You Need Swedish Pop Trio Wildhart
- Josh Stoneham
- Dec 2, 2016
- 2 min read
If spacey Swedish electro-pop is your thing, then you need to check out Wildhart.
The Trio is made up of Ylva Holmdahl, Josefin Runsteen and Christian ”Kiwi” Berg. Much like the quiet fairly unknown Swedish city they inhabit, Gotherburg, Wildhart have an ethereal feel to their music, mixing elements of Soft Rock and House to create a unique sound. Their Debut album Shine came out this November and, due to its incredibly quiet release, you probably didn’t hear
about it. Only a couple of review sites had a listen and all had the same question. Why is no one listening to Wildhart?
The highlight of the album is the song Is It Possible. The song has such incredible range in it, at times sounding like a standard House track, and at other times sounding like an angelic ballad. The pace of the track is perfectly timed and the musical journey the track takes never feels uncontrolled or unnatural. Wildhart sounds like Grimes with a sprinkle of House and a twist of Jaime XX.
Sprawling tracks like Fantasy take the best of experimental song structures, heard similarly by the likes of artists such as Frank Ocean, and mix them with a dance flavour. Wildhart take you to another world where you can’t see the ground, but you still tap your feet.
With tracks on Shine like We Made Up A Dream, you can hear echoes of groups like Kraftwerk, with thick square wave keyboards plodding along rotating drums that float around your ears. Wildhart’s lack of celebrity mean that they can push the already weakened boundaries put in by their predecessors to make truly unique, interesting music.
This boundary pushing takes form in the groups aesthetic as well. With their androgynous look combined with music videos that seem to be inspired by how the songs ‘feel’ rather than being inspired by lyrics, Wildhart epitomise a modern shift in music and how it’s presented and consumed.
Some will say that Wildhart’s look and sound is overly pretentious and fairly boring. But I genuinely think that Wildhart aren’t trying to push their music to the limit. I think they’re trying to take music away from a 3 minute, chorus- verse-chorus structure and make music that puts the sound first and the structure second. With their videos, instead of making a MTV friendly video with lots of actors and extras, they pick a video that reflects how the song sounds and don’t distract listeners with dance routines and lip syncing. Instead of facing a barrage of cheesy imagery that serves no purpose but to distract from the reason I’m watching it in the first place (the music) we get a video that perfectly complements the songs we’re hearing. It looks like how the music sounds. Beautiful, free and a little confusing.
Wildhart take all the elements that boundary pushers in the music industry have introduced and merge them into one. With their new album, Shine, full of great tracks and their track Is It Possible a definite potential pop hit, these guys are definitely one to watch.
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