CMU Approved

Approved: Frida Hyvönen

By | Published on Wednesday 4 April 2012

Frida Hyvönen

Frida Hyvönen released her second album, ‘Silence Is Wild’, in 2009. Which means it’s been three years without any new examples of her brilliant songwriting and unique approach to writing lyrics. Four if you go back to the record’s 2008 release date in her native Sweden. That is too long. Too too long. Happily though she’s back with a bolder, poppier sound on new single ‘Terribly Dark’, the first to be taken from her new album ‘To The Soul’.

The highlights of ‘Silence Is Wild’ were ‘London!’ and ‘Scandinavian Blonde’, the former an unrequited love letter to our capital city – “the way you want to get rid of me makes me weak at the knees” – the latter a gentle, slightly weary mockery of the stereotypical view of blonde Swedish women outside Northern Europe. Both are at the same time simple and clever – simple enough for you to curse yourself for not thinking of them, clever enough for you to know you couldn’t have.

‘Terribly Dark’ offers another juxtaposition – familiar enough to feel comfortable, but enough of a departure to make you sit up and take notice. The piano that had driven all of Hyvönen’s songwriting to date is still there, but where it was once at the forefront of her recordings, it’s now hidden amongst slick pop production (recorded at former ABBA star Benny Andersson’s new Riksmixningsverket studio in Stockholm).

While on the older songs mentioned above she looked at the world outside Sweden, ‘Terribly Dark’ is more introspective. Sweden gets terribly dark in winter – that’s your basic lyrical premise right there. The winter is dark and she’s so desperate to see sunlight again that she’d be willing to set herself on fire for the heat and light it would bring. There’s a hefty amount of metaphor running through all that, but, fuck it, it’s just a great pop song, I’m not going to sit here reading things into its meaning when I could be enjoying it instead.



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