When Alex Ayuli coined the term “dream pop” in the late 80s, it was to distinguish the otherworldly sounds of 4AD bands like Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil and A.R. Kane from the more grounded “indie” groups of the era. These bands’ songs “sounded as though they’d been recorded in a flotation tank,” said Richard King in his alt-pop musical history book How Soon is Now? – the descriptor fit the music perfectly. 

But fast-forward some 35 years, and a new wave of women from Denmark are channelling the same transcendent qualities that defined that influential 80s generation, transforming them via digital workstations and futuristic sonic textures. ML Buch, Astrid Sonne and Clarissa Connelly et al. are all graduates of the experimental Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC). The institution has become a community for “people interested in pushing things forward sonically”, says Nis Bysted, a former avant-metal guitarist whose label, Escho, has been central to the wider dissemination of music by many of the scene’s key artists.

Still rooted in Copenhagen, this network of avant-garde innovators is defined by their fearless experimentation, DIY philosophies, and highly collaborative nature, having crafted immersive styles of sound craft so sparse and free that “you can almost step into it, like a 3D universe,” says Bysted. “They are super curious musicians and songwriters seeking to push the limits and ideas of how to make music... I  think that’s really what unites them.”

With ML Buch, perhaps the scene’s most beguiling figurehead, having just conquered arguably London’s most ethereal music venue, the Union Chapel, last month, there’s no better time to catch up on the blissful sounds that have underpinned what is perhaps the defining underground sound of 2024. Listen up and zone out via five essential artists from Denmark’s ethereal art-pop scene below.

ML BUCH

ML Buch’s ascendancy as eerie, avant-pop auteur over the past year has been almost inescapable in art music circles. Her immense critical acclaim is earned: the artist’s digital dream pop experimentation marks one of the most compelling genre innovations in recent years. Seven-string Stratocaster melodies, shapeless synths, and glimmering vocals – recorded in her Peugeot SUV or at local swimming pools before being relayed through digital effects and pitch-manipulation software – are cornerstones of her singular sound, which carries an almost vaporwave-like quality due to her use of computerised instruments. These MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) substitutes – extensively utilised, for one, in the 90s video game industry – imbue ML Buch’s soundscapes with a transportive nostalgia, creating a virtual musical universe that lies somewhere between ‘Disintegration’ and ‘Dire Dire Docks’.

Even ML Buch’s organic works – like ‘getting to know each other’, her contribution to section1’s ‘piano1’ compilation – possess a haunting emotional quality. Described as “dealing with both the euphoric and confusing awkwardness of getting to know a new person,” the instrumental fore-fronts call-and-response melodies between an expensive grand piano and another one “completely out-of-tune”. As further elements layer, the reverberations create a sense of distant longing — a quality shared with ML Buch’s other beat-less highlights, like ‘Flames shards goo’ and ‘Working it out’.

MOLINA

ML Buch’s touring keyboardist and former classmate Rebecca Molina is another artist with an atypical career trajectory: the Danish-Chilean composer currently enjoys an audience of some 750,000 monthly Spotify listeners, thanks in part to the TikTok-fuelled success of ‘Hey Kids’, a woozy synth-pop track she released in 2018. But neither this nor the glimmering 2019 follow-up ‘Venus’ feel representative of her current, bleary-eyed sound, which is ostensibly inspired by the tape-warping, pitch-bending guitars of early 90s shoegaze pioneers like My Bloody Valentine and Lush. 

Conceived during the 32-year-old’s pregnancy, debut album When you wake up (referencing classic MBV ear-melter When You Sleep) is rife with bodily imagery and glutinous textures, with tracks like ‘Navel’ and ‘I Am Your House’ thick with swelling guitars and cooing vocal lilts. The latter track, Molina told The Fader, was written while overcome with fatigue, having created a music studio on the sofa where she’d perch watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on mute.

The album’s swampiest moments are its best, like the chugging climax of ‘Neverland’, which underpins Molina’s sensual falsetto with gurgling fuzz-bass. ‘Organs’, co-written with ML Buch and featuring her on guitar and vocals, meanwhile, is like a dystopian industrial soundscape, building through metallurgic chord-slides and extra-terrestrial melodies towards a rapturous vocal refrain.

