Who is Oh Land? Get to know the indie cool Danish artist

Coming up the country road in a quaint neighbourhood a couple of hours outside of Copenhagen, I spot a house with pink-rimmed windows and figure this is probably the place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nanna Øland Fabricius, the vibrant artist known as Oh Land, resides in an explosion of colour. Pastel detailing, vintage glass cupboards filled with a kaleidoscope of knick-knacks, candy-hued Helle Mardahl cocktail glasses you can practically hear clinking during an eclectic dinner party. It’s a spacious, joyful expression of Fabricius herself.

Her partner and creative collaborator Adi Zukanović lets me in, smiling broadly and telling me she’s on the way. Strolling into the kitchen, there’s a natural confidence in Fabricius’s posture and a glimmer in her eye as she takes my hand and immediately wants to know where I am from (a diluted Antipodean accent gives me away). She launches into an anecdote about the time she toured Australia and what a wonderful yet isolated place it is. The cosy track pants and sweatshirt, the bandana in her hair, only emphasise her enviable effortlessness.

Related: “Earth is my favourite place I’ve been”: Enter Aurora’s alternative universe

With her orange tresses and elfin-like face, one that contorts expressively as she speaks, Fabricius is instantly intriguing. This ability to captivate is mirrored in the success of her music, which has found the Danish artist supporting Katy Perry and Sia and working with the likes of Pharrell and John Legend. Coming to the fore amid the indie wave of 2008, the artist has endured well beyond the genre her sound was initially pinned to, both in Denmark and abroad. Though, on the surface, her songs embody the good-time spirit of electronic pop, they also carry an emotional weight, with thoughtful lyrics tinged with vivid imagery adding a certain depth. Since her debut, Oh Land has moved seamlessly between catchier bops to introspective ballads. And, with a forthcoming album, she’s set to evolve once more.

Fabricius’ route to music stardom has similarly been full of twists and turns. As a child, she thought she was destined to be a ballerina. “I think it was very pragmatic in that I couldn’t sit still,” she says. “For me the opposite of sitting still was dancing. I think I very much work out of these opposites, as the opposite of being quiet was singing.”

But then she suffered a back injury that became a world-shifting moment. “Dance was completely my identity, more than being a friend or a daughter, so it was very hard to come to terms with that,” she says, adding that she “closed that door” for good at 20 years old. But, in a textbook case of one door closing and another opening, Fabricius instead found solace in sound. “Music has always been super present in my life without me being conscious of it,” she says. Looking back, the signs were there. As a child she would mess around on the piano, making up songs. She sang in the church choir every Sunday from the age of 12. Still, she didn’t have any “formal training” and never considered it something more than a passing fancy. “I’m not one of those musicians who has been in bands their whole life,” she says. “I was literally on stage singing into a microphone the first time that I was Oh Land.”

Choosing to perform under her first name was off the table – after her dance career fell through, she didn’t want to be so inextricably tied to what she does – so she went with a riff on her middle name. “Honestly I could have been called anything as everything went so fast and the name was the last thing on my mind,” she says. “It was like, ‘Oh I gotta be something, OK let’s do that’. It was literally a quick decision late at night before my first show.” The name’s ambiguity (“You wouldn’t know if it was a man or a woman or a band”) intuitively spoke to her. “That was key because I didn’t even know what I was – I was just figuring it all out while it happened.”

While music came to be her new direction, Fabricius never entirely let go of dance. It still reverberates through her music videos, her performances and even her everyday body language. She agrees that the term “multi-hyphenate” suits her, a word that points to her abilities as a producer, performer, musician and artist. “I feel more comfortable with that term than simply just being branded a singer,” she says, adding that it all comes from the “same impulse to express myself ”. “It’s more like a constant seeking of understanding whenever I am in conflict with something.”

