Review: Frida Hyvönen back with Dream of Independence

Dream of Independence is

an album that tries to answer the question of whether you can continue to be a pop artist as a woman after forty.

The answer is a resounding yes.

But that does not mean that the question is stupid or uninteresting.

On the contrary - pop music has always been occupied by young people, and women in particular have found it more difficult to be allowed to age in popular culture.

But Frida Hyvönen shows that it is perfectly possible to write good songs about the questions that arise in the younger middle age.

Can you be independent and at the same time be part of a relationship?

How selfish can you be as an artist, when you have children?

And what does it mean to approach the phase of life when you are no longer fertile?

In the song New vision:

To finally get a watch out of the factory.

Duty completed, the burden lifted from one's shoulders.

But then it is as it is with the pension - twice.

What would become a liberation can just as easily turn into a loss.

But Hyvönen also treats external signs of aging.

Face is a fun and punk song about when people suddenly start saying that you look tired, even though you are asleep.

Did you sleep?

She is good at both humor

and darkness, often even in the same song.

And she has always been a fan of finding the topics that are missing in pop, what others rarely write about.

On the previous album, neighboring pedophiles and childhood secrets, now funerals and fathers on the verge of nervous breakdown.

The decline in English from Swedish does not make her any less affected.

Her way of telling stories from life, like short stories, is intact and she sings raw and dramatic rather than classically beautiful.

Musically, it is still the

piano that plays the main role.

It's beautiful, but I can miss the disco drums she used to offer more often.

Now they are only occasionally heard at dark, captivating A funeral in Banbridge.

Maybe there is no song that makes one completely drop everything, like Friday morning on the last record.

But the beautiful, romantic 14 at 41, about the magic of falling in love on an evening walk, comes very close.