“I like it when songs are embarrassing,” says Bo Milli. “And I know every single
embarrassing thing I’ve ever done.” The 23-year-old Norwegian musician has spent the past
two years documenting her experience coming of age during a global pandemic. There were
a lot of self-reflective moments, sure, but the subject matter moves beyond trying to process
the inability to escape her own busy mind. “The climate crisis comes into everything,” she
says. “I try not to let it, but it’s the backdrop to everything I write. It makes everything very
trivial, which shapes my music but also my attitude.” The result? Brutally honest indie pop
songs that perfectly articulate the struggles of an entire generation.
Bo Milli (a deconstruction of her birth name, Emilie Østebø) grew up in the suburbs of
Karmøy, an island off the west coast of Norway. Her parents raised her on a healthy diet of
Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Rage Against The Machine and Kate Bush, and she was playing
guitar by the age of eight. “With small places, you don’t really expect there to be much of a
scene, but we had one,” she remembers. “There was a lot of metal around and lots of local
indie bands to look up to.” At 13, fuelled by a new obsession with Paramore and Nirvana, the
self-proclaimed “noisy, impatient theatre child” started performing her own songs at gigs her
older sister organised in a nearby town.
By the time high school came around, Bo Milli had an impressive discography and friends
were eager to form a band around her. “I quickly realised it was a lot more fun than playing
alone,” she smiles, noting that she then pivoted to electric guitar. There was never a lightbulb
moment in which the young artist realised that a career in music was something she ought to
pursue. Rather, it was always a natural part of her self-expression. “It just never stopped
being the most fun thing,” she explains. “I’ve always felt like music was within my grasp, and
everybody’s grasp for that matter. It’s not so much something to aspire to, because I could
always do the fun part. So I just kept at it and soon met people who liked what I was doing.”
One such person was the Norwegian producer Odd Martin – best known for his
collaborations with Aurora and Sigrid – who connected with Bo Milli when she was in her
teens. She kept him updated with her projects and he motivated her to become more prolific
with her writing. “I wasn’t intentionally writing songs before, things just became songs,” she
says. “Then when I started talking with Odd Martin, he gave me a platform to share which
made me a lot more intentional with making stuff.” After the pandemic forced her home from
music college in early 2020, Bo Milli found herself with the space to experiment. “I feel like
everything got paused,” she remembers. “It’s just recently that I started thinking about the
fact that time actually passed. I was 19 and now somehow I’m 21… the last one and a half
years has felt like a vacuum.”
A vacuum, of course, in which she taught herself how to use Logic, quickly became a
more-than-capable producer and eventually relocated to Oslo. It was there that she
collaborated with her friend Lasse Lokoy (bassist for Sløtface) on “a mistake”, a playful
depiction of relationship woes through what she calls a self-indulgent lens. Part of Lokoy’s
album, Badminton, it was released under her own name last summer.
Impressed by what Bo Milli had made during lockdown, Odd Martin set about “working his
magic” on it – retaining much of the raw brilliance of her original demos and ultimately
teaming up with Bergen’s Made Management. In early 2022, she’ll release “At The Wheel”, a
Soccer Mommy-adjacent song about becoming an adult and suddenly finding yourself
responsible for not just your own destiny but the future of the planet. “It’s embarrassingly
earnest,” she says of the track, in which she questions “who’s at the wheel these days?”
from a bed of idiosyncratic lyrics and melodies. “It’s about how the small things feel big, and
how you try to relate to the big things but the everyday stuff takes up so much real estate.
There are these flashes of ‘oh fuck!’ but then you’re like… ‘wait, where’re my keys?’” The
feeling of powerlessness though, is all-too relatable.
A number of yet-unreleased songs explore these themes further. The project – nodding at
times to Phoebe Bridgers, others to nostalgic mid-00s teen anthems – sees her lament
procrastination, admit to being on the verge of tears for days at a time and recount thinking
she might die on the 10-hour bus ride home. Far from bleak, she makes complicated
subjects sound like the soundtrack of your next favourite coming-of-age movie.
With a predisposition to self-criticise and a talent for turning that into art, Bo Milli is an
essential new voice in music. Through her diaristic lyrics, the super smart environmentalist
writes hook after hook as she navigates her inner conflict. And indeed, in putting her own life
into words, she has unknowingly narrated our collective existential angst. “Writing music is
an emotional outlet, but it’s also a puzzle,” she says, reflecting on her craft. “Sentences
come to me and I try to make the pieces fit together. And if just for a moment my music is a
good thing in someone’s life, then I will take any opportunity to play it.