Dreamer+

Sassy 009 was once a trio of classmates from Oslo: three cool, elusive voices swirling and stuttering against a gentle barrage of programmed ploinks, like club music by the jaded girls sitting at the back of the room. Then ringleader Sunniva Lindgård, who took the alias from an old SoundCloud handle, shed her counterparts (and some of the frosty detachment) and went solo. In 2021, Heart Ego inflamed her sound with shocks of color and dance pop as energetic as Cowgirl Clue. Lindgård took four years to return with Dreamer+, which at times sounds more like a nightmare. Pulling from a morass of trendy club pop and trip-hop tropes, she’s homing in on brash, flashy thrills and injecting them with darkside dissonance.

The often cryptic narrative seems to chart the highs and lows of a doomed relationship, one where the protagonist needs their partner to leave in order to evolve as a person. The fictional narrator, played by Lindgård, is “free fall aiming for your arms tonight” and finding adoration in her lover Jakov’s eyes. But she feels an overwhelming sense of despair and eventually “kills Jakov with nothing more than a thought,” as she states at the record’s end, before abrasive noise consumes her voice. According to the press release, the story involves a fairytale with mutating characters, and the narrator is supposed to be on a mission in an abandoned town, although none of that is really discernible from the music. Instead there’s a lot of yearning and uneasiness and irresolution. Some standout lyrics send obliquely suggestive images fluttering through the brain (“swoosh community,” “a silent triple face,” “television, chilling sugaboo in a cage forgets”).

Mostly, the vocals poof up and twinkle like plumes of vapor; they work best when she experiments with her flow. Auto-Tune magic and formant freakiness light up “Butterflies,” where Lindgård sings in a herky-jerky rhythm that’s like cyberpunk slam poetry. The sparse wintry sweep of “In the Snow” provides the perfect backdrop for Lindgård’s crinkling, pixelated inflection. On “Edges,” a doomscroller’s aging-out anthem, her voice cuts through the fog with a surprisingly intimate “Hey there you, you.” As much as she fucks up and filters her voice, it all starts to blend into the same genre of misty freakout by the end of the record—ad-libs spraying like raindrops on the windshield, chopped-up slivers of angel warbles, dragged-out sighs. Even the guest features are reverbed to oblivion. Blood Orange sings gently over “Tell Me,” which has the uneasy churn of a Moin track but with the serrated edge aggressively softened.

Much of the production is supremely pleasant to listen to, but just as hazy and confused as the plot, splitting between spacey expanses of synth and dramatic eruptions. “Enemy” starts with 30 seconds of pure gloomy ambience before detonating into a kind of trap drum hook, where she repeats, “Are you an enemy?” over a beat that doesn’t offer full weird-pop gratification à la “Noid” but also isn’t texturally intoxicating (though the way she shadows every line with “I don’t know” is delicious). “Dreamer” offers formless dream-hop filler and “My Candle” hints at a grunge-gaze blaze, then just hurls more thwacky breakbeats. Maybe the most ungainly yet conceptually cool is “Butterflies,” the musical equivalent of undergoing transhumanist surgery from man to machine. Revving cars and cyborgian synths give way to a monstrous terror-bass sound so gurgly it’s like Lindgård’s duetting with a cartoon rapper from Friday Night Funkin’.

In the last few years, Scandinavia has become the global center for all manner of uncanny cloud rock and ambient pop wonder, from the dreamy Danes to screw-pop savants like Smerz. Digital-analog trickery and aching minimalism have taken over indie scenes across the world, catalogued by amorphous playlists like Spotify’s “Cph+” (“Copenhagen plus”), of which Lindgård is now the cover. In this album’s least inventive moments, it’s like a focus-grouped version of that alternative, gently askew style, a 2020s parallel to the vibey indie-pop made to fit the infamous POLLEN playlist. The impersonal trip-hop pales in comparison to a.s.o.; the slanted R&B of tracks like “Mirrors” mostly makes you want to listen to Tirzah, and the witch-house doom doesn’t go as hard as E_DEATH. In many cases, someone else did it first, someone else did it better, and the lack of graspable depth from the plot means the album lacks real stakes.

One standout is “Ruins of a Lost Memory.” Surrounded by orchestras since the womb, Lindgård is the child of two classically trained musicians who once submitted a song to a Eurovision contest in the 1990s. They didn’t make the cut, but Lindgård—who holds complicated feelings about picking the gaudy thrills of EDM and pop over her parents’ discipline—samples their melody for an anachronistic yet strangely alluring piano ballad. Maybe it’s here as an ode to where she came from, or a comment on the classical route she refused and all the twitchy and turbulent digital chaos she chose to explore instead. It’s a concrete, compelling closer to an album that otherwise slips from memory as swiftly as a dream.