize that what the city has is totally replicable with the kind of shared intentionality that can turn a gaggle of musicians into a proper community.

Governmental support for the arts and free, innovative music education can do a lot, but to make this kind of music, there has to be a network of like-minded musicians supporting each other and helping everyone navigate the unique challenges to making music in Denmark, where it’s tough to break out when not making Danish-language, radio-friendly music. There has to be someone with the savvy to know that creativity thrives in a sustainable partnership and that reaching out to the global independent music ecosystem can only help music meet more ears and media-makers. We spoke with five musicians about coming up in this scene and the unique intricacies of music-making in Denmark and the head of Escho, a longstanding indie label with an ear for the off-kilter, pop-adjacent indie coming out of the country to understand more.

Fine

Fine (pronounced fee-nah) is Fine Glindvad Jensen, best known as the vocalist for electropop trio CHINAH. She also co-wrote three of the NewJeans songs that de Casier helped craft. This June, Fine released her debut solo LP, Rocky Top Ballads, a deeply affecting collection of hypnotic, floating folk-pop that harnesses the mortal instruments she grew up on with the electronic production she mastered in her time with CHINAH and while studying at RMC. “Losing Tennessee” and “Big Muzzy” are particular standouts that could not be more different: “Losing Tennessee” sounds akin to the indie country of Why Bonnie while “Big Muzzy” is an intense, dream pop experiment with Elizabeth Fraser-like vocal entropy. Like Buch on Suntub, Fine’s voice, moods, instrumentals and production straddle the human and the transcendent, attracting audiences with hints of the familiar and blasts of something entirely new. Her take is remarkably fresh, arguably entirely different.

Glindvad grew up in Denmark, primarily surrounded by her father’s dedicated bluegrass musicianship at home: “The soundtrack to my childhood is banjo through a wall. You can hear it, but you can’t really hear it.” In her teen years, she fell in love with rock songwriting and formed a band with high school girlfriends before founding CHINAH with two friends—both named Simon—who were ravenous consumers and producers of electronica. Over nearly ten years, CHINAH put out two albums and two EPs, and in the most recent years, all three members have dedicated more time to their solo endeavors. Glindvad’s electro-infused alternative rock has that distant quality not unlike how she preferred to hear her father’s banjo: removed, through a wall, with a certain vastness that allows her to map her own interpretation onto the music.

Her songwriting North Star is profound: Glindvad is guided by intuition, yes, but intuition doesn’t come from just anywhere—it comes from experiences and learned responses. Knowing that intuition is rooted in lived materiality, Glindvad finds it easy to then manipulate intuition: how can we sew the familiar and unfamiliar together? On Rocky Top Ballads, Glindvad’s compositions feel familiar, but they are that much more playful and surprisingly unlimited.

“That school should win an award or something,” Glindvad remarks, as she recalls her time at RMC, where she just recently graduated. The school served as a meeting point for her: She met musicians like Astrid Sonne, with whom she co-heads the project Coined, and Escho labelhead Nis Bysted, who served as an advisor throughout her time at the school. “He just has a gift to breathe new life into your process. It’s a calm flow: no rush, the music will sort of emerge how it’s supposed to,” she continues. When her countless ideas coalesced into an album, it only made sense to bring it to Bysted and release it through Escho, purveyors of the Copenhagen underground. Within RMC, people’s practices are eclectic, and Fine can see that reflected back: “Copenhagen has been more eclectic lately than it used to [be]. There’s a lot in a small city.”

Molina

Where many genre-bending artists in Copenhagen’s scene dart between hypnagogic pop and disorienting electronics, Molina’s alternative landscapes draw from her lifelong love of shoegaze. Her approach sounds little like the mass shoegaze revival seen in the United States; it sounds more confrontational: while her guitars swirl like any proper gazer, her unencumbered vocals render her the center of focus. The guitars bow to her rather than occlude her. The approach is a different kind of haunting than traditional shoegaze, full of whimsy and heart displayed vulnerably atop a bed of noise. This is how Rebecca Molina, a longtime my bloody valentine admirer, does it as Molina.

Molina caught the musician bug early; there are photos of her as young as four years old singing or bashing one thing against another to make improvised percussion. She learned to make beats on a small keyboard and record vocals at eight onto a cassette tape and has only grown into a masterful producer in her thirties. She grew up around other musicians and enthusiasts in her family, exposing her to all kinds of instruments and styles, and she recorded a CD young.

It was at RMC, though, where Molina zeroed in on her practice and found community. “There are just more varieties of music coming out of there than when I started. I was really happy there, and it was a privilege to go to school and work on your own project. I got to explore it all myself,” she recalls. It was through her experience at RMC where she met ML Buch; the two now tour together to perform Buch’s music, with Molina on keys, backing vocals and electronic drums. She met de Casier, Sonne, Fine, Connelly and more. “When I met all my friends in the Conservatory, I felt like I had a collective with people who were thinking the same way as I did even though we make really different music,” she continues. “Erika’s music and Clarissa’s or ML’s are completely different, but the way of working and exploring feels like it’s in common. We are great supporters and we’re playful.” As she progressed through the school and produced more songs, she sought these women for feedback, especially during the lonely lockdown.

