Isle Of You
Hailing from Sweden, Ida Johansson and Elina Danielsson are bursting onto the music scene as the 80s-inspired pop duo, Isle of You. In June of 2019, the two released their debut album, “Party Until We’re in Love”, and have been busy working ever since. From performing at a maximum-security prison in Medellin, Colombia, to getting placed on Team Sia’s EarCandy (the artist’s playlist of personal favorites), the friends are truly en route to industry success. Isle of You was also nominated “The Future’s Artist” by the Swedish national radio station P3. As of 2020, they boast over one million Spotify streams. Their 2017 single, “50 + 1”, earned the duo over 260k streams alone. We recently talked to them about their past experiences, favorite artists, and more!
How did you get started making music?
When we were about ten, we had different band constellations. Then our friends, all of a sudden, wanted to quit playing; That’s when Ida came running into my classroom at school. She asked if anyone wanted to play guitar together with her and I was totally in for it. And that was the beginning of it all. Today we have been playing for 12 years together, more than half of our lifetime, which is quite overwhelming to think about.
What song from the Party Until We’re In Love is your favorite?
Elina: For me, I really love the song “Hold Tight.” It increases from a very sensitive state to become more and more powerful. The formula of the song reflects the different phases in the relationship and the different feelings that you go through when you start to lose faith in the person that you have recently been falling in love with.
Ida: Yeah “Hold Tight” is my favorite song too. It was such a special moment for us in the studio when we had written the song and then came up with the last part— when everything explodes into an emotional confetti. I think all of us had goosebumps at that moment. “Hold Tight” is about being afraid of falling in love and all the fears and doubts that comes with falling for someone.
What future projects should fans be looking out for?
We are working a lot in the studio at the moment and are onto something really cool, according to us. Most of our gigs are cancelled because of the pandemic, as you might know of course. So we have had a lot of time to really challenge our song writing for the coming time.
Which artists have had the greatest impact on your music style and career?
The reason we started out was because of Taylor Swift— although nowadays we find most inspiration in Tove Lo, Robyn and Little Jinder. They have massive soundscapes and emotional melodies. But we listen to a lot of music, everything between rap to old jazz songs. The biggest impact on our career though was when Sia’s team added our song “Bodyguard” to their playlist, “Team Sia’s Ear Candy”. That changed everything for us; Swedish radio started to play our music and we got nominated as the Artist of the Future in Sweden.
What would be a dream venue for you?
We both love festivals. So we’re really looking forward to performing at festivals like Lollapalooza. And we set up that goal to play at Madison Square Garden even before we knew what MSG was, but we still think it would be the perfect venue. We’ve been playing live since we were 12 so we have seen a lot of different venues already. And through the years, we have realized that it is not always the “cool” gigs that are the best. The most important thing is the crowd and the connections between us and them. A couple of years ago, we played at a prison in Medellìn, Colombia. That was the most special venue, nothing we’ve dreamed about but it had the biggest impact on us ever. So many different emotions mixed up with a really pure connection to the audience (real prisoners).
Any dream collaborations?
Years ago, we would definitely say Taylor Swift. We were the biggest fans ever. Today we’d say Tove Lo, we got a feeling that our music would be super cool as a mix. Or maybe Charli XCX, we think we’d would have a lot of fun together. Maybe do a collab with Tove Lo, Taylor Swift and Charlie XCX.
Favorite non-music activity?
We’re both into cooking right now, baking sourdough bread, making up our own recipes, and exploring the vegan and vegetarian world in the kitchen. So making food is like a new hobby. Apart from the time we spend on making nutrition tasty, our favorite activities would be creating content for Isle of You. We want to be in charge of every part of our group, so we’re doing everything by ourselves; all the content to our social media, lyrics videos and so on. That takes most of our time and we love to do it so maybe that’s our favorite non-music activity after all.
