:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/mentormedier/OSMDABOH4ZBQ3MBC6DZ3MNOZCQ.jpg "– Used to the charm – Dagsavisen")
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CONCERT
Emma Steinbakken
Oslo Spectrum
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Among thousands of fans, with thousands of mobile phones aimed at her, Emma Steinbakken sits out in the audience in the large Oslo Spektrum hall as if she should never do anything else, and sings “Hold My Breath”. That’s how you suddenly remember a couple of lines from one of her other big hits, and wonder what on earth happened:
«We used to sit on the balcony/Smoking cigarettes, you were so obsessed with me/What happened to all those little things?»
The obsession among the many is there, but the time of small things is over for Emma Steinbakken, at least when it comes to public contact. At the age of 20, she is one of the very youngest to have taken in a packed Oslo Spektrum, and she is probably the very youngest Norwegian solo artist to have undertaken this task. She’ll be splurging with glitter, pyro, courting the public, serious confidences and guests like Isah and Bjørn Eidsvåg, but the down-to-earth way she does it is rare in an industry that constantly turns up the degree of bare skin and speculative effects. Emma Steinbakken is a pop artist thanks to her voice, flair and charm.
During the opening songs, she says that this is her birthday celebration. In a week she will turn 21. When she says later in the concert that most of the people she has with her in the band have been together since before she was confirmed, and that she played her first concert aged 14, the pieces fall into place. That doesn’t make it any less impressive.
Emma Steinbakken joins a long line of other younger Norwegian pop artists who apparently fill Oslo’s largest indoor concert arena without problems, among them Sigrid, Dagny, Stig Brenner, Sondre Justad, Chris Holsten, Undergrunn, Stig Brenner and a number of bands within the so-called party music genre . It shows the position Norwegian music has gained, and Norwegian lyrics as well, even though Steinbakken does not have his mother tongue as his first pop language. Or maybe yes, many will probably say as she leaves the stage after 23 songs with two songs in Norwegian that make the chorus ring out between the walls of Spektrum. We will return to that.
She occupies a stage that literally bubbles over and is lit to perfection. The big band with string players, co-vocalists and others fills out the large room, and even though we have seen Karpe’s series of ten concerts, we don’t go back that many years before filling this venue, which holds around 10,000, was a distant dream for the very most Norwegian artists and bands. But Emma Steinbakken apparently does this without any problems, and we see who she is talking to. If we are to guess, around three quarters of the audience are girls her own age and a little older. If we count the many mothers who bring girls down to the age of nine or ten, we realize that she is a role model that goes straight to the heart of her own generation.
She opens with a slightly high-shouldered version of “Sorry” and “Used To Love You”, but after that there is no doubt that the evening will be about her. As a matter of course, she tells stories and other things between the songs, and she wrote the subsequent “Fight This Feeling” immediately when she met her boyfriend. In other words, there is a big gust on the way, and the first real gust comes with the Isah song “Delilah”. Isah himself will first appear in the duet “Mysteriet deg”, originally done in “Hver gang vi møde”. “It’s Bjørn!”, howls a flock next to me when Isah sings the first stanzas. It definitely isn’t. Bjørn Eidsvåg, on the other hand, is Steinbakken’s guest in “Drukne”, and when the cheers rise as he enters, it is not the parents in the hall who scream, but Steinbakken’s own generation. This is star glam Eidsvåg has probably not been close to since his rockiest Ten Sing days.
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But all this underlines that Emma Steinbakken has sold out Oslo Spektrum by virtue of being an artist and a pop carpenter of the serious kind, who creates songs with an atmosphere and precise vocal touches and underlines that the vast majority of much older artists can look up to. And she sings about feelings that obviously win over the audience, and even if not everything is self-experienced, there is something in her voice that makes it believable far beyond the common pop cliché.
We have seen her do club concerts, and this evening she gives Oslo Spektrum the same intimacy as if it were a club concert. She owns the stage and the entire venue with her voice, show professionalism and large doses of charm.
Even in concert format, she has full control over her expression and her big voice. When she seemingly effortlessly breathes life into the feelings she puts into sentences, stanzas, words and phrasing, several thousand sneakers and boot soles lift off the floor while the mobile lanterns are lit in the thousands of hearts.
Steinbakken has become one of the country’s most popular pop artists within a very few years, not least thanks to the interpretation of Hellbillie’s “Eg gløymer deg aldi” – here as “I forget you aldi” – in the series “Rådebank”. It was broken through. Then she managed the feat of making a reviled and worn-out Bjørn Eidsvåg song accessible and relevant to a new generation in the TV 2 program “Hver gang vi møtes”. It beat most, including absolutely all other artists when the lists for 2023 were to be made up. The weakness, however, is her own song material. Not necessarily in terms of quality, but quantity in a context like this.
Her biggest streaming hits so far may have been written by others, but her fan base shows that Steinbakken’s own compositions and lyrics resonate with their own lives. Like when “Parents” comes far into the set, and is about how a child’s heroes turn out not to be heroes after all when the parents split up. Or what is about to become her biggest song written on her own, the aforementioned “Hold My Breath”, a song about fighting for a relationship that is about to unravel, and which with simple images connects to feelings and situations that the vast majority of young people can identify with.
Among the highlights are “Home”, the title cut from the debut album, as well as the heavier “Dynamite”, the aforementioned “House On Fire” and the Matoma collaboration “Wow”, here in a string-dominated version that works better than the original. She breaks the code on “Floden” also in Oslo Spektrum, with a voice that is wide open, that goes beyond most in terms of personality, volume and empathy, and that gives the song and the text a narrative that everyone sings along to without it becomes small. Of course, it comes at the very end, as song number 23. She has perhaps a dozen really good songs herself and a handful of cover songs that everyone sings along to, but also songs that at the next Spektrum crossroads do not deserve the place they got here.
Emma Steinbakken has shown that she can write songs. She has her time ahead of her, and the EP “