Critics have bemoaned how the supposed dwindling attention spans of younger generations has led to a demand for multiple hooks littered through shorter songs. That approach has certainly helped in the streaming era. “We often tweak and simplify the song, and never quit before we feel we’ve got a killer hook.” They’re as focused on creating ear-worms as their pop peers : “We make sure there’s a lot of melody in the track, so it can inspire the writer,” they said in 2019. The Nords now have a formidable list of collaborations to their name, including Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, Janet Jackson, Sam Smith and Whitney Houston. Stargate broke into the UK music industry via their work with British Nineties pop acts such as S Club 7, Blue and Atomic Kitten, but they also helped launch London R&B group Mis-Teeq, who achieved a US Top 10 with “Scandalous”. Coincidentally, they were born the same year Abba formed in 1972. Move into R&B and hip-hop territory too and some of the big players are LA-based Norwegian duo Stargate, aka Tor E Hermansen and Mikkel S Eriksen. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a music A-lister whose work, at one point or another, hasn’t been sprinkled by some Scandi magic dust. The New Yorker journalist and author John Seabrook defined “the Max Martin sound” as “Abba’s pop chords and textures, Denniz Pop’s song structure and dynamics, Eighties arena rock’s big choruses, and Nineties American R&B grooves”. But his sound is also inextricable from Scandipop’s history. His reign continues to this day: he has the third-most No 1 singles in the US, behind only Paul McCartney and John Lennon. He helped to define Y2K pop, working on hits such as Britney’s “…Baby One More Time” and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”, then some of the biggest pop singles the next decade, from Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”. “And they can make a complicated theoretical concept sound easy – that’s pop magic!”Ī lot of that pop magic has since come to be underscored by Max Martin, one of the world’s leading music producers.
![you tube swedish house mafia you tube swedish house mafia](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GH_49G6jOY8/maxresdefault.jpg)
“Their hooks, their prog way of songwriting… you never know what’s lurking behind the next corner, you don’t expect the next chord progression,” she explains to The Independent at Norway’s by:Larm music festival. She says that part of Abba’s alchemy is down to their music’s element of surprise. Sigrid is one of Norway’s biggest breakout successes, having won the BBC Sound of 2018 poll and gone on to score a top four album in the UK. They are all a tiny little part of the music I make today.”
![you tube swedish house mafia you tube swedish house mafia](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/I0YCe-p6iT0/maxresdefault.jpg)
Somewhere in my head there’s a bank of all the melodies I’ve heard in my life. And sometimes that’s subconscious, sometimes not, says Oslo-based singer Anna of the North: “I must’ve heard all their songs a million times, so it’s impossible for me not to be inspired by them. “I think a lot of Scandipop writing techniques originate from picking apart Abba songs,” says Dagny. Such is their vast legacy, the group has continued to inform the structure and style of Scandi pop music ever since. Songs that are written by Swedish songwriters and producers are considered Swedish in origin, and the report found that they are mostly played (27 per cent) in North America, suggesting that the pop charts are firmly in their glacial grip. Fast forward to 2021 and a recent report by Export Music Sweden found that Sweden especially is now the second-highest exporter of music in the world, after the US and ahead of the UK.
![you tube swedish house mafia you tube swedish house mafia](https://res.cloudinary.com/graham-media-group/image/upload/f_auto/q_auto/c_scale,w_400/v1/media/gmg/3LJQ34FWSFAETH5H7PWCDCVVVM.jpg)
![you tube swedish house mafia you tube swedish house mafia](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f3/62/72/f36272b5bf801b5f3b7d584a443833ce.jpg)
A year later, the high priestess of them all, Robyn, returned to claim her throne with her first album in almost a decade, Honey.Īnd that’s not counting the vast number of pop architects behind the scenes, in the studio. Cast your mind back to the heady days of 2017 and you couldn’t move for new Scandipop stars jostling for space: Sweden’s Zara Larsson and Tove Lo, Norway’s Sigrid, Denmark’s MØ among them. There’s Abba, of course, but in recent years, the march on world domination has intensified. Every now and again, Scandipop has super-troopered its way into the global pop charts and stolen hearts with its sublime catchiness.