Digital Cover: Joalin’s Nordic Rhythm

Joalin Loukamaa knows how to create a viral moment. Case in point: February 4, 2023, at The Emma Gaala (the ‘Finnish Grammys’), where the singer-songwriter used the red carpet to debut her new haircut. The reveal moment set off an avalanche of ‘omg’ comments and love heart emojis on social media. The move, however, was calculated. “I cut my hair one day before the Finnish Grammys so that the first time people would see it would be in professional pictures taken in a beautiful dress, full makeup, hair styled, the works. I was like, ‘If I make it a big thing, it’ll become a bigger thing’,” she laughs. For the Finnish pop star, it was her way of taking a risky plunge. “I made it a thing on purpose because I've been wanting to cut my hair for such a long time and I knew there was a risk of me hating it.” Her decision had the desired effect: the comments were positive and Joalin now has a fresh chop she’s “obsessed with”.

I’m speaking to Joalin and her relatively new blonde lob via Zoom, which seems extremely fitting. Along with a string of pop hits and a newly launched solo singing career, she is also one of Finland’s most followed on Instagram. The majority of her fans have fallen in love with the bubbly blonde via a screen; whether it be her playful Instagram dumps, her addictive TikTok moves or her YouTube channel that has become a platform for her meteoric music career. She speaks internet fluently; the intricate pink nails she’s flashing on the screen as we talk were chosen based on a TikTok challenge. “I let my nail technician do that little TikTok thing where she gives me two papers and then I choose what she does, and we went really full out.” On her arm you’ll find a butterfly tattoo, an homage, among other things, to her obsession with the butterfly emoji.

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The world first encountered Joalin when she was just 16 as a dancer in Now United, a super pop group of young talents formed by renowned Idol creator and Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller after an extensive world search. Joalin was Finland’s representative. Now 21, she’s left the group (“We were never meant to be in it until we were all 90. It was always just a launchpad.”) and is moving even closer to the spotlight, forging a solo career as a pop star after releasing her first single ‘Angelito’ last year.

“I'm always like: ‘Let’s go. You can do anything you want. I believe in myself,’” Joalin tells me as she sits in her Finnish home, dressed in an oversized black sweater and slippers. “But, of course, there’s that moment almost every day where I’m like, ‘Is this really working out? Is this going to work out?’ So things like a Vogue cover make you feel you’re going in the right direction.” Joalin possesses an ease, a natural star quality that makes it hard to believe the direction she’s heading won’t be anywhere but up. In fact, her celebrity seems to have been written in the stars long before she even took her first breath. “I felt it before she was even born,” her mum Johanna Loukamaa tells me. “That’s why I gave her an artist’s name.”

Related: “Even before I was born, I was a dancer": Joalin on the meaning of movement

Born in Turku, Finland, Joalin moved to Spain when she was three, as her mum, a single parent, always had “a connection to the Spanish-speaking culture and wanted to be somewhere warm.” They returned to Finland when Joalin was about eight. “I remember moving back to Finland and telling everyone I was Spanish,” she explains. It wasn’t long before the family had packed their bags again, this time heading to Mexico. This trip, which was only meant to be six months, ended up being 10 years and set in motion Joalin’s trajectory to fame. “My mum used to be a dancer,” she explains. “My stepfather, who she married in Mexico is a B-Boy [a breakdancer, going by the name BBoy Kalaco]. So he does breaking. Very cool. And at some point, they opened up a dance school, and that’s literally where I spent every single day.”

The dance school became a playground for Joalin to hone her craft and be surrounded by resources to push her to the next level. At 13, she transferred to home-schooling so she could focus more on dance. “I felt like I was wasting time in school,” she explains. “People there weren’t really supportive of my dance career. I didn’t do ballet or contemporary. I was doing breaking, popping and locking, all the hip hop styles – and in their eyes that was a little embarrassing. I just felt very outside of my comfort zone.”

When Joalin was 15 she heard rumours that aforementioned industry heavyweight Fuller – with his Pop Idol and Spice Girls credentials – was looking for dancers for a group he was creating. Not knowing whether it was true or not, Joalin sent her information, “just to see what would happen”. She then got invited to a week-long bootcamp and by the end of that week was accepted into Now United. “It’s crazy. That’s what it is,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘My life is going to change forever.’ I was crying. I was so filled with emotions. I was excited and I was scared at the same time.”

