Sigrid

Sigrid: The Pop Star Who Writes From Irritation

A producer was patronising her in a songwriting session. Most twenty-year-olds swallow it. Sigrid Solbakk Raabe went away and turned the sensation into "Don't Kill My Vibe" — a chorus so precisely aimed that Island Records signed her on hearing it, and BBC Radio 1 made it the Hottest Record in the World. It remains the cleanest illustration of how she works: take an ordinary humiliation, and build something enormous out of it.

Ålesund

She was born on 5 September 1996 in Ålesund, on Norway's western coast, to Håkon Raabe and Anette Sølberg Solbakk, the youngest of three. Her grandmother taught her piano; her older brother Tellef, himself a musician, taught her guitar. She trained as a dancer for a decade. Her first public performance, in kindergarten, ended with her being carried off the stage in tears. At thirteen she was singing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and at seventeen she and her sister Johanne formed a band called Sala Says Mhyp, named after their dead cat.

For a long time she treated music as too precarious to count as a plan, considering teaching, law and journalism instead. The turn came at sixteen, when Tellef told her to stop performing Adele covers and write something of her own. She came back with "Sun," released as her first single in 2013 and picked up by Norwegian radio. "Two Fish" followed the same year and "Known You Forever" in 2014 — all three now scrubbed from streaming services and surviving on YouTube, the discarded juvenilia of an artist who worked out early what she wanted to sound like.

Don't Kill My Vibe

"Don't Kill My Vibe," written with the producer Martin Sjølie in 2016, arrived on Radio 1 in February 2017 and did what breakthrough singles are supposed to do and rarely manage: it converted a private grievance into a public anthem without losing the sting. The EP of the same name charted in Norway, Australia, the United Kingdom and Scotland. She spent 2017 on the festival circuit — The Great Escape, Roskilde, Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading and Leeds — recorded a Simlish version of her own single for *The Sims 4*, released "Strangers" in November, and sang Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows" over the opening of *Justice League*.

In January 2018 she won BBC Music's Sound of 2018, the industry's most closely watched forecast. She took Newcomer of the Year at that year's Spellemannprisen and released a second EP, *Raw*, in July. The stripped-back "Focus" showed one register; the title track of the album to come showed the other.

Sucker Punch and After

*Sucker Punch* was released on 8 March 2019. It topped the Norwegian chart, reached the UK top five and went platinum. She toured Europe with Maroon 5, supported George Ezra across Britain, headlined North America, contributed "Home to You" to *The Aeronauts*, and appeared on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list for European entertainment. At the 2019 Spellemannprisen she was named both Pop Artist and Spellemann of the Year.

*How to Let Go* followed in May 2022 — described by AllMusic as a strong, insightful blend of shimmering dance-pop and arena-sized emotion — and carried a fifty-date world tour that ran from Radio 1's Big Weekend to Dublin's 3Arena that November, with a deluxe edition adding acoustic versions and previously unheard songs including "Blue." *The Hype* EP came in September 2023, a collaboration with Kygo, "The Feeling," in 2024, and her third album, *There's Always More That I Could Say*, in October 2025, trailed by the single "Jellyfish." An eighteen-date European tour opened at the Rockefeller in Oslo in January 2026 and closed at Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom that March. She holds three Spellemannprisen awards, two MTV Europe Music Awards and two P3 Gull awards.

The Method

She is unusually explicit about her raw material. Her songs, by her own account, centre on anger, melancholy and disappointment; she finds frustration easier to write than happiness, and the resulting records tend to sound triumphant while saying something considerably more ambivalent. Her stated influences run across generations and registers — Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt, Adele, Coldplay, Lykke Li, Robyn. AllMusic's summary is that she delivers pop in an earnest, fist-pumping style on a rich, versatile voice, which understates the engineering underneath.

Why Sigrid Is Called a Genius

The claim, honestly stated, is about craft rather than intellect — and specifically about compression. Sigrid's distinguishing skill is the ability to take a small, unflattering, precisely located emotion and build a chorus that a stadium can sing without the original feeling being sanded off. "Don't Kill My Vibe" is a song about being condescended to in a meeting; it works at festival scale because the writing keeps the irritation intact rather than translating it into generic empowerment. That is harder than it sounds, and most pop writing fails at exactly that step. She also has a technical facility that predates the career — piano from a grandmother, guitar from a brother, ten years of dance training — and it shows in a body of songs whose rhythmic phrasing is more inventive than the polished surfaces suggest.

The counter-case is that almost none of this is solitary. "Don't Kill My Vibe" was co-written and co-produced with Martin Sjølie, as most modern pop is; the credits on her records are collective. BBC Sound of, Forbes 30 Under 30 and the rest are prediction lists and marketing mechanisms, not verdicts on originality. Her catalogue after nine years runs to three albums. No critic of standing has called her a genius, and she has never made the claim herself. What the record supports is a first-rate pop songwriter with an unusually accurate ear for the difference between a feeling and its cliche — which is a real distinction, and a narrower one than the word implies.

Legacy

Sigrid arrived at the moment Scandinavian pop was becoming the industry's default machinery and declined to sound like it — no gloss over the grievance, no reinvention of the person singing. A decade on, she is one of the few artists broken by a BBC tip list who has kept working at scale, headlining arenas and rewriting her own settings without either chasing trends or abandoning them. She still records in Norwegian studios with Norwegian collaborators, and her best songs still start with someone annoying her.