New Music: lene 3000 – Lights off

With her debut album, Greatest Swamp Hits, out next month, lene 3000 treats us to the skewed Brothers Grimm vibes of Lights off.

lene 3000, the project of Norwegian synth-pop songwriter Lene Talgø, draws you into a web of sounds and images, some slightly unsettling, never letting you quite find your feet.

Don’t start now
Sitting by his table
Let the curtains fall
Lady keep your pants off
He like them young
Hands under the table

Overlaid with lyrics that strip back much of the sugar coating that transforms stories of human monsters into tales suitable for kids, lene 3000 does the same with the structure of the song itself. It’s pop of a sort: haunting and dissociative, its brief forays into colourful club colours fading in and out of a bewitching cauldron of witch house and alt pop.

You’re never quite sure where you stand as the song progresses, and that’s a big part of its uneasy beauty. The accompanying video, directed by Charlotte Dion, draws from a similar well of horror and surrealism, tapping on an audio-visual universe of lene 3000’s own making.

Greatest Swamp Hits is due to be released on the 2nd of October via 10k Projects. Head to her Instagram and TikTok socials for album news. Lights off is streaming on all major digital outlets, including SoundCloud and Spotify.