Thomas Dybdahl

Among Norway's most celebrated singer-songwriters stands Thomas Dybdahl, whose graceful, emotionally charged songs about love and loss have steadily built an expanding global audience and drawn parallels to Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley. His light, faintly husky tone floats in a sweet falsetto, and he extracts striking dramatic tension from even the most transparent arrangements. Yet Dybdahl's style resists neat classification, moving across indie pop on his opening pair of EPs and the October Trilogy, twenty-first-century mutant soul on the 2013 release What's Left Is Forever, and film scores for Eventyrland and Now It's Dark. The 2018 conceptual album All These Things distilled the artist's accumulated impressions of Los Angeles.

Born in 1979, Dybdahl first attracted notice as guitarist in the Norwegian funk/acid jazz group Quadraphonics, which cultivated a domestic following before touring Canada and the United States. While still with that ensemble he began composing his own folk-rock and alt-country material, releasing the solo EP Bird in 2000. The record drew scant attention, as did the follow-up John Wayne in 2001. Momentum arrived with the 2002 full-length …That Great October Sound, written largely during a stay in New York City where Dybdahl performed nearly every instrument himself; its opening track "From Grace" received strong Norwegian radio support and the album achieved gold status. The successor Stray Dogs matched that success, after which One Day You'll Dance for Me, New York City appeared in 2004 as his first album conceived expressly for the American and Canadian markets. A Danish edition followed in 2005 and was later packaged with …That Great October Sound and Stray Dogs as the box set The October Trilogy. That same year also saw the debut album from Dybdahl's side project the National Bank.

He moved to Rykodisc for the 2006 album Science and began his first United States tour in spring 2007. Two further studio albums arrived in 2010: a self-titled set on PIAS and Waiting for That One Clear Moment on Universal. In 2011 Decca issued the retrospective Songs. Following an extensive international tour, Dybdahl recorded the widely praised What's Left Is Forever in Los Angeles during 2012 under producer Larry Klein; it reached listeners in 2013. That autumn he composed his first film score, Eventyrland, for director and actress Arild Ø. Ommundsen. In 2015 he issued a four-song EP with the Norwegian jazz trio In the Country, then returned to solo work with his seventh album The Great Plains in 2017. After touring Europe and the United States he scored another Ommundsen film, Now It's Dark, drawing on extended listening to Fripp and Eno, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh and related artists. He also resumed work in Los Angeles with Klein once more.

On 16 July 2018 Dybdahl released the single "Can I Have It All," blending contemporary soul, weeping pedal steel and ethereal mellotrons into a nocturnal texture. Four days later he issued the poignant indie neo-soul track "Look at What We've Done" as a live video and streaming single while announcing the October arrival of the Klein-produced, Los Angeles-recorded album All These Things, loosely centered on that city.

Following further touring and four additional months of writing, Dybdahl returned to his home studio in Stavanger, Norway to collaborate again with longtime associate and hip-hop producer Håvard Rosenberg. What began as a planned single expanded first into an EP and ultimately into the album Fever. Having absorbed lessons from years of working with elite producers and session musicians worldwide, Dybdahl chose Rosenberg as co-producer, set aside his customary acoustic guitar for a vintage Fender Telecaster, and performed nearly every other instrument himself, allowing rapid, instinctive work free of external time constraints. Fever appeared on V2 in March 2020.