Since signing with Icons Creating Evil Art in 2017, Bonander has carved out her own lane in the dark alt pop landscape. With a background in jazz vocals and music production from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, she brings drama, experimentation, and feminist critique to everything she touches.
Swedish artist Bonander releases edith on January 16 via Icons Creating Evil Art. The song is the final single ahead of her second album and we stood there, due February 13, and stands as one of the record’s most dramatic and conceptually charged pieces.
“The album is about different stages of powerlessness,” Bonander explains. “I think that comes from feeling a simultaneous apathy and panic toward the chaos of the world right now.”
Bonander has been described by GAFFA and Hymn as one of Sweden’s most underrated artists—an irony not lost on an artist whose project has existed and evolved for years beneath the surface. With and we stood there, she takes a decisive step into a more confrontational musical language, tracing how ordinary people are shaped by political anxiety, exhaustion, and the slow normalization of the unthinkable.
edith is based on, and freely interprets, the poem “Dagen svalnar” by Edith Södergran. The poem’s iconic final line — "you looked for a woman and found a soul – you are disappointed” — is gradually constructed through sampled voices, metallic synths, radio-like rhythms, and robotic vocal expressions. In Bonander’s version, the soul is fractured, complex, and dark, carrying both contempt and resignation.
“I wanted the soul to feel broken, layered, and uncomfortable,” Bonander says. “Not idealized—just very human.”
Beneath the surface, the acclaimed choir Tusen Tungor can be heard screaming in the song’s refrains, while much of the beat is built from sampled sounds gathered from forest floors and ground textures. The track closes with an unexpected physical turn as co-producer Elias Ortiz Venegas enters on live drums, grounding the piece in movement and breath. The single is mixed and mastered by Gabriel Lundh.
Thematically, edith connects directly to the emotional core of and we stood there, an album that explores apathy, frustration, grief, and anger—but also the physical and psychological fatigue that arises when time, energy, and hope seem to slip away.
“It’s about how your limits slowly change,” Bonander explains. “How your bar for what’s acceptable gets lowered, almost without you noticing.”
The album’s previous singles approached these themes from different angles. apathy functioned as a direct confrontation with political numbness, collaging media fragments, distorted choirs, and fractured rhythms into a defiant rejection of passivity. clay focused instead on quiet transformation—how anxiety becomes a survival strategy, and how adaptation reshapes us over time. Both tracks received strong early support and quickly appeared on influential playlists such as Spotify’s Oyster.
Musically, and we stood there is built through a solitary, labor-intensive process of sampling sounds, instruments, and voices, later expanded through collaborations with a wide circle of musicians. The album features contributions from Dan Berglund (Tonbruket), Kristina Issa, a string quartet, and Tusen Tungor, whose presence—sometimes explicit, sometimes deeply embedded—has become central to the album’s sonic identity.
Despite its heaviness, and we stood there is not a record of surrender. Aggression and fragility coexist, leaving room for grief while insisting on motion, resistance, and collective force.
“I hope the album can spark some kind of drive,” Bonander says. “To keep reacting. Maybe even to act.”
With edith, Bonander closes the chapter of singles and opens the door fully to and we stood there—an album that refuses silence, even when exhaustion sets in.
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D I S C O V E R
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bonandermusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bonandermusic
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4tM87IYx08XNUSdrlky6y2
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bonander/1204751753
