One of Sigrid’s most anthemic songs from her highly anticipated second album How To Let Go materialised at the Reading and Leeds festival last year
After a chance meeting with UK rock band Bring Me The Horizon backstage, they realised they were both fans of each other's music. This led to vocalist Oli Sykes and keyboardist Jordan Fish sending a demo, they all got in the studio to lay down lyrics, and the tear-stained rock ballad “Bad Life” was born, released today on Island Records.
“It tells the story of when things are rough and it can feel like you're never going to stop feeling sad,” says Sigrid, with searingly beautiful lyrics, “It’s just a bad day, not a bad life”.
Pairing the Norwegian pop sensation’s uplifting power-house chorus’ and with Bring Me The Horizon’s ability to capture intense emotion, the song is a mighty allegory for taking struggles with mental health day by day.
The video, directed by Raja Verdi (Holly Humberstone, Celeste) takes the viewers through an epic storm of emotion, showing both festival favourite performers Sigrid and Oli powerfully moving through inner turmoil: "The concept for this one shot film was to lean into the themes of having to get through the bad to eventually reach the other side - life can certainly feel like a rollercoaster sometimes,” says Raja.
This year has been an important time of collaboration for Sigrid. Having met Griff at a fashion show, the two pop stars bonded over pizza and their experience in the music industry, and got in the studio and wrote the mighty firecracker ‘Head on Fire’, which won the Best Collaboration at the NME Awards 2022. Sigrid has since released stadium rock-ready banger “It Gets Dark,” which lyrically pulls off that very Sigrid trick of zooming in on the personal while keeping it universal, and looks closely at the two sides of her personality and how they’ve been magnified by being in the spotlight.
Set to release her highly anticipated second album “How To Let Go” on 6 May 2022 - the follow up to 2019's critically acclaimed UK top 5 album Sucker Punch - the past few years have been a time of deep reflection for Sigrid.
The 12-track LP ‘How To Let Go’ was written at a time where Sigrid was thinking a lot about her life in Norway and her life outside of Norway.
“They're two different things. The chill girl who loves to ski and hike and cook versus the other part of me that's like ‘let's go out’, or let's play massive shows, go on stage and not be scared of anything. I used to be so shy as a kid but then when I'm on stage at Glastonbury for example I love losing myself in it.” Sigrid comments that sometimes those personalities clash and you get confused about what makes you thrive in life, wanting both parts but realising sometimes they don’t always align.
This sense of differing perspectives and looking at the same thing from a new angle, is reflected in the amazingly surrealist video for ‘It Gets Dark’, which was made with Mirror director Femke Huurdeman and CANADA (Dua Lipa, Rosalia), featuring Sigrid escaping to space.
To celebrate the theme, Sigrid has teamed up with the star-gazing app Star Walk 2, which allows fans to explore the wonders of the night sky and uncover a special constellation whilst listening to ‘It Gets Dark’.
Writing huge pop songs from the heart with that rasp, and recalling great vocalists from Stevie Nicks to Carole King and Freddie Mercury, since Sigrid’s ascent to pop stardom in 2017, the 25-year-old has achieved every accolade a young artist from a small town off the coast of Norway could ever have imagined.
From releasing her critically acclaimed debut EP Don’t Kill My Vibe, to winning the Sound of 2018, performing across the globe at The Royal Variety Show, the Nobel Peace Prize, headlining her first Arena show at 3Arena in Dublin to 12,000 fans, and that Glastonbury performance to 30,000 festival goers and millions at home: Sigrid lit up stages with her non-conformist and progressive attitudes to the femininity in pop.
Ending 2019 with a 5* (The Times) headline show at London’s Eventim Apollo, Sigrid has become renowned for her high-energy live shows, writing anthemic chorus’ for festivals that would become her definitive stage. It’s no surprise that the only place Sigrid feels truly she can take out “all those emotions” is performing live with her band.
Last summer, Sigrid was the most highly billed woman on the Main Stage on Saturday at Reading & Leeds festival, and this Winter will bring her huge live show to the UK and Ireland, headlining Wembley’s SSE Arena on 12 November 2022.
With 1.3 Billion global streams and over 1 Million global album unit sales, and the Platinum certified success of pop-dance anthem Strangers, Sigrid returned to the world stage with the “empowerment anthem” (ELLE) ‘Mirror’, followed by the ABBA-inspired synth banger ‘Burning Bridges’, which showed Sigrid’s immense pop songwriting talent.
Then, having soundtracked the BBC Olympic closing montage with her stunning ballad ‘Home To You’, the pop star released the ‘Home To You (This Christmas)’ version, spellbinding families at home over the holidays with an incredible Top Of The Pops performance, and cementing Sigrid’s position as the ‘voice’ in alt-pop.
ABOUT BRING ME THE HORIZON
Bring Me The Horizon has sold over 4 million albums globally to date, played sold-out shows in over 40 countries, including two sold out nights at London’s O2 and one night at The Forum in Los Angeles, wowed a traditionally non-rock crowd at Glastonbury Festival in 2016 and 2018, and stole the show at high profile festivals across Europe all summer 2019.
They have now also amassed over 1 billion video views on YouTube. Bring Me The Horizon are vocalist Oli Sykes, guitarist Lee Malia, bassist Matt Kean, drummer Mat Nicholls, and keyboardist Jordan Fish.
