- Heaven-Sent/[PIAS] Électronique
- 2026
On Valentine's Day 2025, the Oslo musician known as Sassy 009 did something ridiculous: She covered a song as familiar as "Happy Birthday" and made it her own. On that day, Sassy 009 posted her version of Usher's 2004 mega-hit "Yeah!," Lil Jon ad-libs and all. (She didn't attempt the Ludacris verse, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.) Sassy 009 rendered "Yeah!" in the recognizable trappings of the Scandinavian strain of 2020s bedroom electro-pop: reverbed-out deadpan vocals, hypnotic synth-wobbles, a general feel of comforting blankness. But even though that filter, the headlong immediacy of that song came through. Usher's conflicted club-night desire sounded no less poetic when rendered in a heavily accented murmur, and Lil Jon's synth-siren still riveted when it was reduced to a soft pitter-pat. Sassy 009's own music works in similar ways.
Sassy 009 started out as a band. Sunniva Lindgård, who was born in Sweden and who moved to Oslo as a kid when her parents split up, started the trio with two high-school friends, and she kept it going as a solo project when both of them left. Both of Lindgård's parents are classically trained musicians, and the new album Dreamer+ ends with "Ruins Of A Lost Memory," which is built on a smothered sample of a big piano-ballad. According to an NME profile, that's a song that Lindgård's parents wrote for the Eurovision Song Contest in the '90s, which is fun. Lindgård learned to play a bunch of instruments before she discovered dance music as a kid. For the better part of a decade, she's been playing with hyperactive club beats, using them to fuel her downbeat, psychedelic, personal version of pop music. She's made a couple of mixtapes, but she says that Dreamer+ is her debut album.
Dreamer+ arrives into a world where Sassy 009's particular strain of insular mutant dance-pop has a certain constituency. In recent years, lots of Scandinavians auteur types — Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Yung Lean, Bladee, Astrid Sonne, fellow Oslo residents Smerz — have twisted different strains of music up into sleek, fascinating new shapes. I first noticed the press emails about Dreamer+ because of the short list of artists who make guest appearances on the record: Blood Orange, yunè pinku, BEA1991. But Dreamer+ doesn't get over on of-the-moment sounds or coolness by association. Instead, Sunniva Lindgård, like so many of her contemporaries, has constructed an utterly beguiling soundworld of her own.
The drums on Dreamer+ are crazy. On many of the album's tracks, the only name credited besides Sunniva Lindgård is drummer Elias Tafjord. Sassy 009 tracks are built on chopped-up breakbeats, but they don't sound sampled or muffled. Instead, it seems like Lindgård is playing around with the complicated jazz and funk patterns that Tafjord lays down. (I haven't seen her talking about her process in any interviews, so that's just my assumption.) There's a crisp, physical immediacy to those drum sounds, which lends an extra dimension to the murky synthscapes. Tafjord plays both drum and guitar on the Blood Orange collab "Tell Me," and the smothered grunge riffage and neck-crack skitter-thwacks contrast nicely with each other and with the downbeat swirl of the two voices.
Most of the time, Lindgård's voice is a deep, sleepy monotone. It makes me think of ancestral post-punk ghouls like Ian Curtis and twitchy contemporary weirdos like Yung Lean. Her lyrics are oddly phrased meditations on internal reactions, whether she's talking about a moment of nightclub attraction ("Here he comes, bangs to the side/ It's happening tonight on the floor") or connection between lost and alienated people ("I text my baby/ On the edge, maybe/ He's so scared of it all/ My 5 a.m. flex won't make him fall"). She sounds like she's distantly narrating her own life in a language that she's still learning. Her voice and her music work together in mysterious ways, both of them often just slightly out of reach.
But Dreamer+ rarely sounds like a meditation on pop music. A lot of the tracks here work as outright bangers, albeit weird ones. I sometimes get pleasantly lost in the smear of textures on the record, but lots of these songs would actually make sense in real brick-and-mortar dance clubs rather that the idyllic futuristic ones of the internet's imagination. On opening track and lead single "Butterflies," the sound of a speeding engine dissolves into visceral body-jacking drums and gasping electro bass-blurps. It's the kind of song that might make you want to grind on a stranger.
For me, the defining quality of Dreamer+ is its body-moving physicality. Many of the past few years' most exciting records have been the mutant pop records, the ones that combine underground sounds with auteurist sensibility. With so much of that music coming out, the tough thing is to set yourself apart. Sassy 009 doesn't have Charli XCX's sheer force of personality or Oklou's mesmeric otherworldly magnetism. What she's got is the ability to fuse a blurry synth-drone with an acid house bassline at the exact right moment, an understanding of how to make it hit. That gift might be less sensational, but it's still plenty powerful.
In interviews, Sassy 009 tends to name formative influences — Björk, Grimes, M.I.A. — who took the currents of sound floating through the air and synthesized them into something new. I don't know if Sassy 009 will become a star like any of those three, and I also don't know if she'll align herself with fucked-up people and causes like two of them. But she's done something similar with Dreamer+. This is a record that could've only come out at this exact moment, and it only could've come from this exact person.
Dreamer+ is out 1/16 on Heaven-Sent/[PIAS] Électronique.
Other albums of note out this week:
• A$AP Rocky’s Don't Be Dumb
• Peaer's Doppelganger
• Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore's Tragic Magic
• Jana Horn's Jana Horn
• Xiu Xiu's Xiu Mutha Fuckin' Xiu: Vol. 1
• Courtney Marie Andrews' Valentine
• Oxis' Oxis 8
• Together Pangea's Eat Myself
• Sleaford Mods' The Demise Of Planet X
• Madison Beer's locket
• Cavetown's Running With Scissors
• Langhorne Slim's The Dreamin' Kind
• Kreator's Krushers Of The World
• Richard Marx's After Hours
• Gluecifer's Same Drug New High
• The James Hunter Six's Off The Fence
• Alev Lenz's 4 In A Cycle Of Thirds
• Tyler Ramsey & Carl Broemel's Celestun
• Ov Sulfur's Endless
• Ya Tseen's Stand On My Shoulders
• Wormy's Shark River
• Travis Bolt's Burning Bridges
• Shaking Hand's Shaking Hand
• Wilson Tanner Smith's Perpetual Guest
• Imarhan's Essam
• Clothesline From Hell's Slather On The Honey
• RIOPY's Be Love
• Nat & Alex Wolff's Nat & Alex Wolff
• Sylvia Black's Shadowtime
• Carrion Vael's Slay Utterly
• Lexa Gates' I Am
• Mike Mattison's Turn A Midnight Corner
• Fire In The Radio's Red Static Action
• Osvaldo Golijov's Ever Yours
• Craig Taborn's Dream Archives
• Rifle's Rifle
• Arcángel's La 8va Maravilla
• DaBaby's Be More Grateful
• Daniel Blumberg's The Testament Of Ann Lee score
• Barry Adamson's SCALA!!! score
• Warning's Watching From A Distance (20th Anniversary Deluxe)
• Nate Smith's LIVE-ACTION (Deluxe)
• ENHYPHEN's THE SIN : VANISH mini album
• DxS (SEVENTEEN)'s Serenade mini album
• I Promised The World's I Promised The World EP
• They Might Be Giants' Eyeball EP
• Westside Cowboy's So Much Country ‘Till We Get There EP
• Elvis Francois’ Realignment EP
• Local Weatherman's Right One EP
• Tigra And SPNCR's Black Rice EP
• Gylt's In 1,000 Agonies, I Exist EP
• Belaria's Dynamic State EP