What followed was a whirlwind couple of years of tours. The first year alone, Now United visited no less than 18 countries. Joalin describes it as a lot of planes, a lot of jetlag and a lot of sleep deprivation. During this time, she also discovered the power of melatonin and black coffee. “I was always like, ‘I’m never going to drink coffee’. But my stepdad said, ‘You should try it. Everything starts moving slower and you start moving faster.’ And I remember being so tired and we had a show and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to drink this black coffee’. And it tasted horrible, but I felt so crazy energised after that I started drinking coffee and now I can’t stop,” she says holding up the iced oat latte in her hand.

Being on stage, watching crowds sing along with the group, Joalin got an itch. She didn’t want to just be in the background. But to be in the spotlight she needed to be a vocalist, something she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. “I wanted to be upfront, but I didn’t like singing. I didn’t like my voice.” Along with that, people questioned if she was capable, as Joalin didn’t sing in “the traditional way”. “So then I kind of just gave up on that, she explains. “And I was like, ‘Well, I’m just going to stick to being in the background. Maybe this is my place’.”

The world, however, had other plans. The calendar clocked over to 2020 and Covid hit. Joalin and her family move back to Turku, a Finnish city that straddles the Aura River, about two hours outside of Helsinki. When stay-home orders came into play, she was making music videos for Now United via Zoom and filming a bunch of content for the group at home. “I thought if I can do all this at home, maybe I could try my own stuff too,” she says of her decision to start uploading her own videos onto YouTube. Soon word got around that she was back in town and record labels came knocking. “Finland is very small,” she explains. “So when one person heard there’s this girl representing Finland in an international pop group and she has a bunch of followers, it was very interesting to them. People started talking and then suddenly I had made a name for myself by just being [in Turku].”

Joalin has now spent the last two years in the studio working hard with iconic Finnish singer Chisu, and Chisu’s producer husband Jori Roosberg to find her voice. “My biggest fear was singing in front of people,” she says. “So going to the studio and recording where the producer can hear only you, you can’t even hear yourself, was hard. But now I’ve gotten more comfortable.” For Joalin it’s not just about the singing, it’s about the music, the sound. “My superpower is the creative part. So I’ll sit there with the producer and we’ll figure out the songs together and how it’s going to sound. I don’t consider myself really a singer. I consider myself an artist because I don’t only sing and my singing is not really singing. I’m making art,” she says, delivered almost as a stream of consciousness. She is involved in as much of the process as possible, from writing to vocals to even video editing. In fact, the music video for ‘I’m The One’ was shot and then edited by her as she sat on a long-haul flight.

Despite being fluent in Finnish, English and Spanish, she’s decided to sing in the latter. The reason? The language allows her to hide. “I was kind of scared of not being good enough, which I always am for some reason,” she admits. “I thought, well, they don’t understand Spanish in Finland. So I can say anything in Spanish and they’ll think it’s beautiful.” She explains that playing her song ‘I’m The One’ to a friend in Mexico was one of the most nerve-wracking things she’s done. But when the friend responded with, “You’re actually a good writer”, Joalin breathed a sigh of relief.

Looking at Joalin, she’s almost the stereotypical poster girl of Scandinavia with her blonde hair and big blue eyes, but her identity doesn’t fit any checkbox. Recently she posted a poem on Instagram that explores this duality of her identity. It starts:

I come from a country real cold,
Where people don’t say hello, don’t nobody smile at you on the streets, and it gets slippery when it’s dark.
But I was raised in a city full of palm trees, salty Sea mixed with jalapeños,
Neighbours like family, Mi casa tu casa…
Mix that Caribbean with the darkness you get a lover girl regardless.

“I think that poem is the perfect description of my identity because I don’t really identify with any particular country,” she explains. “I talk to people here in Finland who are my age and they tell me stuff about their childhood and I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s very different from mine’. But then I hear stuff from Mexico too, and I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s also very different from mine’.” For Joalin, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, instead, she feels rich to have these different cultures and world views in her life. “I don’t really feel like I belong in one place, but I feel like I belong everywhere. Yeah, I’m just a child of the world,” she laughs.