While Molina has ample experience and skill with digital production, she recently found herself drawn to trying out instruments that aren’t as familiar to her. She tuned her guitar unconventionally and jammed, recording endless loops of guitar experiments before ultimately chopping them up and piecing them back together on her computer. That playfulness and juxtaposition of organic and mechanical processes helps access that unconventional, extraterrestrial sound: it’s fun, it’s cosmic, it’s confrontational. “I am trying to get my music somewhere else, especially with the mix. I want the vocals in the front, drier. It’s more out in your face,” she describes. You can hear that kind of fantastical guitarscape crossed with embodied vocals on her newest song, “Scorpio,” especially.

Snuggle

Snuggle is a new alternative duo featuring Vilhelm Strange, guitarist and producer formerly of Liss, and Andrea Johansen, guitarist and songwriter for Danish indie rock band Baby In Vain. Their heartfelt psychedelia leans both in the pop direction that both songwriters wanted to try when forming Snuggle and the experimental tendencies they nurtured as students at RMC. Liss dissolved after the tragic death of one of its members; Baby In Vain released an album earlier this year, Afterlife, but its composite members are all cultivating new solo projects, so Strange and Johansen teamed up after meeting in the conservatory, finding their complementary approaches ideal. Their late 2023 EP Calendula is a riveting, genre-agnostic introduction.

Both Strange and Johansen came into musicianship in their teens. In Strange’s case, a friend’s dad was so into punk and post-punk that he made all the neighborhood kids listen and encouraged them to form a punk band. Johansen grew up with a father who subscribed to numerous print music magazines from the UK, most of which came with mix CDs with everything from Arab Strap to the Kooks: “Back then, I just remember feeling like each CD was a little treasure. Then, I’d go out and buy the album, and 9 times out of 10 it’d be really disappointing.” Born and raised in Copenhagen, Johansen found herself plugged into the local music scene by 15, where she met her friends Ben and Lola and formed Baby In Vain.

Both Liss and Baby In Vain grew to become accomplished bands within Denmark’s music scene, but outside of Copenhagen or Aarhus, shows can be hard to manage: “You might play for two people in a random town. You have to look outside of Denmark,” Johansen says. Within Denmark, there are seemingly daily festivals, so it’s not impossible to get your foot in the door there—but undoubtedly, radio-friendly Danish language music gets priority. Within Copenhagen, though, Johansen has fond memories of Posh Isolation and Escho events opening her world up to more abstract, experimental forms of music.

“We saw something in each other. I really like your songwriting, and I’m new to writing my own songs. I felt safe sending songs to you and seeing what you do to finish. You had a lot of stuff you wanted to finish, and so did I, so we finished it together,” Strange says of his collaboration with Johansen. Where Johansen has more experience behind the pen, Strange has more experience with Ableton. In the last few months, the duo has decamped to Berlin for a renewed sense of purpose; they’re antsy to release new Snuggle material. They’re embracing pop: “We’ll sit down and say ‘Let’s make a pop hit,’ and we’ll let our guard down and do it. Only thing is they don’t come out sounding like pop hits,” Johansen adds. “We trick ourselves into making something totally stupid and out there,” Strange furthers. No doubt there are hints of pop and the hooks are there, but their years making punk and alternative rock mean they lean into all kinds of aesthetics beyond pop while incorporating pop’s signature structures. The result is something that thrives in the interstices.

Astrid Sonne

Composer and violist Astrid Sonne came into life as an experimentalist after years spent working as a classical musician—but like many people, young women especially, she felt like she hit a wall trying to work within the confines of the classical system. Over three albums and two EPs, including one of live recorded ephemera, Sonne has grown into the composer she never knew she could embody. She is one of the most experimental musicians in the Copenhagen orbit, but her ear for songwriting that borrows from pop is just as keen as her peers. She displayed her uncanny songwriting and production chops on Great Doubt this past January, toured with ML Buch, and recently relocated to London, taking the oft-followed next step for many left-of-center Danish musicians: emigrate to where the audiences live.

Having grown up on a small island with a relatively relaxed, nonmusical family, Sonne found herself drawn to the viola and considered a career in classical music growing up. However, she struggled with theory, and after enduring the strict, masculinist world of classical training, Sonne took advantage of the institutionalized breaks before high school and university to explore additional interests. When a peer started getting into Ableton, she followed suit, realizing her own potential to act as a composer after spending years upon years performing canonical pieces from dead white men. “I had one friend who I showed my stuff and he said I should apply for the composition classes at RMC. I was really green at the time, but I got in. I think entering that course and studying composition made me feel like I really am a composer,” Sonne recalls.

