Rocky Top Ballads

There must be something in the water in Copenhagen, where for the past few years a cohort of rising artists have been making sublime, hyperreal songs in singer-songwriter mode, but from an electronic background. Some members of this scene transmute guitar music through MIDI, giving their pastoral landscapes a freaky sheen; others apply classical training to homespun electroacoustic R&B. These loosely connected artists meet somewhere between the Danish countryside and the uncanny valley, capturing different angles of the “real world” as mirage: shimmering, bending, retreating.

From this pool of talent emerges the debut album of Fine Glindvad Jensen, who makes music as Fine. The singer and producer studied at Copenhagen’s esteemed (and free) Rhythmic Music Conservatory, whose alumni include ML Buch, Erika de Casier, Molina, and Astrid Sonne. She’s spent a decade as the vocalist for the electro-pop group CHINAH, collaborates with Sonne in a side project called Coined, and co-wrote songs for K-pop superstars NewJeans with de Casier last year. But Rocky Top Ballads, her first full-length solo project, stems from a childhood memory of hearing her bluegrass musician father play his banjo through the wall: “You can hear it,” she recalled in an interview this year, “but you can’t really hear it.”

The songs on Rocky Top Ballads—sample-based productions with organic instrumentation, written and produced by Fine—tell a story of a love affair that’s hard to understand. “You kiss me like a stranger,” she sighs on “Coasting,” downtempo dream pop for the spa or chillout lounge. Then she delivers to her lover a cryptic prophecy: “You’ll meet me in a bathtub/Upon a mountain.” These enigmatic characters move through a quiet, intense world that seems suffused with meaning that’s just beyond our grasp: the night sky turns strange colors, fires burn in the rain, and people often get lost, purposely or otherwise. The lovers keep leaving, or wishing they hadn’t, or begging the other to stay, though it’s hard to tell which one is which, or why they have to go. “There’s something/I’m leaving/Every day/Something I have to give you...” Fine sings softly on the twangy “Losing Tennessee,” but she doesn’t ever say what it might be.

On songs like that one, with its campfire sing-along vibe, Fine throws an alt-country curveball into the Copenhagen scene. Elsewhere she wallows in melancholy ’90s rock, channeling the mythic dreamworlds of the Cranberries or Cocteau Twins on the transcendent “Big Muzzy.” (“Oh, why can’t you stay?” she trills angelically, then doubles back a minute later: “I’m so sorry I had to leave.”) I hear Ultraviolence-era Lana in the dark surf-rock of “A/B,” the ache of Grouper in “Days Incomplete”’s sparse coda, and throbs of Zero 7’s “In the Waiting Line” in the dead-sexy trip-hop of “Remember the Heart.” Looming above it all is Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, whose detached gaze and whispered vocals echo as Fine murmurs a command—“Get lost with me, my love”—looking past her lover towards some point on the horizon.

There’s something primal here, too—a deep, folkloric feeling that seems steeped in ancient magic from somewhere down in the earth’s core. You can sense it on “Whys,” a siren song straight out of The Wicker Man, or in the haunting premonitions whispered on the final track: “I can feel/A star/Coming back….” “Let’s not say we’re like wind and sea,” Fine sings coolly on “Adore You,” a drowsy lullaby rattled here and there by careless shakes of tambourine. Then she shrugs to her lover, who’s leaving again: “Maybe I’ll go with you.”