New Music: Sigrid - Don't Feel Like Crying

Today Sigrid has released her latest tune Don’t Feel Like Crying, a song which will be featuring on her forthcoming album Sucker Punch, due in March.

There’s a school of thought around some Sigrid fans / music boffins that since the initial power punch of Don’t Kill My Vibe, the BBC Sound of poll 1st place and the UK chart success of Strangers that everything since just hasn’t quite matched up commercially to those early career highs. Of course, much of this thought is based around the fact that these days we can all see the statistics for artists on Spotify, You Tube etc to get an idea of how ‘successful’ they are being. 

And of course artists themselves can also see these statistics, which sometimes must be quite soul destroying. In pre-streaming days an artist could sell several thousand records and happily blindly assume that the people who had bought them were playing them lots and enjoying them – these days the statistics might tell you a very different story about how many times fans are actually listening to the music you’ve spent hours creating, and it may not be very comforting. Alternatively it might just be telling you a story about how many big playlists the song made it to. Not that Sigrid is likely to be feeling uncomfortable about any of this - let's keep this in perspective - a lot of people are still streaming her music.

This article on Popjustice (here) talks about the statistics for Sigrid’s songs and makes the (important) point that such figures don’t tell the whole tale: “Sigrid has pretty much the same number of monthly listeners as Robyn, for instance, and Honey's streaming numbers are, to put it politely, underwhelming, but Robyn can still sell concert tickets.”

But what Popjustice doesn’t say is that Robyn is a long-established artist, who in the UK had a small flourish of hits in 1995-97 (Show Me Love being the biggest at number 8 in 1997) before releasing a string of songs that didn’t chart at all until Be Mine, Who’s That Girl and With Every Heartbeat (her number 1) propelled her back to new giddy heights 10 years later. Sometimes in judging pop  commercial success we focus too much on the here and now and not enough on the long term. Maybe Sigrid isn’t delivering massive pop hits right now, but she’s clearly super talented and perhaps just needs to keep plugging away. Besides she’s already played Brixton Academy – a near 5,000 capacity venue. Not bad for someone yet to release an album. As I said, let's keep this in perspective.

Onto her latest then, in which Sigrid grabs the strings from Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, slows them down a bit, has a go at some speaking rather than singing and generally sounds a little less ‘Sigrid-like’ than we’ve come to expect. It’s a good pop song, and as is probably going to sound very catchy on the radio. As we gear up for the album, my guess is that Sigrid’s label is trying to show some different flavours of what she can do and perhaps appeal to some more mainstream fans. I could imagine this being played on Radio 2 and Radio 1 in the UK.

However, my favourite Sigrid song (this one - click here) still has yet to see the light of day. Let’s hope it finds a place somewhere and hasn’t been tragically consigned to the rubbish bin. For that would be a true crime against pop.

Sigrid - Don't Feel Like Crying