Denmark: not just mermaid statues, hippy islands and Sandi Toksvig. Every year the SPOT festival crash lands in Aarhus to showcase the country’s finest new music (with some Scandinavian shenanigans thrown in) over 20 venues and almost 300 shows, plus the odd floating stage in the Aarhus Canal for the locals to stop off at on their way to some weird herring-guzzling ceremony. The Raveonettes, Mø, Junior Senior and Mew all got big breaks over Spot’s 24 years so far, and 2018 looks set to be a bumper year. Here’s some hot tips to chase down like Toksvig after Mary Berry’s job.
Nordic Woman-wave
Not Peter Stringfellow’s favourite genre, but what the locals are calling the torrent of fabulous Nordic female acts speeding to fame in the slipstream of internationally-renowned wonder women Mø, Sigrid and Aurora. This year’s line-up features soul pop sirens Ea Kaya and Anya (no, not the ‘Orinoco Flow’ one) as well as one half of production duo EMA, Jada, spinning her delicate webs of minimalist R&B like a frostier Frank Ocean.
Irrelevantbitch101
Merging Motown, hip-hop and, um, Shania Twain (it says here)and recording entirely on his phone, we’re sold on this Copenhagen “luxurious pop” misfit’s self-penned biog alone: “To whom it may concern. In the age of social media and perfect unattainability, I admit that I'm irrelevant; and also a bit of a bitch. The 'Fresh Meat EP' chronicles my experiences as a high school dropout, navigating through depression, addiction, sexuality, and bullshit music industry politics. Albeit all wrapped up in accessible tunes that teens will relate to and/or your dad can bop to in the car. At times pretentious but always fresh and intriguing.” See you down the front.
Collider
This exploratory psych-pop outfit has been making Copenhagen question its aural sanity since 2016, when their debut single ‘Bruno’ emerged, fittingly sounding as though My Bloody Valentine, Mew and MGMT were all simultaneously going twelve rounds with Frank Bruno. These are songs that, when they start, barely know which genre they’ll end up in – indie pop, shoegaze, acid prog or drenched in Nicaraguan nose-flute. Unmissable.
Astrid Sonne
STRØM (Danish for ‘power’) is an electronic festival based in Copenhagen, and they’re running two days of music at this year’s Spot festival. Amongst those STRØM-tipped acts attempting to rewire the music industry this weekend is Astrid Sonne, a classically trained viola player who turned to electronics to satisfy what appears to be an urge to find out what a primitive AI might do with Ableton or, as Drowned In Sound astutely put it in a review of her 2018 album ‘Human Lines’, “like a cat playing with string theory”.
Pardans
With minimalist R&B now unfathomably considered in some way ‘alternative’, the alt-rockers are gunning for jazz now as well. Copenhagen’s Pandans play a form of jazz-punk that they call “intense orchestral no-rock” and somehow ends up as visceral and violent as prime-clatter Nick Cave. That they play it in Mansion squats, in abandoned factories and on boats on the Seine makes it all the more outre. Catch them at Spot and you’ll be begging more Pardans.
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SPOT Festival runs 10 - 13 May in Aarhus. Check here for ticket information
