Dark horse

MUSIC:Hypochondria, anxiety and a healthy dose of hair-pulling have made for a striking debut album from Swedish dreampop duo I Break Horses. LAUREN MURPHYreports

MARIA LINDÉN is a hypochondriac. This is no slur on the twentysomething Swede’s personality. She will tell you as much herself. There is no shying away from the condition that she has been shackled with for most of her childhood and all of her adult life. Thankfully, however, Maria Lindén is known for more than her propensity to dwell on imagined illnesses – or at least, she will be soon. The woman behind I Break Horses (named after the Smog song of the same name) has, with her co-writer and drummer Frederik Balck, created an exceptionally striking debut album.

It started on the internet – as many modern band connections do – but not in the way you’d imagine.

Lindén and Balck were both members of the same medical web forum and when they later met in person, they discovered they had discussed their imagined symptoms of a certain strain of cancer online. In case you hadn’t already guessed, I Break Horses are a bit... different.

“It’s true,” says the softly-spoken Stockholm native. “I used to go to the doctor, like, once a month when I thought I had some new disease, or something.” Lindén had been writing music in and out of bands as a teenager (including a stint in Stockholm shoegazers Blackstrap), but I Break Horses was the first one she “could really call her own”.

When she discovered that her new acquaintance Balck drummed and wrote lyrics – and that his words resonated with her distinct blend of heavily layered dreampop – it was a no-brainer to expand her solo project to a duo. And it's no surprise that Balck's lyrics are infused with the subject matter that brought the duo together in the first place – songs have titles such as Hearts, Cancer, and Pulse.

Coupled with Lindén’s swathes of shoegaze-tinted gauze and ghostly vocals, it makes for an often unsettling listen in parts.

“I think you can hear that I’m a very anxious person on the album,” she agrees. “I worry about things. But I’m working hard to be a bit more confident. The idea of putting an album out is definitely scary, but at the same time, I’m so happy about it. And I’m really happy about working with Bella Union, they’re such lovely, lovely people.”

The Bella Union label was founded by former Cocteau Twins member Simon Raymonde, who was hugely impressed by the demo recordings Lindén sent to him on MySpace several years ago. “I’ve always been a huge fan of Cocteau Twins so I was so happy when he replied,” she says.“I actually never had a plan to make an album; I just wanted to find somebody who I thought had the same visions about music that I had, the same thoughts about the music industry.”

Raymonde sent her to a studio in Poland to develop her sound, but those initial sessions proved fruitless. “I have a weird way of working anyway – I write stuff, and I love it, then I hate it, and then I delete it and start all over again,” she says. “Then I went to Poland to record the album about two years ago . . . I didn’t get the same energy that I could get from sitting at home with the blinds down, not knowing if it’s day or night, which was much better than working from eight to four every day... So I deleted almost everything from that session.

“I went back to Stockholm and started all over again. There have been many moments of pulling my hair and crying, but I’m very happy that it finally came to an end.”

Heartsmay have taken more than two years to complete, but the finished product is a gorgeously-crafted album with a beautifully natural flow. It begins with an uplifting bombardment of pop-tinged synths on Winter Beatsand ends with the ghostly, airy shimmer of No Way Outro. In between are some remarkably accomplished songs that nod to Lindén's love of 1980s pop and 1990s shoegaze, all fed through a vintage analogue filter.

Her music has already been shunted into the same bracket as My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, but she’s happy with those comparisons.

“Oh, it’s definitely flattering,” she says. “I love all those bands, and my music does have fragments of all those bands, of course.”

Lindén's style is at odds with most of her female Swedish contemporaries – although there are moments on Heartswhen you could imagine Lykke Li's sensual murmur pluck a line from Wired, or Karin Dreijer Andersson's experimental sensibility tussle with the tempo and key of I Kill Love, Baby!In any case, Lindén doesn't quite see herself at their level just yet.

She and Balck still have day jobs and Linden recently revealed on Twitter that she had to pawn her guitar and violin to make ends meet (although the guitar was rescued not long afterwards).

“When I decided to finally finish [the album] and start rehearsals for a live show, I just couldn’t do the day job at the same time – so I started working two days a week, and the money ran out pretty quickly, so I had to pawn them for a while. But the violin was probably a good thing,” she says.

“My parents pretty much forced me to play the violin when I was a kid, and I never wanted to. And they never got that I actually hated it — they always want me to bring it when I go to their house for Christmas, because everyone in my family plays an instrument . . . They always say ‘Maria, can you please bring the violin this year?’ and I always have to make excuses.”

This year, she’ll have her own album to play over dinner. “That’ll be much more interesting than playing Christmas carols,” she says. Anxiety-laden songs that speak of cancer and illness may not be the most cheery festive tunes, but she does have a point. It’ll certainly be interesting.

Hearts

is released on Bella Union today