Friday, March 14   5:30 p.m.
SESAC Day Stage Cafe Austin Convention Center   (500 E Cesar Chavez St) Friday, March 14   9:00 p.m.
Ninety Proof Lounge   (333 E 2nd St) Friday, March 14   11:00 p.m.
Maggie Mae's Rooftop   (323 E 6th St)

LYKKE LI

There’s more than a degree of inevitability to Lykke Li’s debut single. Firstly, it’s being released in UK on Moshi Moshi Singles on 18th Feb 2008, a label which is rapidly earning a reputation for unearthing future hits – they’ve successfully launched the careers of Kate Nash, Late of The Pier, and Friendly Fires in the year or so since their inception. But to get down to the artist and track in question, Lykke Li is an independently-minded artist of sizeable appeal…and potential. Whilst much of her recorded work remains unavailable, A&R activity on both UK and US soil continues apace. Joining a few of the dots between Feist, Robyn, Peter Bjorn and John (she is in fact produced by Bjorn Yttling of the trio), and her own particular strain of otherworldliness, Lykke Li’s ‘Little Bit’, is a hushed, breath-y, out-of-the-box, smash.

Credibility, longevity, and pop music, do not always go hand in proverbial hand. The here-today-relegated-to-the-outer-reaches-of-the-top-200-tomorrow mindset of the standard chart machine can mean artists quickly reach their sell-by date. But in recent years the genre has, by all accounts, been reinstated as something to be celebrated and preserved by ‘serious’ critics and music snobs alike. Popjustice.com reigns supreme as a pastor of tastemaker integrity, preaching its gospel to hipsters and Indie Kids, as well as unabashed lovers of this increasingly loose bracket.

21-year-old Swede Lykke Li, it could be said, sits somewhere on the periphery of all of this - she’s of an offbeat mould. Growing up on a mountaintop in Portugal, the only music available to her was Madonna’s ‘Immaculate Collection’, on cassette. Her parents were by all accounts hippies – her mother a photographer who roamed India with her daughter each winter. She took up ballet when she was 5, spending many years chanelling her creative energies into dancing. As soon as she’d learned to write though, she was composing poems. And by her early teens, now based in Stockholm, began making music. Lykke Li’s 3-track debut EP, released on her own label LL Recordings on home turf in September, has seen her quickly become the most talked about new artist in Sweden – word spreads quickly across the international blogosphere. Having recently completed her debut album in New York with Bjorn Yttling on production duties (of Peter, Bjorn and John), Lykke Li’s recent debut performances in London left packed audiences pleasantly shell-shocked. A master of subtle delivery, leftfield arrangements, a lovelorn melody, and minimalist brilliance…there’s sticking power coursing through her veins.

‘Little Bit’s video (www.myspace.com/lykkeli), directed by Mattias Montero, is a stunner, and worth seeking out.

Lykke Li debut album “Youth Novels” was released in Sweden 30th January 2008.