ASTRID SONNE

Another RMC grad whose idiosyncratic art-pop frequently flirts with nightmare material is Astrid Sonne. But her 2024 breakthrough Great Doubt, which blends the staccato sequencers and schizophrenic structures of her earlier Escho releases with dulcet vocals and more organic instrumentation, also points to a more diaphanous plain, marking it as one of the more complex and rewarding albums of this multi-faceted Danish new wave.

Raised by a family that run a Christmas tree business on the island of Bornholm, Sonne trained in viola since the age of six, and worked as a church singer for Sunday services, funerals and baptisms through her teens. After over a decade in Copenhagen, where she initially pursued a career in classical music, she now lives in London, where her digital dioramas (usually embellished with violins and cellos on stage) have found fans via shows at Pitchfork Music Festival, the ICA and Corsica Studios.

Her third LP Great Doubt, released in January 2024, is a chameleonic catalogue of minimalist harp loops (‘Almost’), breathy woodwind (‘Light and heavy’), and eerie strings and chiming pianos (‘Give my all’) — usually underpinned by doomy electronics and stop-start beat programming. The latter track, which unexpectedly homages Mariah Carey, hints at pop sentiment — while ‘Staying Here’ captures an emotional high with its unpredictable Close Encounters arps and dramatic, double-stopped strings.

FINE

Fine Glindvad Jensen is one of Copenhagen’s more multi-faceted musical polymaths. “She’s been a musician since she was a baby,” says Bysted, whose working relationship with Fine began when she was a vocalist in CHINAH, an electro-R&B trio whose glossy 2015 debut single ‘Away From Me’ invokes the melodic pop hooks of Jai Paul.

That track was later utilised as a sped-up sample on Two Shell’s ‘Home’ in 2021, with Fine then co-writing three songs with fellow Copenhagen natives Erika de Casier in 2023 for an EP by K-Pop idols NewJeans. Away from mainstream pop polish, she sings in Clarissa Connelly’s Canons, though she foremostly operates as a solo artist today — with Rocky Top Ballads, released on Escho in July 2024, marking her debut LP as Fine. 

The album, self-recorded, self-produced, and self-mixed, is earnest and introspective, distinguished by the fore-fronting of acoustic guitars over the colder digital palettes utilised by her peers. “She’s really inspiring,” Bysted says, “[for her], it’s not just about writing songs, it’s about the before, during and after they are made. It’s about the sound.” While the warm, warbling samples of ‘Coasting’ serve as a foil to Americana-tinged tracks like ‘Losing Tennessee’, ‘Big Muzzy’ (the central guitar refrain for which was played as a sample on a computer keyboard) more readily channels the fluttering sounds of Cocteau Twins. More broadly, Fine’s languid vocals recall those of Mazzy Star singer Hope Sandoval, giving this dreamy debut a sullen, romantic edge.

CLARISSA CONNELLY 

Raised in a strict Catholic home in Fife, Scotland before moving to Denmark with her Danish mother in 2001, Clarissa Connelly would acquire a master’s degree in composition at the RMC while working alongside the web of creative women outlined elsewhere on this list. Across her three richly layered and almost sacred-sounding albums, Connelly’s music stands out for its unique tapping of both Nordic and Celtic cultures for inspiration.

One of her foremost influences has been with her since childhood. “When I was about eight years old… I was at this after-school program [in Denmark],” Connelly told Warp Records, her current label, in 2024. Locking herself in a classroom with a boombox that day, she put on Enya’s Paint the Sky with Stars CD, “pushed all the tables and chairs aside, and just danced for hours and hours.” Traces of the new age music icon can be found all across Connelly’s career, from 2018’s vocal-trilling De Novo through 2021’s Nordic Music Prize-winning album The Voyager (also inspired by Kate Bush and walks along historic Hærvejen hiking paths), right up to her present-day output.

World of Work, her Warp debut, arrived in April. Tracks like the choral ‘Wee Rosebud’, washed with winnowing voices and classical guitars, are emblematic of the songwriter’s wispy, Celtic folk-fusion sound. Newest release ‘Give it Back’, meanwhile, is a balletic, rhythm-shifting symphony of pianos, plucked strings, MIDI bass and woodwind, taking inspiration from the great fairy tale movie composers Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (Aladdin, The Little Mermaid).