I ask what language she dreams in. “I don’t know,” she says thoughtfully. “In fact, I don’t remember having a single conversation in my dreams. But what’s more strange is that I don’t remember seeing my smartphone in any of my dreams. Ever. It’s weird because I use it every day…” This brings us to her 3.4 million Instagram followers and the pivotal role that her smartphone has played in her success.

Despite growing up watching and loving YouTubers, her high follower count brings up complicated feelings. “I don’t feel it tells you anything about a person,” she says. “I have so much to give. It sounds clichéd, but I want to make a change. I want to inspire people.” For Joalin, she’s worked hard. She wants to be known for her art not necessarily her Instagram feed. But she also wants people to know things haven’t been handed to her “just because she has followers”.

The like and follower count also gives her a sense of imposter syndrome. “I keep thinking they are just followers from Now United. Did I do anything to deserve them?” Valid concern or not, Now United did sky-rocket her social media presence. In addition to elaborate music and dance performances, the group’s ability to deliver and interact with its fan base has been a large factor in its success. The intimate behind-the-scenes Now United videos on YouTube have amassed over 2.7 billion views alone. She vlogged constantly with the group and was given access to information on how much to post, when to post, and what to post for optimal engagement. But she’s quick to say it was more organic than just a management team telling them all to take out their phones. “In the beginning, it was more them encouraging us to use [social media] or taking us to places that would give us good content,” she explains. “It happened organically, but I also had a platform. I mean I’m 16, I’m in this pop group and I’m like travelling the world….”

Now she’s here for the fun social media can offer her, when she has to report numbers to partners or clients she gets her mum to do it as looking at the stats doesn’t make her “feel good". So what is her tip for a good Instagram post? “I love a dump,” she says matter-of-factly. “When you post a dump and you have that bomb selfie, then you can post all these weird, not-so-good pictures after it, it can be so interesting. You could just post a picture of a pile of clothes and it fits the dump.”

Last summer, Joalin found herself sitting in a square in Turku with friends. They were about to head home when Joalin heard a familiar sound. It was her song ‘Angelito’. “My heart started beating so fast I was shaking. I’ve never been so filled with emotions in my life. So I started running. I’ve never run so fast.” The sound took her to a park where a group of friends were blasting the song from a speaker. She stopped in the centre of the group expecting them to be surprised, excited by her presence. “Turns out they didn’t know who I was,” she says laughing. “I just kind of started slowly walking away.”

Later that night she reflected on the experience. For her it was the highest compliment. They were listening to the song purely because they liked the music - not Joalin, not Now United. Another highlight came when she performed a pocket show in a mall in Brazil. It was the second time she had ever sung in public. She arrived to a screaming crowd, homemade signs and gifts. “I got on stage, I was singing and suddenly everyone in the crowd was singing with me. They’d actually taken the time to learn all the words to my song, a song in a language they don’t even speak.” She was moved to tears so much so that she had to stop to compose herself. “It was very beautiful.”

Joalin understands how profoundly inspiring an artist can be to someone. Her hero was Michael Jackson. “I loved him. I had all these CDs, everything. That’s the reason why I started dancing. My biggest dream was for him to teach me to dance,” she says, still a little starstruck. “Then he passed away. I was heartbroken. I was like eight years old. I saw the news and started bawling.”

Nowadays, there is another person she constantly turns to for inspiration: her mum, who quickly put her hand up to be manager when Joalin decided to break away from Now United. “I was her ‘momager’ as she used to call me,” says Johanna. “I was also her teacher, coach, biggest fan and mum. So we’ve struggled to balance the many roles but luckily we’ve found a way to always stay close.” “She’s always been way too supportive,” adds Joalin, saying Johanna will often just have her songs replaying on silent so Joalin can gain more streams. “Mum always said she knew I was going to become someone. The name, the dance school. Like everything I’ve dreamed of, she’s made it possible. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s my manifestations or my mum’s,” she pauses, before adding. “I guess a little bit of both.”