SKAAR

Doors 7:30pm // Age Restriction 16+

Mad Woman: not so much a term as it is a weapon; a threat to remain silent, a cautionary tale of what happens to women who dare to speak the truth. For three years, Norwegian singer-songwriter SKAAR has been bound in a straitjacket, gagged by self-doubt and a mistrust of her own memory. Mad Woman, her third record, is a story of hard-won reclamation, a scream for survival. Pushing the parameters of what pop music is capable of, the album’s hooks and highs offered much-needed sweetness to the bitter realities she forced herself to confront. ‘One step at a time, one day after another’, she promised herself, and here she is at last: Mad Woman, the destination at which she’d always hoped to arrive. You’d be forgiven for believing that everything had started to fall into place for Hilde Skaar. Her 2018 double-platinum certified debut single “Higher Ground” earned a prominent placement in Norwegian Netflix drama Battle when she was only nineteen years old. Her voice seemed to burst forth from a crystal spring out of a fjord: clear, fresh and exhilaratingly sharp. She found a natural ally in pop – it lifted her to danceable heights, and she, in turn, lent a sense of feeling and gravitas to the dancefloor. Met with both commercial and critical success in Norway, SKAAR has amassed over 50 million all-time streams on Spotify, with eight top 40 singles and numerous award nominations. Her 2020 debut album The Other Side of Waiting was an act of self-discovery, striving to negotiate the tension between her artistic identity and that which was expected of her at an age when she hardly knew herself. The following year, she would release Waiting, an acoustic album of strays from her back catalogue which marked her first tentative steps towards vulnerability in her songwriting. But there was a chasm between the music she was releasing which she had written as a teenager and the emotionally turbulent reality of the young woman she had become. The turn of the pandemic marked a year of reckoning: it demanded a confrontation of her past, reopening old scars and finding that the wounds ran far deeper than she first thought. “What is most important is I’ve finally been able to say things out loud to myself,” says SKAAR, “and now I’m gonna say it out loud to the world, as well.” She felt, to tell this story, she would have to divide Mad Woman into two parts. The first is a reflection of SKAAR’s mental state at its worst, the rock-bottom she was determined to build from; the second is about the day she always hoped would come, when she reclaimed her control and spirit through writing this album on her own terms. Part 1 is formed of seven tracks which unravel her long-avoided trauma: a toxic relationship and the defining events of her childhood. But this is not a project of victimhood. Rather, this is about SKAAR finding protection in pop music, euphoria in a refusal to be silenced and a reclamation of control. No single song lends itself entirely to darkness or light, just as she no longer sees experiences in terms of ‘bad’ or ‘good’: they only serve the woman she has become. We wouldn’t have Mad Woman were it not for SKAAR’s close support system of friends and collaborators who helped draw out those difficult stories. Written with Mathias Wang and Bjarte DePresno Borthen, “Get Him Away From Me” is an exhilarating pop anthem that plays out like a much-needed exhale; the relief that comes from defiance. SKAAR writes of a predatory man who those around her brush off as just being “physical”, just trying to be her friend (“You shouldn’t read into it”) and a primal reaction inside her which set off alarm bells. Speaking on the track, she explains: “My body remembered everything that had happened before and kind of screamed, ‘You have to stand up for yourself.’ I feel like I didn’t really have a choice because my body made that choice for me. I was very paranoid people didn’t believe me, or thought I was just trying to get attention. I think I instinctively felt shame so that I wouldn’t get hurt by speaking up. But I’m in such a better place now, and I feel like it’s a banger,” she smiles, “so people need to hear it.” The reason why her body had such a visceral reaction to the events of “Get Him Away From Me” is because of the story SKAAR tells in “Obscene”. Written on the island of Giske at Ocean Sound studios, surrounded by the vast Norwegian landscape and interminable rage of the sea crashing against the windows, it proved to be a conduit for her own rage she desperately needed an outlet for. Beginning with the sound of a warped music box which bleeds into battle-cry percussion and menacing grooves, this is SKAAR’s declaration of war. Her thoughts pace around a line being crossed, a mistrust of someone’s intentions, before everything falls away to SKAAR’s voice alone. She elaborates, “I’ve felt crazy, I’ve felt insane the last three years. Your brain just tells you that it didn’t happen, or it wasn’t that bad – it does anything to protect you from feeling anything so you don’t experience it again and again. But I’m not crazy. It’s just my body trying to protect itself.” In 2021, as she was writing Mad Woman, SKAAR made the decision to see a therapist. “Something Like This”, a slice of soaring pop euphoria that will have you singing into your hairbrush, is about the thrill of finally being understood and heard after her first session. You could almost read it as a love song. It’s clear to see how crying-in-the-club progenitor Robyn is one of SKAAR’s key influences. Like “Dancing On My Own” achieves, SKAAR seeks to hold up a mirror and let her music reflect what we feel, whether that’s joy, sadness – or an embrace of both. Speaking on “Something Like This”, she says: “It’s so great to go to someone and untangle things that feel like chaos. I can be vulnerable and say everything I need to say and understand why I make the choices that I make,” she says. “I’m less scared of things getting real in conversations – which is a relief, because it’s pretty exhausting going around being scared of getting vulnerable when it’s the most natural thing in life.” But SKAAR soon learned that with therapy, there is no quick fix or easy answer. The album plays out much like a session, beginning with immediate situations and then reaching back into childhood to seek a newfound understanding. Final track “What Are You Scared Of?” is by far the most vulnerable. Here, there are no pop theatrics, only SKAAR and the murmurs of an acoustic guitar. It was written with Fanny Hultman, who she likens to a “big sister”, in her tiny studio basement. They talked for hours on end, cried together – and what remained was this song. It sounds almost claustrophobic, like it was recorded in a childhood hiding place. Together, the album tells a story of a person daring to believe in herself and stand her own ground. The nocturnal, piano-driven banger “DNA” draws from the final conversation between SKAAR and a controlling partner. At last, she cuts the puppet strings, taking back control of where she goes from here. SKAAR comments: “The whole album is about my journey to dare to listen to myself, believe myself and let it go. I don’t think you can let things go if you don’t accept that they’ve happened.” After all this time, she has never stopped chasing silver linings: she wants her experiences on this album to be a source of comfort, to create a sense of closeness and sisterhood that she experienced with her own friends as she was writing it. As she prepares to embark on a tour of the UK and Europe later this year, SKAAR hopes to see that this album has shaped the lives of others as profoundly as it has shaped her own.