Healing Bones

Oh Land (aka Nanna Øland Fabricius) has surmounted personal tragedy to become Scandinavia's coolest electro-pop star, her third album, Wish Bone, generating global buzz. However, the eccentric singer-songwriter, now aligned with Dave Sitek's fledgling Federal Prism Records, is just content to have it released in Australia. She lately visited for the first time, staging her theatrical show at the Vogue Fashion's Night Out in Sydney. “I had so much fun,” Fabricius enthuses. “It's really lovely and friendly [there] – I'm into it.”

The Dane's success has been incremental – or, as she puts it, “very organic and natural” – with listeners discovering cult songs like Sun Of A Gun between albums. Fabricius was born into a family of classical musicians, her mother an opera singer and father an organist, but she didn't consider following them. Instead Fabricius was preparing to be a prima ballerina in Sweden when disaster struck – she suffered a grave spinal injury. Unable to dance, she turned to music, composing “therapeutic”. Ironically, that catastrophe was liberating. “I started dancing when I was only ten and immediately got admitted to the Royal Ballet School,” Fabricius explains. “Once you get into that environment, it's very professional, very ambitious. So I never really questioned that I was supposed to do anything other than dance the rest of my life, because I was just a kid. When I got an injury, when I was 18, and I realised that it was not a passing one but something more serious, it was very shocking, of course – because, when you're young, you think that you're immortal and you'll never get old and you'll never die. The way I dealt with it the most, and the best, was by writing about it – and the way I wrote about it was in melody. ”

In 2008 Fabricius, teaming with DJ/producer Kasper Bjørke, presented her debut, Fauna. She'd lay down choral vocals for Danish electronic wunderkind Trentemøller – “a very sweet guy” – on Into The Great Wide Yonder. Nevertheless, Fabricius left Copenhagen for New York nearly five years ago.

While her music is largely influenced by experiences and people, Fabricius has found stimulus in her new US surrounds. “Being there has definitely confronted me with a lot of things that I'm not used to,” she says, Denmark comparatively “isolated” and “safe”. Fabricius collaborated on Wish Bone with Sitek, who, outside of TV On The Radio, has produced everyone from Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Santigold to Beady Eye. (He's likewise rebooting Kelis' career.) Their Los Angeles sessions were spontaneous. Sitek encouraged Fabricius to discount any expectations. “It was just very intuitive and very real, the way we worked.”

Consequently, Wish Bone has a tougher, brassier sound – Fabricius touts it as “astronaut-ballerina-pop”. The material is grounded, too, in urban realism with less of the old magic variety (cue Oh Land's Wolf & I) as Fabricius explores modern romance. She asks “questions”. “I grew up in the ballet – like [with] Swan Lake and all of that – so I was used to big, epic tales, and that was the way you expressed simple stories,” Fabricius suggests. “Then I also grew up in the Land of Fairytales with Hans Christian Andersen – so that form of storytelling is very natural for me. But I think within the past few years I've become more and more interested in what's going on in the world around me and things that I can't figure out – like political issues, feminist issues... – whereas on the first album it was more very personal, about my injuries and my story and stuff.”

Fabricius' feminist consciousness emerges on Renaissance Girls, Wish Bone's warehousey lead single, and the minimally harmonic My Boxer – although she remains more exemplary Odette than evil Odile. The Renaissance Girls video centres on singing, dancing and performing, Fabricius eschewing gimmickry.

As it happens, Fabricius has dabbled in acting for “fun”. She'll appear in Danish director Kristian Levring's western The Salvation as part of an international cast. And, to her astonishment, Fabricius has been embraced by the fashion industry. “I was like, 'Oh, wow, that's crazy' – because I always was told that I dressed so weird,” she laughs. “But I guess the fashion world like when people dress differently – that's what keeps the fashion world going.”