Highasakite - Mother

The album MOTHER follows their last two-part album The Bare Romantic (2020), including triple j playlisted single ‘Can I Be Forgiven’, but this time around it’s even grittier, balancing between powerful synthesis of pop, entrancing Berlin techno and cutting-edge Scandi production. Previous releases include international breakthrough album Silent Treatment (2014), which spent more than two years in the Norwegian Top 40 Chart, and #1 charting successor Camp Echo (2016), which solidified Highasakite's status as one of Norway's finest exports. The title track "Mother", which was released January 14th, masquerades as slick, laid-back RnB but surprises you with its devastating chorus, in which songwriter and front figure Ingrid Håvik cries: “I need to call my mother”. “For me, saying that, as a grown woman with two kids, it means I had no other options left,” Ingrid explains.

The album features frequent forays into the kind of music that can really take a hold over you physically, get your synapses firing, lock you into a trance state. Some of the album tracks feel like being caught in Berlin’s legendary Berghain on a Saturday night, while others are gentle pleas to a loved one. Håvik writes songs like a musical diary, noting fragments of conversations and feeling, and discarding as many songs as she keeps. Most of MOTHER was written pre-pandemic, finished during lockdown in Oslo, and recorded in the band’s urban studio, deep in the bowels of the city’s famous Central Station. Highasakite have retained their top spot on numerous Nordic charts, with Håvik’s alternative approach to pop writing earning multiple Norwegian Grammy Awards and widespread acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, NME, MOJO, The Guardian and Vogue. The band remains a formidable and renowned live act – with their 2x sold out headline at Oslo Spektrum (9000 cap) trailing Norway’s five biggest festivals, and international routing including Glastonbury, Latitude and Roskilde. In Australia, previous live dates include Laneway Festival, Beyond The Valley, Field Dayand sold out headlines in Melbourne (The Corner) and Sydney (Oxford Art Factory).