Towards the end of a rammed-to-the-rafters headline gig in her hometown of Copenhagen – which has run the gamut from synth-pop to punk – MØ wipes her brow after a comically long crowdsurf, and launches into a trademark version of Spice Girls’ Say You’ll Be There. It’s a cover so brilliant that Mel C herself has given it the seal of approval.
This scene feel like a fitting introduction to the world of MØ. Though she’s easily Denmark’s biggest pop export, and among the most streamed artists on Spotify thanks to her mega-hit Lean On (absent from the show’s debut album-focused setlist), the 35-year-old singer started out fronting a feminist punk band called MOR, and performing songs with titles like Fisse I Dit Fjæs (Danish for P**sy In Your Face) on Copenhagen’s activist squat scene.
“Before I got into the whole punk scene, and alternative music, which was in my teens, I was so into pop music,” she tells me. “Those two very contradicting genres have always influenced me.”
Backstage, after the gig, MØ proudly introduces me to her parents and sticks around for beer, before heading home to rest her voice for tomorrow’s show.
When we first meet up, earlier in the day, Karen Marie Ørsted is on day two of a trio of shows at the city’s iconic live music spot Vega, an achingly stylish, teak-panelled venue that has hosted everyone from David Bowie to Prince over the years.
Though her live return comes right as she’s finishing off her fourth album â more on that later â the special anniversary shows are all about looking backwards, to the days of MØ’s debut album No Mythologies To Follow.
Now 10 years old, MØ’s debut was mostly recorded at her parents’ house, in a makeshift vocal booth made out of hanging towels and blankets. Many of the visuals are black and white collages, or DIY style videos, created on a shoestring budget.
“I went to art school, I borrowed a camera, and me and my friends filmed some stuff on a green screen that we made ourselves. There were no voices in my head,” Ørsted remembers, as we grab a coffee at one of her favourite spots on Enghave Plads, right around the corner from tonight’s venue. “No-one being like, ‘Oh no, you shouldn't do that’. It's such a pure place to create from.”
As well as these three sold-out shows in her home city, MØ is also bringing the anniversary celebrations to London, with two gigs lined up at XOYO for later this week.
In Denmark, No Mythologies to Follow proved her big breakthrough moment, charting at number two, and turning her into one of the country’s leading pop stars overnight.
In the UK, it was released by the influential indie label Chess Club (best known for launching the careers of Wolf Alice, Jungle and Mumford and Sons) and pulled in a cultish following with its glassy, punk-influenced Scandi-pop.
The debut paved the way to a lucrative major label deal, and a string of huge hits as a guest star. As well as the ridiculously fun Charli XCX collaboration 3am Pull Up (from the former’s mixtape Number 1 Angel) a number of feature spots with Diplo’s dance trio Major Lazer, including on the Justin Bieber-assisted Cold Water, marked her true mainstream crossover moment. She is one of just four Danish artists to land a number one single in the UK.
Her biggest global hit of all, Lean On, was at one point, the most streamed song on Spotify, and with 1.9 billion streams to date, it surpasses hits for both Oasis’ Wonderwall, and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit on the platform.
And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite a few onlookers clock her as we wander around the city’s Vesterbro district, though MØ â low key in sunnies and a black hoodie â does a good job of pretending to be oblivious, and continues gleefully reeling off a string of pastry recommendations (her favourite spot is Hart Bageri, for the record) and some of her favourite escapes after a long day in the studio. Out to the south, she says, there’s a coastal walk she does at least once a week to help her mull things over: “it has windmills, and this flat landscape with meadows. It’s very soothing for me.”
Though it’s still only early afternoon, a small gaggle of particularly hardcore fans (or Mømins, to use their official title) are already hovering around Vega’s stage doors, back for round two after coming to last night’s gig, and she heads straight over for a quick chat before heading inside for soundcheck.
“I’ve seen so many incredible shows in this place,” she exclaims, swinging open the doors to the venue’s grand main hall.
“I felt like I had to run faster than anybody else. I had no idea how to navigate the music industry. I was not a man, you know?”
Though Ørsted doesn’t seem to mind heads constantly swivelling, she also treats her supposed pop star persona with a healthy dollop of humour, and looks slightly bewildered at the sight of her own face – on a much larger scale – being projected across the entrance to Vega. She remains grateful for the doors that her massive Major Lazer-assisted hits have opened, but the way that she measures success has changed.
