Danish singer/songwriter Asbjørn has just released his next full-length album Boyology, following the success of his debut LP Sunken Ships.
“I’ve made a career out of breaking norms”, Asbjørn laughs.
“The mainstream thinks I’m underground and the underground thinks I’m mainstream. I quite like that – the freedom of not fitting in.”
Since 2012’s Sunken Ships, Asbjørn has done things his own way. 2015’s Pseudo Visions and its interconnected nine music videos got fellow-Scandinavian Lykke Li’s attention while Soundvenue, in the 5-star review, praised Asbjørn for giving “much needed CPR to a genre at risk of losing its edge”.
One of the world’s biggest record labels paid notice to Asbjørn’s uncompromising rise on the international scene. They believed they could make him into a global success and all of a sudden Asbjørn was writing music with well-renowned people in London and Los Angeles.
“I flourished as a writer and had a unique chance to develop my craft with some of the most talented people of the pop industry,” Asbjørn says.
“But there was also a commercial expectation, which I struggled to implement in my emotional and personal approach to pop.” And when the first single didn’t perform as the label had hoped, Asbjørn was given an ultimatum; He had to sing other people’s songs, and turn down his queerness – otherwise, he would lose his contract.
“It was a no-brainer,” he says. “The male popstar they wanted me to be was exactly the ideal I have spent my whole life emancipating myself from.”
Asbjørn took back control. Without the multinational company, he had to reinvent the vision for his third album, which had already been through several phases. In his Kreuzberg apartment, he wrote and produced the album from scratch, before finishing it in London with co-producer Tom Stafford (Alexander23, Orla Gartland) and with help from PC Music’s Danny L Harle (Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek) on album single STB x Boyfriend.
“Boyology is a personal pop laboratory,” Asbjørn says.
“My relation to pop music is in constant development and my life mission in my work is to study and test its boundaries, as well as my own. But I’ll probably always be standing on the outside looking in. Cos Boyology is a pop album on my own terms as well as my emancipation from the traditional male ideal and the invisible expectations in society and within ourselves to what a man should or should not be”.
This determination is hard to miss: His intimate explorations of sexuality and vulnerability in the album’s accompanying video trilogy. Him touring high schools and giving talks to students about identity and pop culture. Or, maybe most of all, on album-highlight “Be Human”, where he juxtaposes gender politics, a four-to-the-floor beat and, with his melancholic falsetto, states: “I don’t wanna be a man if man means power, to not empower others”.
Boyology is out on January 28 via Embassy of Music and Asbjørns own label Body of Work.
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