A decade of Dagny. The Norwegian pop export on writing a hit and rewriting the rules

As she basks in the glory of the critically acclaimed 2024 album ELLE, Norway’s Dagny looks ahead to celebrating a career landmark in 2025, as well as looking back and taking stock of what’s gotten her there.

2025 ushers in a special anniversary for the artist Dagny. It marks ten years since the release of her debut single Backbeat. And in the fickle world of pop music, a decade is by no means an easy milestone to reach. In Dagny’s case, however, the singer and songwriter is hurtling towards it with all the flair we’ve come to expect from her by now.

The last hurrah that has yet to end

Ahead of the anniversary, she lets us in on a surprising secret. That beginning ten years ago was very nearly the end. “Backbeat came at a time when I was almost moving on from music,” the singer from Tromsø admits. “It was almost like a last hurrah, in a way. I was thinking of going back to Norway and studying, and looking into what else there is in life.”

The song was released and all of a sudden the tastemakers of music journalism had a new and unmistakably Nordic name to shout about. Dagny has a fond recollection of the sequence of events that followed: “I remember that I released it on a Wednesday, and quite quickly it started to create a little buzz. Back then there were blogs and people were writing about it by the Thursday. And then on Friday, it was all over New Music Friday on Spotify.” And the positive ramifications of having a hit single entered into Dagny’s life pretty much immediately. “The time after the release was quite surreal. Quite quickly it changed a lot in my life. It took me on this completely new journey. And in so many ways, I don’t feel like that journey has stopped since that release. It’s been a continuous run of exciting things happening.”

Trends come and go, trust your gut feeling

In the decade since Dagny’s breakthrough, while all those exciting things she alludes to have been happening, many popular singers have come and gone in Norway. And so, too, have many trends in pop music. It’s entirely plausible that a large part of why people are still listening to new Dagny music ten years later is down to her consistency in focusing on good songwriting; the composition of a strong melody and a clever lyric.

Dagny hails from Tromsø in the north of Norway. Not just a singer, Dagny has also worked as an actress; she starred in the second series of the Netflix series Home For Christmas

“Don’t ever jump on trends,” is the first piece of advice Dagny offers up on the notion of longevity. “Trends come and go, and if you try to follow them then you always lose touch with that one thing you have – that gut feeling.” The at times high velocity of the industry she’s in is one of the singer’s bugbears when it comes to making a career out of it: “I find that in music, there’s this constant feeling of wanting everything to happen really quickly. If you have one single that is connecting, then everyone gets almost stressed, wanting to put out more and more songs in the hope that they will connect too. I think that is an unhealthy pressure and an unhealthy approach to being a musician.”

Dagny’s solution to avoid falling into this trap has been to afford herself the luxury of time and space. “I’ve released two albums in ten years – clearly I’m in no hurry,” she jests. “I do think that sometimes allowing yourself to take the time to make the songs that you connect with, instead of feeling like you have to constantly release stuff to stay relevant… Maybe there’s something to that.”

Dagny released her debut album Strangers / Lovers as two acts in 2020, reflecting the two different stages of a romantic relationship. She released her second album in the summer of 2024; the eight-track LP ELLE.

Group therapy

We touched upon Dagny’s focus on composing a clever lyric earlier, but it’s difficult to overstate just how well her way with words can hit a listener. Whether she’s cheerfully inviting emotional trauma into her life on Heartbreak In The Making or encouraging us to expose our vulnerability on Let Me Cry, pop fans are paying close attention to what Dagny is saying and how she’s saying it. She credits her talent for storytelling as being a group effort; one which she likens to group therapy.

“I always work with other people, I don’t really write on my own a lot. And a lot of the good lyrics really do come from great conversations that are happening in the studio. Every time you go into the studio, you basically get free therapy! It’s such an open space, and people are not scared to share. Everyone has this unspoken respect that whatever is said in that room, stays in that room.”

Dagny’s biggest hit is Somebody, which has received over 100 million streams on Spotify alone.

Regardless of what comes out when writing, and however niche the subject matter might be, Dagny likes to bank on someone somewhere being able to relate: “I often feel like if I’m connecting to a certain lyric, then the chances are that someone else will connect with it… Someone else has experienced that too.” She compares it to Googling an obscure thought that you might have had; taking to the internet convinced that surely no one else will have thought to ask this of a search engine. “And someone out there always has,” the singer smiles.

Katy Perry based her hit single Never Really Over on Dagny’s song Love You Like That, for which Dagny received a writing credit.

Living the dream

Thanks to the age of streaming, something which is possible for artists these days in a way that it never used to be, they can now go out there and meet all these listeners who relate to their songs. Performers don’t need to wait until they’ve achieved commercial success in a certain territory. If the streaming data tells you that you have 1,000 active listeners in a city, you can go out there and book a venue… And your fans will come to see you play.

Dagny was an early adopter of this new outlook for artists, and she’s so far completed two successful tours of Europe. “I was definitely nervous putting that first European tour together,” the trailblazer concedes. “But those tours… They honestly give me so much life. We’ve never had major success in any other country than Norway, but it’s so nice to see that there are people connecting with my music. And it’s so rare that I’m able to see them, that it really feels special when I’m able to tour. Playing live has always been the biggest drive I have, it’s always something that has motivated me. If it was up to me, I would just tour constantly.”

It’s a gamble that has paid off for Dagny, and it’s inspired other pop artists to take the plunge and hit the road to go out and play to their listeners too, wherever they may be. And for Dagny at this milestone in her career, it sounds like it doesn’t matter what the next decade has in store for the singer… She’s found her audience and she knows where to go to see them: “This most recent European tour has been so special to me. For me, the music doesn’t have to take off anywhere, so long as we can continue to do that, go out and play shows. It doesn’t even have to be huge shows. I would feel like I’m living the dream.”