Dreaming of a New Sound in Denmark
Erika de Casier makes whisper-soft, forwardthinking club music from her Copenhagen home.
Erika de Casier recently spent a few weeks holed up in a century-old house on a small island off the coast of Denmark, called Fanø. She was there with other artists who’d chosen to isolate together — something like a TikTok Hype House, but less annoying. She describes the surroundings as quiet, and even spookier than usual in the ongoing pandemic:
“You can really hear your thoughts.”
De Casier is no stranger to introspection. Her singing voice is gentle, nearly a whisper, and her love songs have an existential bent. Take her recent single “No Butterflies, No Nothing,” in which de Casier sings about fading love over a deconstructed club beat: “Yeah, I’ve been looking real closely/Didn’t really find nothing.”
De Casier was born in Portugal, with a mother from Belgium and a father from Cape Verde; as a kid, she relocated to Denmark, where she and her brother were the only mixed-race children in their new school. She remembers finding solace in music videos: “MTV was a place where I could feel a sense of belonging.”
Her 2019 debut, Essentials, featured sensual R&B laced with hints of U.K. garage and drum-andbass. For her follow-up, out later this year on 4AD, she wrote songs that recall the empowerment ballads of Destiny’s Child or TLC, with a more inward focus. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I am with people,” she says, “and parts of my emotions that I haven’t maybe dealt with before.”