Music, Style & Culture

Icona Pop: ‘Now We’re Really Gonna Show Them What We’ve Got’

Heartbreak, Tarantino and the Sugababes.

Icona Pop are the latest in a long line of Swedish exports. Their blend of dirty pop has caught the attention of many-a-blogger, with their single 'Manners' attracting a smorgasboard of remixes and the attention of major label Mercury. We grabbed Caroline Hjelt, one half of the duo, to talk heartbreak, Tarantino and the Sugababes.

Sweden is home to a number of popular artists at the moment. What was it like as a place to grow up?
To grow up here is amazing, or at least I had a very good childhood here. We have a lot of good schools and green areas and water so you can take a swim everywhere! And the standard here in Sweden is very high as well. It's great growing up here, I love it

You mentioned the standard being high in Sweden, is the music scene very competitive as a result of that?
Yeah, it is. It's just a small country so of course it is. But that's a good thing as well because if you're good then pretty soon people will know about it and you're going to be able to work with good producers. You've just got to be out there and show what you've got.
I love travelling and going out in the world as well because then you see how big the music scene is, because here, sometimes, you make it very small. We have a lot of Swedish artists that we think are huge abroad because every newspaper says a lot of artists from here are very big in the United States or in the UK but then you go over there and ask someone and realise that isn't the case. We really want to go out there and move. We're going to move to London at the end of August and we're really looking forward to that.

What made you decide to move to London?
Basically, we have a record company over there, Mercury, and we feel that it's time now. We've been working so hard here in the studio, working 24/7 for a year, and now it's time to get out there. Aino and I always create our little own world, wherever we go and now we feel it's time to let the rest of the world in to our Icona Pop world. It's a little bit scary but we're looking forward to that.

Would you say that you're more influenced by other Swedish artists or do you tend to draw inspiration from further afield?
It actually depends a lot on which mood we are in. We're both dreamers and we're quite black and white, we're never in the middle. If we're super excited and we find that artist that just makes us feel more in that feeling or in that moment than we are, we get stuck in different artists or movies or places. It can be another type of art or beats but of course we get very influenced by good music. We DJ a lot and we find so much new music but we also listen a lot to old music as well. We find a lot of inspiration through cool, older artists like Prince and Daft Punk.

You once described your sound as "Sugababes goes Tarantino" and you mentioned movies just then. Is film somewhere you look to when writing new music?
Actually, I love that because that was in the very beginning and we also described ourselves as "death pop" because we felt that when we met new producers and we were going in to the studio, we had to try to find a way to define ourselves. We were two girls singing pop and sometimes people really didn't get us. We wanted a more dirty sound with a lot of drums and twisted synthesisers, and to get that sound, we came up with "Sugababes goes Tarantino". Tarantino is amazing and we love Sugababes as well, especially the first stuff that they did.

Are there are recurring themes you revisit when you're writing new material?
When we start writing, sometimes we go directly into the city together with the producer and just come up with a beat that we like - we really like to be involved in the whole process. Then we go into the studio and create a track that we like. We go home and listen to it and get into the mood, and me and Aino write the words depending on how we feel. It's very much in the moment, all the time. Sometimes we watch a documentary that inspires. Now that we've been travelling so much and sleeping on floors, you meet a lot of people telling their life stories and that's been very inspiring. We also read books and watch movies, and we like really to meet new people and hear what they have to say, that inspires us a lot. And actually, in the very beginning, when we met, we moved into this girl collective. So we lived as a bunch of girls in an apartment and every night we heard new stories about heartbreaks and stuff like that, and that was very inspiring. We got a lot of material from that.

Your first live show sold out entirely. That must've been quite a lot of pressure for your first performance?
Actually both me and Aino had been on stage a lot before we met each other and so that is the place we really like the most, when we feel we connect with our music and the audience and each other. But of course it's always scary when you've been in the studio for a long time and you love the stuff that you do and then suddenly you're supposed to stand there on the stage and show other people? That's scary but it's all fun and we love being on stage. You're nervous before you go on stage but once you're up there, everything just disappears.

How have you worked to make your material translate to the stage? Have you got a live band that you perform with?
When we perform live, we have a small band. We have a drummer, playing on the pads. And then we have a keyboard player who's playing keyboard and computer on the backtracks and things. And we also DJ sometimes and try to involve that in the live sets.

So you're working on your debut album at the moment with a couple of producers, we hear?
We've actually been working with a number of producers! We have Elof (Loelv) and Patrick Berger that we've been working with the most and we love them. They're really talented and they really understand our sound, and that's the most important thing, to listen to each other. We have to work with people that dare to try new stuff because sometimes we just want to freak out and do something so totally different to the other sounds that we've made and they're always so up for it and so ready to try, and that makes it so fun to work with them.

What can we expect from the album? How far along with it are you?
I think some people have heard some tracks. It's a very mixed album with a lot of feelings. As I said before, we're always super-happy-up-in-the-sky-excited or we're down and sad and I think you can hear that on the album, it's very spread. I love the album, we both do, and we're very proud. We hope the people will love it as well.

Do you have a title yet?
No we don't! We've been talking about it a lot. We have a couple of suggestions but we're not really ready to tell it yet.

Your single 'Manners' received quite a lot of attention and you've had quite a few remixes surface of it. What have you made of those?
It's actually such an honour when you put your music out there and someone contacts you saying they want to do a remix. It's so fun when someone makes a new song out of our song. Great people have done it and we're very happy with the remixes.

So what's next for Icona Pop?
Actually, the album is gonna be done in a month so we're now working 24/7 with that, and then we have a new video coming out and then, like I said, we're gonna move to London, and that's gonna be an experience. And then we're gonna start to perform live over in the UK because we've just been over, DJing and writing and getting to know people but now we're really gonna show them what we've got.

Icona Pop's new single 'Manners' is out now.