You’d be forgiven for believing that everything had started to fall into place for 24-year-old SKAAR (real name 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 her new album 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 longavoided 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.