Hometown: Stockholm.
The lineup: Erika Soldh Ahlström (lead vocals, voice pedal/loop), Marta Pettersson (lead vocals, keyboards).
The background: How good is Scandinavian pop? So good that, just as we were deciding to feature superb rising Swedish duo I Am Karate, another record, this time from Denmark, arrived at the New band of the day office that was every bit as deserving of this space. The pop dominance and excellence of that region continues apace. Something about their distance from the fray evidently gives them the perspective and freedom required to fashion – contrive, even – immaculate pop.
I Am Karate martial their artistry with aplomb. They will chop your head off, in the nicest possible way, with their marvellously maudlin and mordantly mellow mid-tempo melodies. These are songs about the destructive power of relationships, designed for love and dancing, to quote the great bard Sir Philip Oakey. IAK are bang up to date, while also nodding to earlier developments in electronic music, from dubstep to R&B. It’s shimmering, spacious synthpop with a commercial sheen and rough experimental edges, for fans of Grimes, Saint Lou Lou and Mø. As with most of the best Nordic pop, it could come from the US, Britain, anywhere, although connoisseurs will take one listen to the soulful – not glutinous or gloopy but coolly impassioned – vocals and polished production and think, “That’s Swedish.”
Actually, it comes from Nacka, near Stockholm – in a house that singer and keyboardist Marta Pettersson lives in with five others. It isn’t, she insists, a shared home but a collective. “We do the groceries together, cook together, eat together and watch movies together,” she explains. “It’s more like a family. A religious commune? No. We’re all just normal people.”
The house is where the sharing ends. I Am Karate solely belong to Pettersson and project partner Erika Soldh Ahlström, who is joint lead singer and uses a pedal and loop station to manipulate her voice and assorted sounds. They both handle the writing, producing, singing and playing. They don’t have a studio as such, just Pettersson’s bedroom, where she keeps her laptop, sound-card, microphone, Midi keyboard, Logic software and guitar. Asked whether it matches the equipment used by so-called successful professionals, she cites St Vincent’s 2011 album Strange Mercy, whose drums were, Pettersson believes, all computerised, as well as the intro music to Game of Thrones. “It sounds expensive, like a whole orchestra, but it’s just one cello playing for real and the other stuff is Midi-based,” she says, realising she may have just dissed GoT composer Ramin Djawadi. “That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”
Pettersson finds interviews in English hard work, but her and Ahlström’s all-Anglo lyrics for I Am Karate are effortless, pitch-perfect examinations of affairs of the heart. “How could I be so brainless?” they sing on All Good, from the In Thin Air EP. They have, she says, very different voices. “Mine is more indie – crispy.” Crispy? “Fragile. Erika’s is more like a Katy Perry-type voice.” Would Ahlström beat her on X Factor? “Yes.” Back to that “brainless” lyric … “We struggle with writing English sometimes,” she admits, inadvertently alighting upon the appeal of IAK’s words – they sometimes get them a little bit wrong, which makes them seem even more right, if that makes sense. “It’s not our mother language,” she adds. “Often we’re, like, ‘Can we really say this?’ We just try and speak our feelings directly.” Discussing relationships in a foreign language must be especially tricky. “It’s not that hard,” Pettersson replies, honestly. “We want to write in English because we want to reach more people than just Swedes.”
All Good is about “feeling really low and stuck inside your head with all these bad thoughts looping around, when you just need somebody to say, ‘Hey, let it go, it’s all good.’” Bitter addresses the problem of wanting to be with the wrong person “because they’re exciting and everyone else is boring”. Bloom and Lock concern, respectively, cruelty and commitment. The pulsating Swayze is particularly poignant: it’s about “ghosting”. Pettersson has been the victim of the modern phenomenon. “I have had a serious couple of dates and then the person just suddenly disappeared – no texts, nothing. And its like, ‘What?’ I told Erika and she said, ‘You’ve been ghosted!’ I looked it up and I was like, ‘Wow, this has to be a song.’”
I Am Karate’s heroes are Robyn (Marta) and Susanne Sundfør (Erika). “She’s like this pop queen,” says Pettersson of Robyn. “She is so strong and she has this beautiful melodic language. It’s simple yet perfect.” She’s never met her but guesses that, if she did, she’d lose the ability to speak. I Am Karate aren’t exactly strangers to fandom back home, where they have appeared on daytime TV, and children are known to hum their music in the playground. “I have a teacher friend and she tells me her kids sing our songs at break,” Pettersson says, proudly. Sometimes, IAK get carried away by their own greatness and it all goes slightly awry. “We sang one of our songs at karaoke one night and it sounded really bad,” reveals Pettersson. “A friend filmed it so we had to force her to delete it, in case she put it on YouTube.” They didn’t employ martial arts, but at least one of them could have. “Erika is a black-belt in Taekwondo,” notes Pettersson. “‘Karate means ‘empty hand’ – you come in peace and use no weapons, but you can defend yourself if necessary.” So Ahlström could beat her in a fight? “Definitely,” she says, and she laughs so loud she might wake the collective. “She could beat me in singing and fighting.”
The buzz: “Brilliant mid-tempo gems.”
The truth: Another great Nordic pop act, out of thin air.
Most likely to: Appear in the charts.
Least likely to: Suddenly disappear from our lives.
What to buy: The In Thin Air EP is out now on Universal.
File next to: MØ, Saint Lou Lou, Grimes, Kate Boy.
Links: soundcloud.com/i-am-karate
Ones to watch: Bricc Baby, Michael Christmas, Lester Fitzpatrick, the Dream Life, Trudy and the Romance.
