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The Local’s top Swedish songs for September

The Local's music guru, Paul Connolly, has picked out Sweden's eight best new tracks to help ease you into autumn.

Published: 4 September 2015 11:36 CEST
Updated: 4 September 2015 15:36 CEST
The Local's top Swedish songs for September
Swedish singer Noonie Bao embracing the autumn. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/TT

1. Loreen – I’m In It With You

The 2012 Eurovision winner is still making lush, melodramatic pop music and this might be her best song since Euphoria.

2. NHGT – Redefine

The debut single from NGHT (Jens Andersson and Mikael Jepson, formerly of The Ark) conjures up New Order and early techno but has a snappy pop sensibility too.

3. The Royal Concept

Fashion This Stockholm band are clearly familiar with the work of the Rolling Stones and Reef. A big, big chorus too.

4. Elin Rigby – A Friend With A Car

Just as the nights shorten and autumn approaches, here comes the perfect soundtrack for long summer days. Elin Rigby’s timing may be suspect but this dreamy, electro-pop still shimmers beautifully.

5. John De Sohn – Rush ft Violet Days

Adrenalised electronic dance with just a hint of raw pop edge. This’ll get you going in the mornings.

6. Leon – Nobody Cares

Tove Lo’s almost alarmingly confessional pop has infected this deceptively breezy slice of summer pop – the chorus will soon lodge in your head like a giant hook.

7. Noonie Bao – Pyramids

Noonie Bao, one of Sweden’s more interesting pop stars, here channels Sweden’s most famous pop stars – Pyramids has a golden chorus that rings with the vocal clarity of Abba.

8. Cape Lion – Oh Girl

This has been the month of great choruses – Cape Lion offer us another gigantic earworm.

Watch all the tracks on YouTube

Listen to The Local's Spotify playlist

 

 

CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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