Fabricius’s insatiable energy for her creative practice – in all its iterations – is impressive. Each album, starting with her 2008 breakout Fauna, is a universe unto itself with a distinct mood and aesthetic. And, if the first single from her next album, ‘Bleeed’, is any indication, the forthcoming Oh Land universe is going to be way out there. “I’m really inspired by retro sci-fi – the way that you perceive the future from the past,” she says. Throughout the process of making the album, which will be released in September, she’s been going back and reading old diaries from her adolescence. “While my life is extremely different it is the same emotions, the same dreams.” The notion of bridging different time periods is reflected in the production, which finds a mix of instruments from different periods (“vintage analog synths like Jupiter-8 against modern software and euroracks”). She refers to the album as her “musical spaceship”, one that she’ll be boarding for a tour in the autumn.

Related: Swedish pop wonder Loreen on life beyond Euphoria, buying a marina and finding her voice again

As much as Fabricius’ home reflects her artistry, it equally displays the common trappings of family life; little clothes piled up for the wash, kids toys scattered about. With two young children, Fabricius lives a life that is a perennial juggling act, but it’s one she embraces with ease. “It’s very hard to separate work and life and passion. Inspiration doesn’t always come at convenient times,” she says. “It’s very nice to be able to embrace it when it’s there – have my piano on hand when I’m watching a movie with my kids.” Proximity to her instruments has its setbacks too. Given that work is “always an option” she sets careful boundaries so she can regularly be “off duty” and present with her family. Still, both lives bleed together – Zukanović is a keyboardist who often collaborates with Fabricius, including performing in her live shows.

Prior to this cosy country life, Fabricius lived in New York for seven years and Stockholm for three. It was the tug of family that brought her back to Denmark . And while she’s certainly built a lovely existence in her native country, she speaks of her time in New York with a certain wistfulness. “When you live in New York you are not from anywhere, you are just from New York,” she says. “I feel like there is some earthly connection to being a Dane. When I am here, I feel like half of me is underground, roots dragging. In New York , you are free.” Though she’s from here, she feels somewhat of an outsider, working on the periphery of Denmark’s “small circle of creatives”. When she does seek out “creative partners in crime” she casts her net wider. “Right now I am doing a collaboration with a Mexican artist and we are doing all our meetings on Instagram,” she says. “I really try to not put myself in a specific geography.”

But when Fabricius really needs to get down to business, she needn’t go far at all. We hop down the stairs and enter a room filled with toys that are exclusively hers. Vintage synths, keyboards and mixing desks fill the space. A lava lamp, perched across a massive speaker, emits a retro glow. “It’s so much easier to have the studio in the basement,” she says. “I can just go downstairs and sing.” Building a rhythm of regularity has been key for Fabricius, especially as her family grows. “I try to be very disciplined with myself when it comes to music – I go downstairs to the studio and I work,” she says. “Of course there are days where I might not be feeling inspired, but I still go to the studio if I need to get shit done because, you know, if you open the door to it, it can always arrive.”

Related: Lykke Li on heartbreak, her new album and meditating with David Lynch

With the new album done and dusted, Fabricius is currently working on her live show, specifically, making “something that isn’t just a regular concert”. An Oh Land show is a complete sensory experience – the costumes, the dancing, the live musical elements. It’s an experience she brought, albeit in a more stripped down form, to Skall Studio’s autumn/winter 2023 show, at which she and Zukanović performed live. “We have always been great fans of Oh Land’s music and artistic universe,” say Skall Studio founders Julie and Marie Skall. “We especially admire her poetic and mystical approach, which we think stands in beautiful contrast to her clear and pure voice.” Speaking for the entire show audience, the sisters were “very touched by Nanna’s performance on the day”.

While Fabricius’ multi-sensory approach to performance is commonplace in pop today, it was a bold choice for an artist coming up in the indie wave. “When I started out, when you had dancers on stage there was a lot of prejudice – she’s superficial or she can’t sing,” she says. “Everything has morphed and been embraced in recent years and that is such a nice development . I feel so much more comfortable doing what I do now than when I started out.” She describes her on stage persona as an “enhanced version” of her self. “I’m not climbing up the walls at home,” she says. Still, it’s a “part of herself ” that she loves to amplify. “I live for those two hours around a show,” she says. “That is the peak of my life.”