“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-debut LP Sunken Ships, the Danish singer/songwriter and producer 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”.
This peculiar duality might explain the very DNA of Asbjørn: a modern male pop star who wants to change the world – while dancing.
Boyology is out on January 28 via Embassy of Music and Asbjørns own label Body of Work.
Not a boy, not quite a man.
Bonafide pop; but a maverick in the mainstream. Ever since his 2012 debut album Sunken Ships, Asbjørn has been a poster boy of the unconventional. His self-exposing lyrics offer radio-length sex education wrapped in adventurous yet highly infectious pop production, gaining him praise from his personal heroine Lykke Li and creating waves of critical acclaim beyond the shores of his native Denmark.
In 2014, while releasing his sophomore visual album Pseudo Visions, Asbjørn uprooted to Berlin to write the follow-up. Unrequited love kickstarted an entangled rite of passage in the busy metropolis, ultimately leaving him heartbroken and questioning his resilience. The forthcoming, long-awaited LP BOYOLOGY is “a study of the relation between vulnerability and masculinity”, Asbjørn reflects. “I always thought of myself as a natural-born gender bender, but suddenly I saw myself reacting to heartache by oppressing it in this super stereotypical way. The album confronts that within me as well as outside; I want to discuss those invisible expectations, in society and pop culture, of what a man should or should not be.”
His body moves with soft sensuality yet the force and energy of a lightweight boxer, but his words might even pack a harder punch. “I don’t wanna be a man if a man means power, to not empower others”, he sings on the album with his longing signature falsetto, only to burst into a powerful belt. And anyone who’s witnessed Asbjørn on a festival stage in Europe or on headliner tours from Denmark to China knows he bears it all. But after the extensive touring that followed his second album, Asbjørn needed to figure out his next move. “I want to hit this nerve where vulnerability sounds pop”, Asbjørn explains. “And to find that space I needed to reflect, as well as practice my craft in writing and producing.”
BOYOLOGY is the fruit of that labour.
Asbjørn’s stunning visuals for Pseudo Visions accumulated millions of views on YouTube and solidified his status as one of Scandinavia’s most visionary upcoming artists.
BOYOLOGY too is accompanied by a series of interconnected videos which, in Asbjørn’s own words, “feels like a queer coming-of-age short film”. The album and its videos are released by Embassy of Music and his own label Body of Work.