Although Dagny tells Music Week that it feels as if she started to get industry attention overnight, she is definitely not an overnight success.
The singer moved from Norway to London “about four and a half years ago”, and, along with her band, was “working for years, playing shows and doing that sort of stuff”, before she released her single Backbeat, which blew up online.
“It felt weird,” she explains. “You look through emails and suddenly everyone is just emailing me. It was such a big change overnight, even though it was a long time coming.”
Backbeat is the lead single from her debut EP Ultraviolet, which was released digitally on September 2 and was originally premiered by Zane Lowe on Beats 1.
It’s now had close to 22 million streams on Spotify already, but Dagny insists that she had no idea how big it would be.
“Everything changed and suddenly we got an online presence,” she says. “Record labels and stuff call you so all of those kinds of things just suddenly happened.
None of us really expected that to happen. It was just crazy, it was really fun.”
Commenting on what she’s achieved so far, Dagny adds that the role of her management team can’t be overlooked.
“Everyone is not only really hardworking and great at what they do, but they’re also great people,” she says.
“We all have a good time and everyone just gets along. It’s a good team.”
Dagny adds that the process of writing Backbeat “happened quite fast”, but was also “a long time coming”.
She explains: “I was in the studio for a few days and we’d really gotten stuck.
We were just sitting there looking at each other going, Wow this really isn’t going anywhere. Then we decided to start from scratch.
“We refined it and worked on the lyrics but it was very spontaneous, it was a really good process, starting the whole thing off and vibing it out.”
Looking to the future, Dagny tells Music Week that she really wants to try to make another song like Backbeat, and that she’s looking forward to finding out what the public thinks about her EP.
“It’s five tracks that are quite different,” she says. “They’re all like that energetic band-driven pop, which is what we do, but they all have their own little thing going on.
So it will be interesting to see how people react to it and how it’s critiqued.“
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