“I mean, sorry, it's gonna sound cheesy, but I'm just gonna say it,” she laughs. “But I think success now is not just about the numbers. It needs to feel really good, in the stomach. I need to feel like I’m 100 per cent in it, with my heart.”
Accordingly, MØ has begun gradually deviating further and further from the sound of her most mainstream pop hits, teaming up with more left-field collaborators such as Empress Of, Noonie Bao, and the late electronic producer Sophie.
Following her chart successes, Forever Neverland, the follow-up to her debut, was plagued by delays and took four years to finish; sonically the record battled it out between MØ’s alternative roots, and high-polish EDM.
By 2022, it morphed towards rage and defiance as MØ rejected radio-friendly chart pop. “You don't know me anymore, you don't, do ya?” she smirks on New Moon, the stomping, nu-disco tinged standout from her third album Motordrome.
Though many of these songs initially feel like they might be about romantic relationships, they instead explore her “toxic former mindset” in relation to the music industry. When she wrote New Moon, and the rest of the songs on Motordrome, Ørsted was riddled with anxiety, and struggling with burn-out after seven years of almost constant touring;
“It had a lot to do with my romantic relationship to my career,” she says. “You’re young, you’re inexperienced… “ she says. “You get thrown into the arms of this beast, and it's everything that you have ever dreamed about, all coming true. I felt like I had to run faster than anybody else. I had no idea how to navigate it. I was not a man, you know?”
“I remember in the beginning, I didn't really want to think about it like that,” she continues. “I’ve always had a very gender non-confirmative view of myself. It’s not something I have words for… but when I started this whole thing, I didn’t want to think about the vulnerable situation I was in. I wanted it to be just… equal. But I found out that it isn’t.”
She describes the misogyny that she’s encountered over the past decade as being a low-level and subtle erosion of her confidence; “this underlying disrespect which you just meet when you are a minority in an industry ruled by men,” she says.
“I don't think people necessarily think that they want to be vicious and control you, or be mean. You know, I played along, and it becomes this weird, codependent thing. It’s quite abstract, and not easy to talk about. It’s f**king complicated.”
“I realised that this is something I had to face, and be a bit more awake about. You gotta organise with non-male colleagues, and find community, and talk about these things that are wrong. I didn't even know that I needed that so much, but it really did help to feel like: oh, we're a lot of people experiencing the same things.”
During touring for Motordrome, she was also recovering from vocal surgery after damaging her voice; an experience she now describes as “terrible”.
“It has been tough,” she says. Ørsted demonstrates some of her vocal exercises, before adding that the hardest aspect of her recovery has been psychological. “Letting go and trusting that you can actually… that nothing bad will happen,” she says. “I guess it's like… you could say a little trauma of some sort… not that I want to use that word lightly.”
While Ørsted felt incredibly angry during the making of Motordrome, and channelled this fury into its glacial, cold electro-pop, her new, as-yet-unannounced new album apparently comes from a more tranquil and “healthier” place. There will be some first glimpses of new music out later this year ahead of its unconfirmed release date.
She explains that she first began writing it while touring Motordrome, and has been working on it more intensely since last March. Still, Ørsted has tried her best to take her time over the process rather than ploughing straight into her next record; “if you don’t live your life, you have nothing to write about,” she shrugs.
“I'm excited about the new stuff,” she adds. “It's good for me to come out of my Copenhagen recording studio cave and just get back to the world.”
The separate process of revisiting her debut (MØ is also putting out four, previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded during that era) has unsurprisingly prompted her to reflect on how much her perspective has shifted since she was an aspiring artist in her 20s, living in Copenhagen for the first time.
“It reminds me a little bit of how when I was writing No Mythologies To Follow. It was these little songs about big emotions, I’m sure, but also just the life that I'm living,” she says of the new album.
“So, you know, friends that you’ve lost, or friends that you miss. Growing older, and reflecting back a little bit on the stuff that you learned. It’s so funny, when I look back at [No Mythologies to Follow] and how I was feeling, it was this thing of: f**k, I’m an adult now, but I don’t know who I am! I’ve always thought, ah, at some point I would have all the answers.”
Still, she says that she’s learned one important lesson over the course of 10 years in the music industry, on a major label. “That thing about trusting yourself a little bit more, and not always just saying yes, to please everyone,” she concludes. “It's just in my DNA to make mistakes.”