She moved to Copenhagen at 16 and frequented the local DIY scene, where she found herself at one particular venue most often, Mayhem: “To get in, it cost an average of, like, three dollars, and beer for a dollar. Concrete floors, run-down. All you’d want from a DIY venue. Loads of free jazz, weird electronic music. That was when Posh Isolation was at a high point and they did loads of events there.” Familiarizing herself with the extremes of the local experimental scene inspired Sonne to pursue new territories for composition in a collaborative environment where aspiring hip-hop practitioners, pop musicians and music teachers could share their craft with people making contemporary classical or other less-familiar styles. “It was very different. People came from such different musical backgrounds. It was very inspiring to hear other people’s processes,” Sonne adds.

It was through RMC that she met the circle of musicians she still considers her friends and collaborators, even if they’re more far-flung than ever: de Casier, Buch, Molina and so many more. She also met her would-be manager while providing the score for a DIY theater production on a boat during those years and linked with Nis Bysted of Escho. She’s been pleasantly surprised with how those connections have evolved over time, like with her recent tour with Buch: “It was hectic but it was really nice, great audiences. It’s so interesting to see how audiences have such personal reactions to ML’s music,” she notes.

Great Doubt is a sonic shift for Sonne towards more traditional songwriting, but with the same experimental impulses. Like her peers, she wants to tap into emotions that are specific to her—Great Doubt is, in large part, a breakup album—without foreclosing the universe of possible interpretations that make her songs relatable. Take “Do you wanna”: amidst thumping drums and smashed keys, Sonne repeats a question asked of her and women of her same age with dangerous frequency: “Do you wanna have a baby?” Rather than treat the invasive question as a masculinist push toward domesticity, Sonne aesthetically wrestles with the question, admitting that it is sometimes on her mind. The soft imagery of motherhood against her cacophonous production choices are disorienting. There is no straight answer.

After years of touring, Sonne decamped from Copenhagen, a city where she’d lived for 12 years, for London. Audiences in the UK reacted warmly to her music, and with London’s robust electronic underground, Sonne is very much at home. “Copenhagen is the antidote to London. What’s nice in one city isn’t so nice the other way around,” she explains. London’s incredible size is a blessing, with its diversity of people and artistic events, and a curse with difficulty of navigation. Copenhagen’s relative smallness means a little more homogeneity, but it’s easier to navigate. The key difference between the two countries, however, is endowment for the arts: “There’s loads of art support in Denmark. In the UK, it’s the opposite. I’ve been thinking a lot about how privileged it was. It’s given me a bit of perspective to spend time here where it is a struggle.”

Nis Bysted, Escho

For nearly 20 years, Nis Bysted has run Escho, a prolific label that many in Denmark’s alt-pop scene find as a home for at least a few releases. Bysted has had a relationship with the music industry for 30 years, notably as guitarist for 1990s avant-metal band Düreforsög, a band with a short career but ever-present influence. Above all else, Bysted loves making records, and through Escho, he’s helped outsiders like Iceage and Norway’s Smerz catapult to international indie fame. Just as RMC helped many of Copenhagen’s finest experimentalists meet, Nis has used Escho as a tool to help the city’s avant-pop scene spread beyond Denmark’s borders, which is especially helpful in a country where down-the-middle Danish-language music predominates on the radio.

Bysted first encountered the music industry young, as part of Düreforsög, whose tribulations with major labels and indie labels alike made all members of the band feel a certain distaste for music even after making a not-insignificant splash on the Scandinavian metal scene. He and his friends felt a peculiar disillusionment, but continued making records, so Bysted helped with their releases, offering the help a label might but without the coercive control one might find. When Bysted assisted on a U.S. tour that ended up being canceled roughly 20 years ago, he stuck around in Philadelphia for a month, venturing up and down the East Coast and witnessing house shows and other DIY events that reinvigorated him. Sensing a lack of a robust DIY community in Denmark, Bysted began booking shows like mad, reaching out to artists across the world, and working to facilitate exchange between Escho artists and forward-thinking musicians across the globe. “My friend showed me this Warner Japan compilation called They Keep Smiling with Gang Gang Dance and Black Dice on it. I was obsessed. We got them to come,” he recalls.

Fundamentally, Bysted just loves making records and sharing them. “I love being a part of the process and figuring out how they’re supposed to sound or look. I’m less a decision maker so much as someone who gets to help the process out,” he says. The whole time we’re chatting, we go on tangents and share albums that have inspired us over the years. It’s clear that Bysted does it for the love of the music, for the thrilling experience of connecting with artists and playing a role in their development. Escho musicians value it, too: without undue pressure to shove more and more “content” out there, musicians create at their own pace and make stylistic changes on their own terms. The music still flies out of these musicians at the same rate as on other labels, but with a more supportive atmosphere, creativity is sustainable.

Bysted is certainly not the only labelhead in Denmark, or the world, trying to facilitate this kind of ecosystem. He spends a lot of time looking outward. “We’re all looking at each other,” he says. “We look at Americans a lot because they play a huge role in our media culture. The media, once in a while, looks at us and at ‘The Nordic Way,’ whatever that means. When I go to the States, I’d like to think we’re feeling the same way. These scenes would interact more if not for the space between. People are afraid to reach out, but it’s so nice to build connections, even just by writing.”

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Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.