Holocene welcomes the Norwegian singer-songwriter and M83 collaborator Susanne Sundfør on Tuesday November 14th. 

“So, it’s definite, then” 

These are the words that open Susanne Sundfør’s extraordinary new album, ‘Ten Love Songs’. Casual but incredibly bleak, the inquiry sets the scene for a record that looks unblinkingly at the contradictions, hopes and fears, and the capacity both for rapture and betrayal that the human heart encompasses. Musically, the ambiguously titled album pulls Susanne closer to pop terrain than she has been before. Yet it also sings with the artistic freedom that has always characterised her work. Barring three tracks – ‘Accelerate’, on which she worked with Jonathan Bates, aka Big Black Delta; ‘Memorial’, with Anthony Gonzalez of M83; and ‘Silencer’, which saw her reunited with her long-time collaborator Lars Horntveth –the album was self-produced. “I wanted to feel a sense of independence in what I was doing,” Susanne says, “and I had very strong opinions about how it should sound. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since my early twenties, and I think I felt ready to prove to myself that I could actually do it. I’ve always had this insecurity about being completely independent in what I do – and maybe generally in life, too. But I’ve also felt this very strong desire to be free. So I think I needed some confirmation that I could do it. On some level, it is a very personal album; and given the themes, I wanted to do it exactly my own way.”

The album’s centrepiece is the 10-minute ‘Memorial’. A giant song whose first section gives way to a heartbreakingly beautiful and forlorn fantasia for chamber orchestra and piano that, though wordless, expresses longing, dejection and pain as powerfully as any words could, ‘Memorial’epitomises the ambition of the album as a whole. And its central refrain –“You took off my dress and you never put it on again” – captures the vulnerability, self-knowledge and candour at the heart of Susanne’s songwriting. “People try to describe their emotions with numbers today, and in terms of science, which I feel is like the religion of today. It is very taboo to be a vulnerable person. It’s almost like the biggest weakness today is to be a human being, because everything around us is about perfection, as if we’re trying to be like robots. It’s sort of what Radiohead were portraying on ‘Ok Computer’, and now it’s actually happening. If I listen to music or read books where people are saying, ‘I’m very human, I feel a lot of things, bad things, good things,’ that’s what touches me.” I definitely didn’t intend the song to be that long, but when I was working on it, I knew it needed to continue, that it didn’t make sense for it to end sooner. I worked on the first part with Anthony, and he transformed it into a massive 80s ballad. He’s a genius, I think.”