The first time I heard (of) Annika Norlin was way back in 2005 when a Swedish friend included the track ‘Highschool Stalker’ on a mix tape. Well, okay, a mix CD, the format I guess being an analogue stepping stone to digital playlists which, as fine as those might be, nevertheless lack the charm of physical objects coming though the letterbox: The cover a picture scissored out of a magazine, or maybe if you were lucky a hand assembled collage. Hand written tracklists with spelling errors and crossings out. The charm of her handwriting.

Anyway, I thought ‘Highschool Stalker’ was marvellous. All handclaps and yummy strummy guitars, teeming with teenage hormones (even though Norlin would have been at the tail end of her twenties when she wrote and recorded the song). Listening again now, twenty years on, it still sounds terrific, with a period charm enhanced by references to being “on the Altavista” and “twice on the Yahoo”. Norlin was going by the performing name of Hello Saferide in those days (was this a band? An alter-ego? I never was quite sure and I’m not at all sure that it matters…) and the ‘Introducing…’ album that ‘Highschool Stalker’ closed off was, and remains, a tremendous slice of IndieFolkPop. That album was certainly part of what was for me and many others something of a period of Swedish obsession. All that Scandi-Noir and the insanely addictive sweet Pop that gave it such a great contrast. Too many artists to mention here, but Annika Norlin was pretty much, if not front and centre, certainly hanging around in close proximity, at least for me. The other two albums she made as Hello Saferide (2008’s ‘More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide’ and ‘The Fox, The Hunter and Hello Saferide’ from 2014) were every bit as good as the debut, whilst I found the songs sung in Swedish under the Säkert! moniker to be equally seductive, even if (or perhaps especially because) I could not understand a word of what Norlin was singing. A version of the second Säkert! album (2010’s ‘Facit’) was released in 2011 as ‘På Engelska’ with the songs translated to English and is another exceptionally charming record.

An appearance on one of Jens Lekman’s ‘Postcards’ songs from 2015 (October 5th 2015, Postcard number 40 if you want to track it down) led to their collaborative ‘Correspondence’ LP of 2019. I consider this album to be a something of a modern classic, particularly the album closing ‘Silent Night’ which is certainly one damn song that is guaranteed to make me break down and cry. Then 2022’s ‘Mentor’, a ‘double album’ with a mix of Swedish and English lyrics and 2024’s ‘En Tid Att Riva Sönder’ which she made with Jonas Teglund who had been in the band Park Hotell, whose 2006 album ‘The Guest Who Stayed Forever’ was another of those Swedish records that struck a chord, in particular the tingling track ‘Size of Spain’. So I have been enjoying both of these most recent albums these past few days as they had passed under my radar until now. Indeed I only stumbled on them thanks to one of those little quirks of connection, again through Jens Lekman, whose recent ‘Songs For Other People’s Weddings’ LP has been playing a lot and is one of my very favourites of this year. So yes, listening to Jens got me thinking about ‘Correspondence’ again so I had a look to see if there were any Annika Norlin records I had missed, and there they were.

Something else that I discovered was a novel called ‘Colony’ which, the advertising assured me, is a ‘Swedish bestseller’. Well, despite being not much interested in contemporary fiction I just had to give it a twirl and am so glad to have done so, for it is a very fine book indeed. It is quite easy to see why the book should be a best seller, for it feels as though it addresses 21st century issues, fears, concerns, whatever. So, of the characters who populate the novel and through whose lenses we see the story unravel, all of them “had anxiety.” Well of course they did and of course they do, for ‘anxiety’ is the contagion of our age. A cover-all excuse behind which to hide and/or a stick with which to beat the flimsy hearted. I say this with a tongue at least approaching my cheek, incidentally, for whilst I am mistrustful of a single word being used to explain away a multitude of issues I equally dislike the fact that doing so often feels like an excuse for avoiding an examination of the reasons for such feelings/responses. From both sides of the fence.

Whatever. The characters, as well as all suffering from ‘anxiety’ are further described as being “all strange… all flawed” and so if not quite the “alcoholics, child-molesters, nervous wrecks and prima donnas” from Dexys’ ‘I’ll Show You’, then they are at least to an extent the wild hearted outsiders. Certainly the misfits, the square pegs, the ones who find modern life to be, at least in part, confusing and challenging, something of a battle. These are characters who to various degrees try to flex in response to the requirements of the society and the systems we all of us find ourselves within. Norlin seems too though to be making the observation that whilst individuals necessarily attempt to bend in order to function/survive within what often feel like alien systems, those systems and societies are in turn almost entirely inflexible and unforgiving. The contest feels rigged, defeat inevitable, at least for some. And so they opt out. They run away.

Such tales of running away to hide in the hinterland inevitably conjure notions of hippy communes and cult retreats. Inevitably too one cannot help but think of the ‘Colony’ as something approaching Manson’s Family (though admittedly without the extremism of murders in the Hollywood hills and dune buggy attack battalions in Death Valley), something that Norlin acknowledges with a reference dropped towards the end of the novel. As such, the novel is also, inevitably, a rumination on how systems and structural hierarchies themselves may be ‘natural’. Much is made of the analogy of the ant colony and it is an interesting one. “Everyone is needed. No one has to know everything” is something of a mantra. Eventually though this gives way to “Everyone is needed… Except maybe humans. We are the only ones who take more than we give.” Well, quite.

This thread of the relationship between humankind and the broader natural realm is central to ‘Colony’ and whilst it would be tempting to suggest that it is a tale that dwells on the urban versus rural question, it is actually more like urban versus nowhere. For the lives of the characters in ‘Colony’ seem to exist not just on the edges of civilisation but on the edge of humanity. There is a sense of humans seeking the point at which they blend into nature, become at one with their elements. As such the novel does feel both deeply rooted to the 21st century and also oddly cyclical. By this I mean that, whilst many of us consider that the threats of climate change and humankind’s (irrational? Certainly unsustainable) obsession with growth and the accumulation/protection of capital is by turns bewildering, disastrous and To Be Challenged, we are certainly not the first to think this way. Younger generations tend to fall into the trap of thinking they are unique in their challenges to established worldviews, but I do not say this pejoratively. After all, each of us belongs at some point to both ‘younger’ and ‘older’ generations, just at different points on the arc of time. One gets a sense from ‘Colony’ that Norlin acknowledges this. Being born in 1977 she is not quite ‘my’ generation but as noted, as we age time erases its barriers and generation gaps blur so the biggest distinctions become the Pop culture references we make. Are these often indecipherable references peculiarly significant or utterly irrelevant? Possibly both. Or neither.

‘Colony’ ultimately feels something of the same. It is certainly a novel that asks questions but, perhaps more importantly, Norlin seems to recognise that the process of asking questions is more valuable than the seeking of answers, which are illusory and transitory. It is a novel where notions of love, belonging, attachment, community and nature weave together in a tapestry that depicts a scene that by turns appeals and repels. In the darkness there is light and in the shadows we might find hope. Maybe this is enough.