Highasakite's Ingrid Helene Havik Doesn't Want To Talk About Their New Album

Since their breakthrough record in 2014, Silent Treatment, Highasakite’s approach to making music has been characterised by its widescreen, cinematic qualities. Everything exists in its most expansive form. A simple glance through some of the band’s song names reveals the scale of this drama; Hiroshima, Iran, and Mexico are all presented as stages for the type of fateful escapism that occasionally risks leaning too heavily towards exoticism. 

As the band’s songwriter, Ingrid Helene Havik seems more concerned with the imaginative potential of these places, rather their physical presence. “Lover, where do you live?” Havik sings in the opening line of album opener of the same name on Silent Treatment. However, this search is soon established as metaphysical, rather than mundane: “In the sky? In the clouds? In the ocean?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Uranium Heart, the band’s fourth album, was not recorded in just one place. Bandmate Trond Bersu produced the album himself, some of which was recorded in his own apartment. However, Havik, calling from her home in Norway, adds that they also recorded “far into the woods in Sweden in a cabin for months, and we did some [recording] in different studios in Oslo”. 

"Sometimes I feel like I lose my relationship with the music if people tell me what the song is about."

Despite the band’s literal and imaginative globetrotting, this record feels like the their most intimate yet. The sparsely produced title track possesses the earthen qualities of a country song, a stark contrast to the dense electronica that characterised the band’s previous record, 2016’s Camp Echo. “I think that the whole album has like this folkish kind of vibe,” Havik says. 

While Havik is reticent to discuss the meanings of her songs, she offers the following explanation of the central image: “I’m thinking about it as like, you know, that uranium is something that you would avoid to be in contact with because of its radioactivity. So I would say it’s kind of like a poisonous heart. I choose that as the title track because I feel like the title embraces all the other songs as well – the title is the essence of the album.”

She hesitates when asked to elaborate. “I can’t explain it because it’s just a feeling. Also, I’m a bit ambivalent about, you know, talking too much about what this album means to me because it’s really not important to the listeners, I think. The listeners should have their own experiences with it, and my experience is just my own.”

This emphasis on subjectivity, while admirable in its romanticism, feels like a difficult position to maintain. The internet offers mass audiences more access to artists than ever before, increasing the pressure on artists to produce a personal brand that complements their work. And that brand can become increasingly inseparable from their work because it often is their work itself. 

“It can be interesting to see a documentary about things like that, about how music is made and what [artists] have been thinking,” Havik says. “But sometimes I feel like I lose my relationship with the music if people tell me what the song is about. They place an image in me that isn’t really mine, it’s not my experience.”

However, it’s not just information about the creators of art that Havik says can get it in the way of a experiencing a personal connection to a song, but also the opinions of others. “I think that it’s kind of a problem with reviews and stuff like that, because if you read the review before you hear the album, then somehow you have changed something in the listener’s first experience with the music.” 

Havik explains that this position isn’t just an intellectual one. Instead, it’s a protective measure that’s embedded in her songwriting process, which involves trying to “not place too many leads on what this is about to me… not necessarily for other people’s sake – it’s more like for me being private, also.” The music, she says, is for the listeners, “and it’s for me, but it’s all our own, and private”.