You can hear from DREAMER+ that it matured in the studio for almost four years until Sunniva Lindgard alias Sassy 009 was satisfied with the result: a dream-darkened electronic world in which nothing is as it seems. Sassy 009 first appeared as a trio in 2017, and in 2021 the Oslo producer followed up with an introspective mixtape as a solo act. During the production of her official debut album DREAMER+, Lindgard consciously imagined writing for a live band rather than giving in to the temptation to lose herself in a thousand layers.
Nevertheless, their design sounds highly artificial: hyper-pop, which contains more hyper than pop. She chases her rough, moleward voice excessively through filters, and a good dose of AutoTune never hurts either. The opener “Butterflies” negates the lightness of its title, the acoustic brutalism including the motorbike humming in and out leads in a different direction than the often trip-hop-trained rest of the album, such as the fluffy “Tell Me”, in which Dev Hynes aka Blood Orange joins in on the vocals.
So DREAMER+ morphs, sometimes shoegazy, sometimes more danceable, until the biggest surprise of all comes in the album closer: “Ruins Of A Lost Memory” was written by Lindgard’s parents for the ESC in the 1990s, a pretty crazy musical song that puts an unexpected end to this dark fairytale forest.
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.