Music

Swedish Duo Icona Pop Are Best Friends Doing What They Love


Working with your best friend and travelling the world is something some girls can only dream about, but for Swedish duo Icona Pop this has become their life—and they are loving every single minute of it.

Icona Pop Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo

With the goal of making music to get people up and dancing, Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo came together after meeting at a party and since then, they’ve created hit songs that are played at parties across the globe. Their music video for “I Love It” has already reached passed more one hundred million views on YouTube and they’ve been working hard on a debut album.

Kicking off their tour with Marina and the Diamonds on Canadian soil, Icona Pop brought an extra ounce of girl power to a highly anticipated and energetic show.

How are you feeling about kicking off the tour with Marina and the Diamonds?

Aino: It feels great. This is our first proper tour that we’re going to do. We’ve just been traveling around otherwise to do gigs around Europe and America, but this is going to be a proper tour. We are very very excited.

Caroline: It feels so good to be with Marina as well. We met her for the first time in the UK and she’s great. So I think this tour will be dangerous.

A: Girl power!

What do you want people to walk away with after seeing you perform?

C: I want people to walk away dancing to feel stuff. We want to make music that makes people feel and when we’re on stage we want people to feel exactly how we feel when we perform that song or when we wrote that song. Or maybe they relate to another feeling in their body, but still we want them to feel stuff, not just walk away and be like, hmm what are we going to do tonight. I want them to be like AHH.

BFFs

Talking about working together with your best friend, doing what you love:

What’s it like working with your best friend?

Caroline: Too good to be true.

Aino: We have so much fun. People think that we’re freaks because no one understands us because we have our own world, where we’re making jokes and stuff.

Icona Pop Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo

Passionate young women do their thing

As passionate and driven females in the industry, they encourage others to be strong and true to themselves.

A: There are a lot of men in the music business and we just want to be strong women in the music business. And never let people push you down.

C: Do your thing and have fun. Don’t be shy. And help each other, I think that’s an important message as well, like stand up for each other and let’s make magic!

On being Swedish…

Icona Pop are yet another successful international band coming out of Sweden which, despite its relatively small population, perennially remains one of the most fertile grounds for pop and dance music in the world.

C: I think Sweden is a country that is very sensitive when it comes to picking up trends. It’s a small country. We come from Stockholm, which is a small city – a big small city. If you are trying to work in music and you give it a go, you will absolutely be given the chance to work with people that are good. Maybe the environment, you see a bit of the bittersweet, the cold dark winters, I don’t know.

A: Sweden is a special country. People are very much lagom, it’s a Swedish word, and that word doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. And that’s like, not too much but not too little. It’s more negative than perfect, but it’s not negative either, it’s a very strange word. It’s in the middle. Swedish people are a lot in the middle. So that can sometimes be a good thing and sometimes a bad thing, but as a musician you should never be in the middle. So maybe we were influenced by lagom.

Icona Pop Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo

Home is everywhere

Being on the road has allowed these two to explore the world and embrace it with open arms. “I think with the lifestyle we have right now, we don’t have a home. We basically just travel everywhere,” says Caroline. “You become very good at living in the now to be present and to take stuff in, in a different way.”

And despite being away from their family, this on-the-go routine is what they’ve grown to love. “It’s good to be homeless. The world is our home,” she says.

They also feel right at home when they get up on stage and perform in front of an audience, bringing their feel-good tracks to life. “I hope people walk away with a big smile and feel touched in some way,” says Aino. “That’s what we aim for when we make pop music.”

Icona Pop and Christina Dun
Icona Pop and Faze reporter Christina Dun

Check out Icona Pop’s music here.

And here’s the video for their mega-hit “I Love It”


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