Sassy 009
Dreamer+
HEAVEN-SENT/PIAS
Listening to Sassy 009’s Dreamer+ is like looking at a surrealist painting: You notice the grounding pop melodies and propulsive choruses—moments nodding to 070 Shake or Daft Punk—before you become fixated on its bizarre, flickering detours from convention. Even these familiar sonic touchstones shift into trip-hop wormholes; there are revved engines, staggered vocal deliveries, and, at one point, a cherubic ballad originally penned by the artist’s parents in the 1990s for a Eurovision submission that didn’t make the cut. After a few listens, those standard pop choruses become unsettling, feeling more uncertain than the album’s atmospheric shiftiness. Sunniva Lindgård is clearly a potent creative force, but Dreamer+ feels muddied when its most innovative moments overshadow the work as a whole.
Dreamer+ is dubbed a conceptual album, though that concept isn’t all that clear without Lindgård detailing in interviews and in the album’s press materials. The narrative follows a doomed romance in an alternate world (described as a forest, then as a “supernatural room”) where passionate thoughts are fatal and memories are erased. It’s a fascinating conceit, although convoluted. One description is particularly striking, maybe speaking to these unfathomable, overwhelming times: “The emotions that come with grief without being able to pinpoint exactly why you’re mourning.” Dreamer+’s conceptual ambition mirrors its sonic expanse: gripping in fragments, but difficult to grasp as a whole.
Some of this narrative can be parsed from the title track, which was the catalyst for the entire project. Ironically, it’s also one of the album’s lackluster moments. Although it feels loose and seamless, like floating on your back in the pool while looking up at the sun, it’s not the album’s focal point. The most striking moments on Dreamer+ are its collaborative tracks: “Mirrors” with Yuné Pinku and “Tell Me” featuring Blood Orange. Which is unexpected, given that Lindgård initially aimed for this project to be completed as a solo venture. Cracks of her own spoken-word delivery do add an interesting tension on moments like the thrilling, gloomy pursuit of “My Candle,” where her vocals glide above the breakbeats rather than push against the rhythmic grains.
With Dreamer+, Sassy 009 feels like she’s on the verge of a creative breakthrough, of waking up from a dream. But choices like the grating boy-band pop of “Enemy” create a mist of obfuscation—it sounds like it’s been broken off from a different project. But then she takes us further from the album’s realm with “Ruins of a Lost Memory,” the magical funeral hymn that closes the album. Such moments of brilliance are fleeting, which is just as thrilling as it is disappointing. Dreamer+ pivots from floating through a dreamworld to the panicked feeling of waking up from a nap and not knowing where you are, who you are. That confused, cluttered momentum maintains the record’s highs as much as it does its lows.
