We’ve featured a fair few Norwegian artists who’ve spent time in Liverpool, mainly as a result of studying at LIPA, the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts – Kalandra and I See Rivers are obvious names that spring to mind. Sara Wolff is a new name to us however, and she’s still based in the city after first travelling across from Bergen in 2016, and her debut EP ‘When You Left the Room’ will be released early next year.
Her style is somewhat different to other artists we’ve featured from the LIPA route, a quirky alt-folk approach based around memorable lyrics and cute tunes. Earlier tracks include the likes of ‘Scarf Song’, released in 2018, where she muses ‘I made this scarf to keep you warm, but now I want to tighten it around your neck’.
New song ‘Cotton Socks’ maintains her fascination with essential clothing accessories, again considering the complexity of the minds and hearts of boys, girls and in this case bees – she says her EP is predominantly about “days in bed, fraying relationships and botched social interactions”. It was recorded with a number of musicians at Eve Studios in Manchester, but it still retains that ‘bedroom pop’ feel, mainly because Sara Wolff has this natural, engaging style, as if she’s just lounging at home with her guitar in one of her many cardigans, whilst mulling over life.
Meanwhile her tunes are simple enough, but they will work their way into your head even quicker than those slugs burrowed into my carefully nurtured garden cucumbers.
Anyway I’m looking forward to her EP, because she has this perceptive humorous way of expressing the curiosity of social relationships, and although it’s probably a dark humour, it’s better to laugh than to wallow too much in self-pity.
I’m sure we’ve all done enough of that this year.
The track was produced, engineered and mixed by Adam Rothschild. A full list of musicians can be found on her Bandcamp page.